Practicing feminist liberatory facilitation

In the latter half of this session, participants applied what they learned to discuss, in breakout rooms of 4, specific actions they would take in coaching a campaign in this scenario:

CONTEXT: About the group, the campaign, & your role

You have been approached to coach a campaign that is being initiated by a group around Indigenous land rights in modern-day Brazil. 

The group is a mix of people. Some are Indigenous people from the Yanomami Territory. They have worked together on different campaigns before, some within their paid work and some in activism.

The group has formed its leadership team, met multiple times, and shared their stories. They have already agreed on their purpose, defined their people, and analyzed the problem.

TODAY, you are facilitating a strategizing meeting, the objective is for the group to agree their strategic objective & campaign Theory of Change. 

GROUP WORK GUIDANCE

Together, discuss and respond to the following questions.

• Thinking of the nexus, what do you do before the meeting? How do you prepare yourself and the group?
• During the meeting, how do you adapt to reflect the balance of people, process, objectives? how do you identify & address the power dynamic in the room?

Please do not spend your time together setting the agenda. Please document your ideas: we will invite you to highlight one-2 elements to the room & this will be circulated for our documentation. 

If it works for you, I would spend:

3 minutes read the scenario individually & agree on a moderator

20 minutes discuss the questions and note down your suggested actions. 

Regarding the preparation before the meeting, the two common threads seen across the group discussions were having one-on-one conversations with the people in advance, and conducting research to build an understanding of the issues, the history of what people have done together so far, and the internal power dynamics already at play. In examining the power dynamics, we facilitators can look at structural dynamics of class—who is Indigenous, who has benefitted from being here and campaigning on this issue and who has not, etc. At the same time, knowing what we don’t know is a valuable mindset as coaches. We will do our research, but we are not going to know everything.

An important point was raised also around assessing your own positionality and fit as a facilitator in this particular group. Examine the structural power, consider how to balance it, and be open to referring the facilitation role to another person if the power imbalance will hinder the facilitation. Hoda said, whether we like it or not, there is a certain power and access to language and knowledge that we amass as organizers and trainers with years of experience. And yet, we cannot lose people because of their guilt and their privilege—we must think: how can we put our privileges and resources to use in the best way for this group? How do we center those with less power and be in active allyship? 

There was a lot of curiosity around the question of what to do when conflict arises during the meeting facilitation. Building trust between you as a facilitator and the participants of the discussion, and building trust among the participants themselves is key in the pre-meeting preparation, as well as in the beginning of the meeting, through the facilitator telling their story of self, sharing values that can be anchor points and bridges for when conflicts arise. But even then, conflicts do arise—then, what do we do? It’s one thing to have aligned on a decision-making norm for the discussion, but it’s another thing to manage a disagreement or confront a struggle between people in the room. We facilitators grapple with this question often, not knowing how to sit with the voices and emotions, especially because we have meeting objectives to achieve and limited meeting time.

When a conflict arises, one way to address it is by being clear on the trade-off and deciding as a group if we want to spend time in that conflict. We can say, “I feel there are a lot of emotions. I want to stop and invest in this, and that means one of the objectives we had will not be done” or “Do we have the energy to continue?” and make this a moment of collective choice. Co-designing the process decenters our power as facilitators (holding time as facilitators comes with a lot of power), helps build trust, and brings in the organizing values of people building power with each other instead of doing things for others.

Another choice we have as facilitators in the moment of a conflict is to not dig deeper into the conflict. If you can hold the tension, if you feel ready and skilled to hold it, then hold it! But it feels even more vital as a facilitator to be able to be in touch with your emotions and understand your own limitations as a human being in that space. Hoda described this as “the integrity of me as a person,” mentioning that she herself is a “rebuild the trust” person and not a conflict mediator. We can say, “I feel this tension rising, I am not comfortable, I cannot continue facilitating,” or “This meeting is not designed as a ‘rebuilding the trust’ meeting. In this meeting, the objectives weigh more than the process. I will support you to get to those objectives, and my facilitation choices are driven by this.” This does not mean that we don’t address harm in the space; it means that we are honest about evaluating our own fit to be the one leading the discussion around the harm on the spot in that moment.