Facilitation Pods Season 3 ...
... is opening this Autumn and you're invited to join us 💚
When facilitating, we take responsibility for noticing, navigating, and, where appropriate, making visible the dynamics and behaviours playing out in the room.
These dynamics and behaviours often take place ‘below the waterline’, meaning that they are not being noticed, acknowledged, or addressed. We are not immune to this: as facilitators, we are also often playing out dynamics and behaviours in the room that we might not see or understand.
On top of this, we are living in chaotic and challenging times. This can affect group members' nervous systems and ability to self-regulate, and how open a group is to facilitation, collaboration, feedback, and change. As facilitators, these times are likely affecting our nervous systems and ability to self-regulate too.
All of above will impact how well we can hold the facilitation role, and how we behave when in it.
⋆˚˖𓍢ִ໋🍃✧˚.💚 Season 3 is happening this Autumn and you’re invited to join us ˚˖𓍢ִ໋🍃✧˚.💚⋆
Inspired by therapist intervision groups, Facilitation Pods are small groups in which to bring our challenges, hopes, and experiences as facilitators, gain access to the wisdom of the social field, and explore the dynamics and roles alive ‘in the room’.
During the three-month season, pod members gain:
access to a small group of practising facilitators that will learn your facilitation blindspots, strengths, challenges, and hopes, and support you in your learning and unlearning. (Each pod has a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 5 members, then the facilitator.)
an ‘Intro to Your Pod’ document, so you can get to know a little bit about your fellow members before you join the first session.
a shared space where we centre care, appreciation, and joy for facilitation as an important role, along with a shared awareness of the responsibility we choose to carry when we step into the facilitation role.
building and stewarding a commons together: after the first three months of pod facilitation and organisation by the pod host, members will be invited to actively build and support the Facilitation Pod Commons, at no extra cost.
access to a shared online Slack space for all pods, with each pod having private channels and access to common channels. Here, you'll meet other facilitators that are members of current and past pods.
inclusion in 6 x 1.5 hour online pod calls where we centre an individual’s facilitation experience and utilise ecological enquiry to explore what was happening within us as a facilitator, and within the room, during that experience. We have found this way of enquiry to be a very powerful discovery process for all pod members.
Three pods, running concurrently…
This season we’ll be hosting three pods to run at the same time. Each pod will host 3 - 5 members, and we’re now receiving expressions of interest for a likely-November start.
🍂 A Community Facilitators’ Pod, for community managers and moderators, hosted by Kristen Pavle. Kristen is a bright, warm, and caring facilitator, with many years experience working within and alongside communities.
🍂 A Novice Facilitators’ Pod, for those new to the role and looking for a space to practise and receive feedback and encouragement, hosted by me.
🍂 And a Seasoned Facilitators’ Pod, for those with rich experience in the role and looking for a space that’s a peer supervision space, with cross-disciplinary insights, hosted by me.
Ecological enquiry
I’ve loved my time in the pods, especially the gentle emergence of what is now a small (and growing) commons. It’s not only landed me into a facilitator I yearned to be but it’s the space that ecological enquiry emerged in.
I’m still only at the beginning of understanding what ecological enquiry is and what it can bring us, so trying to describe it is tough! The closest I can get right now is that it’s a way of gently and attentively exploring the complexity and interbeing that informs our thoughts, worldviews, ideas, behaviours, and experiences, both individual and collective.
We are informed by so much! We are truly ecological beings, living amalgamations of neighbourhood, place, relationships, ancestral lines, current events, ecosystems, social systems, social constructs, cosmologies, possible futures, and shared and personal histories.
Through the caring and attentive gaze that comes from being within a small group working together over time, we can start to explore each of our lived experiences through that ecological gaze.
So, if you join one of my pods, we’ll lean on ecological enquiry to discover the different dynamics and role alive in ourselves, in the other individuals, and in the group as a whole when we are in the facilitator role.
Next steps
We’re excited to host these 3 new pods and widen the membership of our commons.
If you’re drawn to join us, you’ll find details on each pod, our pricing categories, who these are for (and who these aren’t for), here on our Notion page.
Love,
Anna-Marie, Kristen Pavle, Victoria Dufour-Cox, and Katy Kent