Nonviolent Facilitation as a Path to the Future: Bringing Vision, Integrity and Care to Group Leadership

What does nonviolence have to do with group facilitation?

Miki believes that nonviolence is a way of being and living that orients us in all our thoughts, words and deeds toward the integration of truth, love and courage. All nonviolent individual and collective actions are aimed at preserving what serves life and challenging what does not. Facilitation is one clear path for bringing nonviolence to the world!

How can we act now, as facilitators, as if the world of our dreams, the Beloved Community, is already in place?

This course is designed to support you in moving towards more capacity in this area. 

Course Outline

The course is comprised of three sessions. 

• Session 1: Transparency and Intuition
  1. CLARITY OF PURPOSE: You are a human among humans, with a different purpose from anyone else, which is to support the group, not what you want
  2. HUMILITY: You do not "know" anything; and you are the only one who can decide moment by moment how to respond to what is happening
  3. INTUITION: The power of knowing without knowing; how to follow it; and how to train your intuition over time
  4. SPEAKING THE WHY: How transparency increases trust when used to shed a light on process decisions
  5. HOLDING THE WHOLE: How transparency can interfere when used to bring attention to your feelings beyond your capacity to hold          
     
     

• Session 2: Tracking What Matters
  1. PURPOSE: The group will not track it and will hold you accountable for it when they veer off
  2. TIME: The closer to the end, the higher the threshold for changing anything
  3. PEOPLE: Keeping an eye for who spoke or not; who may be stretching too much; and more
  4. POWER: Knowing your own power and any other source of power in the room, along with power dynamics, can help you navigate care for all
  5. NEEDS: What's important to the individuals in the room? How does it get included in what the group does or decides?
  6. OPEN LOOPS: What requests are not attended to? How not to drop anything when stakes are high?
     
     

• Session 3: Challenges in the Group
  1. POWER AND PRIVILEGE: Who speaks, who doesn't; whose voice counts: whose pain is invisible; what you can do about it
  2. OUTLIERS: How to walk towards someone who presents a challenge to a group, and even to you, while caring for the whole group, still?
  3. CONFLICT: How to attend to what is happening in a given moment without compromising the purpose for which the group is there?