Facilitation Statement (2023)

Facilitation is a way to make our interconnectedness explicit while recognizing our complex, often messy, and frequently beautiful ways of being in relationship. Facilitation can be a useful tool for supporting change – and the process is not only intellectual – it is also understood in our bodies and through our experiences. If we are facilitating in order to bring about fundamental change, it must incorporate a myriad of ways of knowing. I believe we are all capable of change and that the transformation of self and systems, at any scale, requires vulnerability, imagination, practice, and humility. 

I am trained as a facilitator and also as an educator, artist, and organizer. I embrace these interwoven fields to cultivate a facilitation process that is dynamic, embodied, and responsive. It is not uncommon in dance to be asked to pay close attention to one’s body as having five planes parallel to the earth: the soles of the feet, pelvic floor, palms of the hands, diaphragm, and roof of the mouth. Recognizing these as planes in relation to the ground is an exercise to get rooted in one's body, quite literally through the feet to the earth, and through the earth, to each other. I often return to these five planes as a way to think about my approach to group facilitation. It is a way for me to think about the importance of movement, the space we create when we gather, facilitation as a practice of care, what it is to breathe questions and listening, and ultimately to recognize that we are articulating not just our goals, but also our lived experiences and relationship to the horizon line.

Facilitation is in many ways about movement. Clearly change is a kind of movement and we also know that this work does not just follow an intellectual goal-driven trajectory. When I work with groups, it’s multivalent and I consider movement in the fullest sense of that word – one that involves all the senses. It begins with deep listening and questions to design a process that meets the group where it’s at, and supports them in articulating, examining, and pursuing the shift they seek. The work is always scaffolded in such a way that I work both with, and in response to, the institutional culture, designing a process that allows a group to move into a new place, all the while integrating where they started from.   

When an institution is trying to go through a great shift and knows what they want from the change they seek, my role as a facilitator is to unpack those expectations, slow people down, offer questions, perspectives and feedback, reckon with scale and resources, find opportunities within challenges, and consider how we gather. Organizations have many different types of arrangements in terms of gathering. We know that the architecture and experience of a Zoom Room and a physically shared space are different, for example. But people have always used technology and space in different ways to gather and while the pandemic has fundamentally changed the way we adapt and pivot, I have always remained attuned to the way group dynamics are impacted by how we come together. How we connect with each other is a material I work with as much as “content” because the choices we make about logistics impact our relationships.

Regardless of the shape or focus of our work together, relationships are at the center. My role as a facilitator is to support a group through their process, and if a group is agreeing to jump in, a necessary guide for our work together are agreements about how people are going to relate to each other. In a process that is inevitably complicated and where mistakes and conflict are part of the work, we need to articulate how we are going to be accountable to each other. Agreements are about relationships – they are not rules but rather a practice of care. When facilitating, I am supporting my clients to expand from a sole focus on outcome(s) to also staying active and present in an interconnected and embodied process. The facilitation guides the grip, the grip shapes the hand, the hand makes the tool, and engaging the tool shapes the work.