Facilitation Skills for Collective Action

Facilitation is an essential skill

Facilitation is more than running a good meeting—it’s a holistic process that spans the entire arc of a group’s work. It includes intentional planning and clear communication between meetings, effective facilitation during sessions, and thoughtful follow-up to ensure accountability. This workshop emphasizes facilitation as a transformative journey that allows people to think well together. 

This interactive workshop is designed to strengthen your ability to facilitate the creation of spaces and conversations that inspire groups to equitably achieve meaningful goals. Over two sessions, you’ll explore seven essential facilitation practices, practical tools, and actionable strategies to integrate into your current facilitation approach. You will learn how to create spaces where individuals can come together, understand one another, and work collectively toward ambitious goals.

In a time when fostering connection and cooperation is more crucial than ever, this workshop offers a practical framework for building your skills to co-create a collaborative path forward. 

While this workshop is suitable for all changemakers engaged in community-driven and community-centric programming, it is most relevant for people in roles that involve convening, hosting, and guiding groups.

The skills of facilitation can be applied to many scenarios, from team meetings and neighbourhood action groups to working groups and roundtables, and even to large-scale collaborative initiatives.

Language: The workshop will be conducted in English, with the ability to transcribe to French.

Through this 2-part workshop, you will:

• Learn seven essential facilitation practices to co-create spaces and conversations where group members are accountable for shared outcomes.

• Think about your strengths and how to leverage them in your facilitation practices.
• Understand and influence power dynamics for equitable outcomes.

• Learn techniques for getting to an agreement with a group, and infusing play, connection, and levity into challenging, complex work.
• Learn and apply decision-making tools that leverage alignment and drive progress.

• Have honest conversations about facilitation challenges, where things can go wrong, and what we can do instead.

Meet the workshop facilitators

Lisa Attygalle

In her role at Tamarack, Lisa works with cities, organizations, collaboratives, and funders to build meaningful community-engaged processes. Over the last ten years, her work has focused on creating authentic engagement strategies and training staff teams, teaching and writing about innovative engagement methodologies, and facilitating collaborative processes to make decisions and work together to solve our most pressing issues. She cares deeply about shifting power, extending trust, and bringing creativity to community change work. Lisa advocates for simplicity in structures, frameworks, and design and loves integrating arts-based practices in community initiatives.

Pricing & logistics

Registration includes pre-workshop learning and access to the workshop itself.

Post-workshop, participants will be invited to register for a post-event coaching session. At this interactive session, learners will reconnect, get further advice and learn about additional resources to put their learning into action.

Can’t attend the workshop, but love the content? Get in touch with Isaac to learn more about how you can bring a custom version of this workshop to your organization or collaborative.