GROUP FACILITATION

FOR VALUES-BASED COMMUNITIES,
COLLECTIVES & ORGANIZATIONS

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 skill and capacity to uphold them.

Whether you’re at the beginning stages of designing your community's systems and culture 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.

your COMMUNITY is already good -
together, we can make it great

WHY BRING IN AN OUTSIDE FACILITATOR?

When you’re inside the system, it’s hard to see the system.

An experienced, external facilitator offers:

A neutral, grounded perspective
Support for interrupting entrenched patterns
Tools and frameworks for navigating conflict skillfully
Systems and processes for collaborative decision-making
Structure to move forward when you reach familiar stuck places
Experience working with other communities that have faced similar issues
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 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 may begin avoiding or excluding others. Until one day you realize that the culture you imagined or hoped for 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.

"Every community needs a Lux!"

- Nikolai, participant in Transforming our Conflict Culture Workshop

You don’t need to be in crisis to reach out.

The best time to invest in your community’s culture is before burnout or breakdown.

Book a Free 30 min Curiosity Call

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.

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:

Communicating for Consent
Giving and Receiving Feedback
The Art of Conflict and Repair
Power and The Nervous System

We can also collaborate on a custom workshop for your community based on your specific challenges, needs, and culture.

CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION

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:

Interpersonal Conflict Mediation: a private, facilitated conversation between the individuals at the center of the conflict
Fishbowl Conversations: a facilitated conversation that centers the individuals most involved but invites other community members to witness
Community-wide Circles: an intentionally structured, facilitated conversation between everyone in the community who chooses to attend
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:

Clarifying the community’s mission, vision, values, and agreements
Designing new leadership roles and updating decision-making processes
One-on-one coaching for members who are at the center of a lot of conflict
Planning activities designed to build and strengthen community connection
Designing or updating the community’s conflict policy
Training community members in Facilitation or Conflict Mediation
Facilitating conversations between focus groups and/or the whole group
Holding a series of workshops designed to address community concerns
Re-organizing communal spaces so they support the community's needs & intentions

COMMUNITIES I HAVE SUPPORTED:

THE PORT TOWNSEND ECOVILLAGE

Facilitated Conflict Conversations (interpersonal and whole group), Community Workshops, & Weekend Retreats

OM CULTURE & SEATTLE ECSTATICA DANCE COMMUNITY

Facilitated Community Circles, Supported with updating Code of Conduct and developing Policies & Practices around upholding Code of Conduct

SAHALE LEARNING CENTER & THE GOOD ENOUGH COMMUNITY

Facilitated Community Circles, Workshops on Giving & Receiving Feedback, & Public Summer Gathering

COMMON AREA MAINTENANCE ART STUDIO & COLLECTIVE

Facilitated Conflict Transformation and 2 Workshops on Consent, Communication, & Power

All of our work together starts with a conversation–
book a free 30 minute curiosity call.

"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 these 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, Artist Member at Common Area Maintenance