FACILITATION
FOR COMMUNITIES,
COLLECTIVES & ORGANIZATIONS
Your community/collective/organization is already good—
together, we can make it great.
As a values-based community, you care deeply about how you live or work together.
Care is a beautiful and strong foundation, but unfortunately care alone is not enough to create a well-functioning human ecosystem— you also need carefully-designed guidelines, policies, systems, and practices, plus people with the skills to uphold them.
Whether you’re at the beginning stages of creating this structure and culture for your community or organization or starting to see gaps in your foundation years down the line, bringing in professional guidance is the best thing that you can do to support your community.
WHY BRING IN AN OUTSIDE FACILITATOR?
When you’re inside the system, it’s hard to see the system.
An external facilitator offers:
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A neutral, grounded perspective
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Support interrupting entrenched patterns
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Tools and frameworks for navigating conflict skillfully
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Systems and processes for collaborative decision-making
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Structure to move forward when you reach familiar stuck places
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Experience working with other communities that have faced similar issues
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Help aligning your lived culture and community practices with your stated values
Communities are made of humans, and humans are messy.
Every member of your community brings their societal conditioning, attachment wounding, and unvoiced expectations into the space with them.
The deeper you get in your work together, the more these hidden dynamics will surface. You may start to experience the tension of things that aren’t being said, as resentment quietly builds. Certain community members start avoiding others. One day you realize that the culture you imagined doesn’t quite match the one you’re experiencing.
That doesn’t mean that your community is failing, but it could mean that you’ve done what a lot of communities do– focused more on your physical infrastructure than your social infrastructure, and now you’re seeing the fall-out.
The solution? Invest in your social infrastructure.
HOW I SUPPORT
COMMUNITIES
We start with a conversation where I meet your community, collective, or organization where you are at. Balancing the nature of your current struggles and goals with the constraints of your timeline and budget, we will work together to figure out the best way I can support your community to grow in the right direction, within your current capacity.
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WORKSHOPS
& SKILL BUILDING
An affordable first step towards shifting culture in your community is to book a workshop that offers your community new frameworks and skills.
My workshops offer a balance of teaching, discussion, and embodied practice so you walk away with practical tools that you know how to use.
A few of my signature 2-3 hour workshops for communities are:
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Communicating for Consent
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Giving and Receiving Feedback
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The Art of Conflict and Repair
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Power and The Nervous System
We can also collaborate on a custom workshop for your community based on your specific challenges, needs, and culture.
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GROUP CONFLICT FACILITATION
When conflict comes up in communities that don’t have policies, processes, and practices in place to hold it, it can easily overwhelm the whole system.
Bringing in a facilitator offers your members the professional support that is needed, lifts responsibility off of other concerned members, and makes resolution more possible.
Group conflict support can take many forms. Some tools I bring to this process are:
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Interpersonal Conflict Mediation: a private, facilitated conversation between the individuals at the center of the conflict
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Fishbowl Conversations: a facilitated conversation that centers the individuals most involved but invites other community members to witness
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Community-wide Circles: an intentionally structured, facilitated conversation between everyone in the community who chooses to attend
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Zegg Forum: a facilitated space for community members to express emotions that have been hiding under the surface
CULTURE & SYSTEMS CONSULTING
As a consultant, I can offer you deeper support, which leads to deeper transformation.
I start by learning more about your community so I can understand the roots of the issues you are experiencing.
This initial process may involve: looking over community documents and meeting notes; interviewing all members or a diverse selection of members; sending out a questionnaire for community members to fill out.
Based on what I find and how we choose to move forward, our work together may involve:
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Clarifying the community’s mission, vision, values, and agreements
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Designing new leadership roles and updating decision-making processes
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One-on-one coaching for members who are at the center of a lot of conflict
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Planning activities designed to build and strengthen community connection
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Designing or updating the community’s conflict policy
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Training community members in Facilitation or Conflict Mediation
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Facilitating conversations between focus groups and/or the whole group
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Holding a series of workshops designed to address community concerns
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Re-organizing communal spaces so they better meet community needs
All of our work together starts with a conversation–
book a free 30 minute curiosity call.
"My organization called upon Lux for a difficult group process, and their support was crucial to our ability to make decisions that reflected the complex needs of our community. I really appreciated their capacity to listen for the wider, deeper truth of what is being expressed."
carey f.
Groups I have facilitated for:
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The Port Townsend Ecovillage
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The Good Enough Community at Sahale Ecovillage
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OmCulture / Seattle Ecstatica
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Conscious Growth Convergence
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The Northwest Permaculture Convergence
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Expansion Festival
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Beloved Festival
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The Berkeley Student Cooperatives
"Lux reflects the deeper truth of what is happening, lends a wider perspective, offers clarity, and helps things move. They do this skillfully and gracefully, always acknowledging the feelings that arise and validating opposing truths. Their background in understanding power and oppression dynamics brings balance while they also attune to and track people’s nervous systems. They bring such needed medicine for conflict in these times!"
facilitation client
"I’m an artist member, and was a part of the leadership team, at a shared artist’s studio space. Having experienced in-studio conflict and knowing that more would be inevitable, the leadership team wanted guidance on how to create a structure for dealing with conflict in a way that was supportive, compassionate, equitable, boundaried, sustainable and easily understood. Working with Lux has absolutely fit all of this criteria for us.
They were able to work with our specific needs by crafting three workshops informed by issues that had arisen in our studio. In the workshops that we’ve completed with them, they came well-prepared with information and tools that we were immediately able to put to use. In fact, some of the teachings and tools that they shared with us, I’ve applied to my everyday life. Not surprisingly, Lux is an excellent listener and brings with them a thoughtful, kind, and grounding energy, which for me, makes them easy to talk to about challenging topics. Thank you Lux for everything that you’ve offered our community."
christine tran
