Looking forward to it….

The start of 2012 is a bit hectic here in the rhizosphere. The exciting thing for me is that almost all 7 of Rhizome’s facilitators are in action in January and February.

Perry’s facilitating a day of meeting facilitation skills with the folk at Climate Rush, looking at their own meetings as well as public meetings they hope to organise. And that theme of facilitating internal and external meetings runs through several other pieces of work we have lined up – Maria and myself will be running a day’s training for the staff of 38 Degrees, and then Jo and I will be doing something similar for staff at WDM.

Carl is leading on a 2 day mediation course happening in early January, co-incidentally starting on the first day of the International Year of Co-operatives – us, a co-op, training members of other co-ops as mediators to support co-ops, and all for Co-operatives UK.

Meanwhile Emily (with her Transition hat on) and I will be training the 3rd generation of facilitators for Transition Leicester’s Footpaths project.

Perry and I are working with Talk Action on a day long consensus decision-making workshop on January 26th – which will hopefully run a few times each year, if the pilot is a success.

And Jo’s also leading some work for Greenpeace, organising and facilitating a review day for the team of volunteer political lobbying trainers, who we trained in 2011, to happen in late February.

We’ll also be revamping some old resources and publishing some new ones to support this work – all available to download for free from our resources page. This includes guides on all aspects of mediation, an area of our resources we’ve been painfully slow to add to. I hope they are worth the wait!