I spent a stimulating day at the Common Cause Assembly in London on Friday discussing the case for working with values and what this might mean in practice. Common Cause is an initiative led by the Public Interest Research Centre that grew out of a report published by a coalition of NGOs in 2010 that makes the […]
Tomorrow I head to Manchester to meet up with my 3 co-facilitators for the Facilitating Change event. Facilitating Change is an exploration of the values that underpin and support effective facilitation. It’s an antidote to the view of facilitation that’s all “tools and techniques”. For a while the event had a nickname – a working […]
Facilitating Change: Supporting Effective and Sustainable Action Groups A 7 day residential workshop in rural Wales, 15th-22nd March 2013. Effective group-work and high quality decision-making. That’s what we all long for, right? Yet bad process is rife in our grassroots action groups and can lead to a lack of trust and respect, frustration, resentment, burnout […]
Here’s a guest post from Naveed Chaudhri, Activism Team Leader, Oxfam Campaigns: Oxfam is planning to pilot a new annual campaigning event, and we recently decided to ask our activist network for help in working out what it could look like. Staff had already been through a rigorous innovation process, and we wanted to consult […]
Having limited time to deliver a workshop focuses the mind wonderfully. What can actually be achieved, in terms of getting people thinking differently and then doing differently, if you only have 60 minutes? This was the situation for a short capacity building workshop for LeedsTidal at their Crisis Opportunity event in late October. If it […]
Last weekend Emily and I co-facilitated another round of Transition Leicester’s Footpaths project’s Facilitator Training. 13 volunteers had come forward to take on the facilitation of small groups of people wanting to explore reducing their carbon footprint. This was the 4th such weekend we’ve run and we’re definitely crafting a stronger training each time. We […]
I found a moment to look around for more interesting blogs to read the other day. Why, I have no idea, as I barely keep up with the couple of dozen blogs already in my feed reader. But I’m glad I did as I came across Natasha Walker’s blog with interesting posts on Teaching facilitation […]
Here’s three posts that caught my attention this evening: Viv McWaters talking about compassion and bravery in facilitation Johnnie Moore on Chris Rodger’s ideas about leadership as an emergent and quite ordinary process And FacilitatorU on the need for confusion as a prerequisite for paradigm shifts
The Edge Fund is a new grant-making body run by its members; who include donors, people directly experiencing and challenging injustice and those working in solidarity with them. From the beginning it was important to us that the power usually held by donors was devolved to those who do not usually have that power, but […]
It’s an interesting question for facilitators – how much do you challenge an organisation or group’s existing culture, or how much do you simply reflect it back to them? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself again in recent months, a reflective process aided by the peer review and co-facilitating we try to do in […]
