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Facilitation is a thing we talk about a lot in cohousing. We ask our members to facilitate meetings. We may look for facilitation training. We use the word facilitator, but what does it mean?
My now-husband asked me that question early in our dating. It was Covid time and I was spending a lot of hours facilitating meetings online. He overheard bits and was intrigued. In his forty years of work, he’d participated in thousands of meetings. He’d never seen anyone facilitate one.
Facilitation, I told him, is the art and skill of guiding a group through a time together toward a shared goal. Successful facilitation begins with a clear definition of what wants to be achieved in a meeting and ends with a stronger sense of belonging and commitment to the group purpose. What happens in between depends on the goal of the meeting, the time available, the culture and traditions of the group, the skill of the facilitator, and the needs of the participants.
Many people enter cohousing with experience like my husband’s. They think facilitation means standing in front of a group, naming topics and calling on speakers. This is a start, of course, but it often leads to meetings that are all cognitive, lack deep listening, and miss the deeper conversations that will reveal better solutions to problems and build more community engagement.
Facilitator Training can build on a basic skill set or start from the beginning. In training, facilitators learn how to prepare for a successful meeting, how to encourage broad and full participation, how to share information and welcome the emotional wisdom of the group, and how to seek genuine consensus, all while deepening the connection and belonging of the group.
This approach to facilitation can be life-changing for communities and their members. For more information about facilitation and our upcoming training, see the blog posts listed below join us for “The Power of Facilitation” on January 30th or check out our blog for "stories from the field." These examples, based on real-world stories, demonstrate what facilitation truly looks like.
Know you want to dive deeper? Register for our Facilitator Training by January 20th and receive an additional, early-bird discount.
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