facilitation workshop: how we hold space

In collaboration with the Wurtele Center for Leadership and the Collaborative Innovation concentration at Smith College, I offered a two-part workshop and class visit about facilitation.

The workshop, The Craft of Facilitation: How We Hold Space, supported students, staff, and faculty at Smith to explore facilitation and its implicit political commitments.

We gather in groups everyday to shape our work, our purpose, and our relationships. How can we make these gatherings meaningful, caring, generative, and transformative? In this interactive workshop, we will engage with the idea that a commitment to intentional facilitative practice is abundant with relational and political possibility. The space will invite us to reflect on our own experiences with facilitating group experiences, and explore how we, in our roles as facilitators, take up responsibility to ourselves, our group(s), and to transforming our culture.

Image above: A text-based word cloud (a grouping of different words, presented in different font sizes) with black sans-serif font. The largest words include "anxious," "present," "focused," "connected." The words are from a crowdsourced poll asking participants to share how they feel when they think about facilitation.