GENERATIVE FACILITATION

We design and facilitate carefully tailored agendas to support your goals around…

building bridges

This work aims to strengthen connections among people who work in different fields, or who come from different politics or ways of organizing. Through online engagements and/or in person“huddles,” we support participants to identify shared visions and opportunities for solidarity. By fostering cross-movement collaboration, we advance aligned strategies that safeguard our communities, flip the script and build power.

Bridgebuilding and alignment work can include:

Building new relationships.
Creating the conditions for severed relationships to mend, establish accountability and build trust.
Learning what our groups/ movements need from one another.
Developing a shared theory of change and narrative.

joyful and humanizing relationships

Time together is a precious gift. Do you want to create a memorable staff/ board/ grantee retreat or team process? We are thrilled to support your group with scaffolded activities that shift out of habitual, weary modes of engagement into thinking with our bodies and hearts, and welcome everyone’s creative, spontaneous, playful and compassionate selves in the service of deeper trust, connection, expression and momentum.

learning

Have you identified a knowledge gap within your movement, staff or members? We looooove designing and facilitating adult learning experiences that engage people’s curiosity with inquiry based learning, generative dialogue, and dynamic problem solving. We may or may not have expertise in the topic you want taught. It would be our delight to nerd out with you to quickly level up and devise a learning process that either you can use on your own, or hire us to facilitate.

We work with an extensive “tool box” of curriculum and are continuously developing new activities that support the specific learning objectives. See below for more about our approach and criteria for activities.

strategic planning

We have found that most plans quickly become irrelevant or create undue pressure that stifles creativity and nimbleness. And yet plan we must! Our approach can support elasticity and adaptability to our rapidly changing world.

When engaging in strategic planning, broadly speaking we:

Begin with an assessing where the organization has come from, where it is now, and where it wants to go.

Center those with the most at stake to ensure that plans are ground-truthed and are aimed at generating the changes needed.

Work closely with leadership so that they are truly leading this effort, avoiding common pitfalls and successfully engaging their staff.

Support long-term practice by prioritizing strategies that can address immediate needs and build commitment and capacity to sustain the work.

Develop a critical pathway so that each action or effort towards the vision builds on the one before it and creates the conditions necessary for the one after it to be possible.

Our Approach

Grounded in Popular Education, our facilitation pedagogy is aimed at creating spaces where people can show up fully, connect across difference, and move from shared struggle toward meaningful action. Our approach is grounded in three core principles:

Justice/Love
We believe justice is what love looks like in public. Our spaces center dignity, trust, and respect—creating the conditions where everyone can thrive. We surface and disrupt oppression, name what’s hard, and make space for truth. Justice guided by love is care work. We hold our shared humanity while recognizing our different realities.

Deep Relevance
We start where people are and connect to what’s urgent and alive in people’s lives, their communities, and the moment we’re in. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions—everything is adapted in real time to meet people’s needs and priorities.

Creative Praxis
We move between action and reflection in a cycle that supports lasting transformation. We use storytelling, writing, art, movement, somatic story-telling and play to invite all ways of knowing and being. We find that when people engage with joy and creativity, authenticity and new ideas can emerge more readily (than boring, disembodied, purely analytical conversations).

Our facilitation tools include:

Spectrums and Mapping - Illustrate or embody different concepts, individual experiences and opinions in service of greater clarity and shared understanding.
Small group dialogues, pair shares and World Cafe - Conversations of different sizes at different times to maximize collective knowledge generation and sharing.
Storytelling - Storytelling games, guided visualizations, and structured tableaus or role plays (See Theatre of the Oppressed) to connect the subject of the conversation to people’s personal experiences.
Open Space - Structure and guidelines for participants to name the conversations they want to participate in or lead, and then equitably arrange a schedule that works for everyone.
Collective inquiry and idea generation - From group mind mapping to exercises with lots of stickies and posters; we set up participants to teach each other and develop shared understanding together.

With all of our activities we ensure that each one:

Contributes to building and strengthening relationships and team
Allows for people’s full intersectional selves to be part of each activity
Is accessible and relevant to everyone in the room, including people for whom English is not their first language, people with disabilities, and people very new to the ideas we will be sharing. Note, our team can facilitate in multiple languages including Spanish or Portuguese and is committed to Language Justice.