Community Facilitator Intensive Series

The Intensive Series has now been completed. Tree offers her deep appreciation to everyone who has been involved: 7 wonderful host communities, 60 dedicated students, 3 registrars, and more. If you are interested in future opportunities of this kind in northern California or elsewhere, contact Tree to get on her mailing list.

This is an intensive training program in facilitation and group process skills. It is primarily designed for community members in facilitator roles within cohousing and other intentional communities built or forming.

The series of weekends of 3+ days includes time for students to practice by facilitating real meetings of the host community, with me on hand in a coaching role and stepping in if necessary. By witnessing and facilitating actual live meetings, students have the opportunity to signficantly deepen their facilitation and process skills. Each weekend also includes training time (particularly on Fridays) along with planning and debrief time related to specific meeting sessions. Students are expected to arrive by Thursday early evening and depart Sunday after dinner. Lodging will be available at the host community (or occasionally at a neighboring community) for those students traveling from further away.

The weekends are scheduled approximately four times a year for two years (thus eight quarterly workshops in total), each one hosted by a different intentional community in northern California. While it is not required for students to attend the entire eight session series, sustained attention will naturally be likely to yield higher results. In addition, for those who enroll for multiple weekends, i am willing to offer additional mentorship via phone and email (or in person during breaks in the weekends) to help you focus on your development as a facilitator and how you want to grow in the work. However, you can also sign up for just one workshop, or take one and then decide about others later.

Classes so far have had about 18-25 participants, with a maximum of 25 including 5 slots reserved for members of the host community. I am also open to the possibility of people attending who don't live in community, so long as they understand that community living groups are the focus.

If you have been wondering what to do when someone doesn't seem to be following the consensus process, how to handle it when two people who have "baggage" with each other get into an argument at the meeting, what to handle in the whole group vs. what to hand off to committees, how to give honest feedback in a way that connects rather than pushes away, how to do active facilitation that keeps the group on track, and more, this set of workshops can help you solve those challenges and boost your skills through roleplays, exploration, and live practice.

Another expected outcome of this series is to create a pool of skilled facilitators within the region who can then support each others' communities as needs arise in the future.

(A note of thanks is due here to Laird Schaub who has pioneered this model of teaching facilitation by running similar series for Mid-Atlantic and Rocky Mountain cohousers.)

Proposed Schedule of Topics

(May change according to the desires and needs of the student group and the host communities)

Weekend #1: Facilitation Skills Overview · NOVEMBER 17-20, 2005 at PLEASANT HILL (completed)