Our Courses

Facilitator’s Academy Winter Session 2024 covered the following modules towards certification: Mindful Meetings,The Collaborators Mindset, Facilitating Connection & Facilitating Positive Sum Decisions.

Tired of losing time and energy in draining meetings? Learn the skills to facilitate meetings that are efficient and effective, without sacrificing equity or connectedness. Level-up your leadership skills with this go-at-your-own pace course that will help you and your team make meetings awesome. The 5-step Mindful Meetings Method will exponentially improve how you collaborate online and off.

“The Shift” is a rich collection of content that features teacher generated real world examples of how to respond to conflict in the moment. The course includes: A downloadable PDF guide covering 14 techniques of dialogue. 15 videos for a deeper dive that describe in detail how to apply this rich knowledge to help you shift any conflict into inquiry. A downloadable PDF reflections worksheet to use with every video. 88 swipe-able questions to shift any conflict into inquiry. A curated reading list to continue the learning. An action plan for how you can use this content with your peers in education and in your community.

These are the course videos from the Spring 2021 semester of Swell Collective’s Facilitator’s Academy with Emily Gonzales.

Facilitation skills rooted in equity and healing are foundational to being an effective leader in the 21st century. These skills are transferable to any multi-constituency and diverse participatory setting and across any topic of collaborative effort. These skills are indispensable in the diverse communities where movement organizing and social enterprise happens. Where groups seek to serve the collective or public good, facilitation is essential. All facilitators become leaders. Not all leaders are born facilitators.

Planning and preparation are so important to effective facilitation yet even in spite of our most thorough preparation, we can never predict with absolute certainty, when the humans in the room may find themselves confronting some “speed bumps”. These can emerge from external forces (we learn someone can’t make the meeting) or internally because of dynamics in the room. As unpredictable as humans can be (exponentially so when you put them together) there are some challenges that as facilitators we can expect to see on occasion. Having some tools and strategies handy when these come up can help us feel as we are grounded enough to be able to better serve the group by helping them through these.

Facilitated decision making is a dynamic and iterative process even as it have very defined phases. The phases may begin sequentially but the facilitator is observing always when the group may need redirection or guidance within the process. We have a number of tools that are available to explore and reveal all the information needed for a group to come to elegant decisions. Positive-Sum game theory informs our practice. The theory imagines the way trust and creativity can help us arrive at decisions where no-one has to lose.

Facilitators lead in the responsibility for curating, creating, and caring for the shared space occupied by participants, so that participants can be fully present in dialogue with each other. Sometimes we call this shared space the “container”. Some engagements happen live, while others happen virtually. There are also asynchronous spaces, such as pre-recorded training sessions and discussion forums, or Facebook groups. In all of these cases, some work is needed on the part of the facilitator to set the tone, guide a process for co-creating norms for engagement, build community, and ensure a safe and equitable environment.

More and more, facilitation is being recognized as an important role in any social enterprise and facilitation is an especially fundamental role for any leader representing systematically marginalized communities (or their allies) seeking to transform “power over” practices within systems.

Diverse communities, and others with the representation of systematically marginalized identities, need safe and thriving communities of care in which they can hold and be held through joy, strife, learning, and growing together. Research points to the additive negative impact on an individual’s wellness as a result of navigating subtle or overt racism and other implicit and explicit biases acted upon by individuals or represented in systems. Facilitation requires a mindset that trusts in the mathematics of positive sum game theory. The facilitator enters the field with the belief that we can be stronger together, that we can resolve conflicts by getting creative, and that no one needs to lose when we problem-solve together. Facilitators represent the vanguard accelerating our shift into a new reality where power is fuel, not a weapon.