Facilitation
We are a team of professional facilitators, experienced at working with large and small groups. We have a very wide range of facilitation tools and approaches at our fingertips, including: Training for Change’s Direct Education, Freirian experiential and participatory learning, participatory decision-making methods including consensus, Popular Education, Appreciative Inquiry, Crowd Wise, Open Space, Reflect Action, Theatre of the Oppressed, the Work that Reconnects, World Café, World Work/Process Work and more. We will always work with you to ensure we use the right approaches to meet your aims, and we will help you understand the use of facilitation without a whole load of kit – no ‘Death by PowerPoint’ approaches! We can offer you help from the beginning of a process (planning and working out who to involve) right through to the end (evaluating and learning) and indeed any aspect in between. We can work online or face to face. Our service covers:
- Facilitation of meetings, workshops, strategy sessions, conferences, public meetings, AGMs, brainstorming sessions, visioning, team-building, unConferences and any other type of gathering of between 8 and 1,400 people;
- Exploring the need for dialogue, conflict resolution or other participatory engagement, including stakeholder and participant mapping and analysis;
- Designing participatory processes with you and the participants – whether this is helping you find an appropriate facilitation tool for one meeting, or designing a larger collaboration or consultation;
- Participatory evaluations of our own/others’ projects, campaigns and processes;
- Advising, supporting and mentoring you by phone and email – from helping you find the right facilitation technique for part of a meeting, to designing an agenda for you to facilitate.
The case studies below give a flavour of the kind of work we do:
Food Sovereignty
During a four-day gathering, we supported a large group to have a hugely complex conversation on local, national and international food issues. Participants came from many different groups to form a grassroots coalition to campaign and support people across the supply chain. Our role included co-designing the gathering, supporting organisers, trouble-shooting and co-facilitating plenary sessions.
Edge Fund
The Edge Fund is a different kind of grant-maker, innovative both in being crowdfunded and in involving grant applicants in decisions on grant allocation. Rhizome helped the organising committee to decide the values of the Fund, and to design procedures to embody these values. Rhizome also facilitated the first grant-giving meeting.
An independent school
We were asked to help an international school make a controversial decision that needed a high level of agreement from the whole senior staff team. We used a consensus process to clarify the key issues and tackle the deadlock. The decision was then successfully implemented.