Facilitation Skill Building Weekend: Centering Power in Our Work

Even groups with great meeting process can inadvertently perpetuate barriers to full member participation and access to democratic process. This happens through group dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression that often marginalize women, people of color, queer, trans, and gender non-conforming folks, people with disabilities, and those with limited access to the cultural cues that come with class privilege. This weekend training for facilitators will center integrating an analysis of systemic power throughout our facilitation work.

We will move beyond basic skills to explore how to address systemic power as it arises in groups, how our identities impact our facilitation style and approach, as well as how we can build our skills to be more effective facilitators. 

Topics included will be: group decision making; supporting groups in conflict; naming, intervening, and addressing systemic power as it arises; working with multiracial, multicultural groups. 

This training is applicable both for people who facilitate within groups they are part of, as well as those who come in as outside facilitators for groups. 

Led by kiran nigam  and Marc Mascarenhas-Swan of the AORTA Collective (see bios below).  

AORTA is a collective of educators devoted to strengthening movements for social justice and a solidarity economy. We work as consultants, facilitators, and trainers to expand the capacity of cooperative, collective, and community-based projects through education, training and planning. We base our work on an intersectional approach to liberation because we believe that true change requires uprooting all systems of oppression. MORE ABOUT AORTA: www.aorta.coop 

COST:  The suggested fee for this workshop is $300, 100-$400 sliding scale. If you are part of a well-funded organization or have access to money/wealth, we ask that you pay at the higher end of the sliding scale. This allows participants with less access to resources to attend and pay at the bottom of the sliding scale.

Space is limited to 35 participants. We expect this workshop to fill; register as soon as possible to ensure a spot.

Workshop is three days: Friday, July 15th 5:30-8:30pm, Saturday July 16th and Sunday July 17th, 9.30-5.30pm.