Finally – Your Very Own Complete Professional Facilitator Development Library

We did it. We worked for years to make facilitator user-friendly content. Now we hope you will benefit from it in some new ways. This blog shares a bit of a story about my journey (and my collaboration with Eileen) and where I am now. Sorry – not much on technique today.  BUT rich on technique if you read about what we have to offer!

I don’t know if you know how I got started in creating my own materials.  I wanted to learn so many techniques when I began facilitating seriously in 1995.  I joined the ICA Associates program and took a three year membership with them and graduated in 1999. I started offering “facilitator cafes” soon after I moved to the USA in 2003.  They were like F2F webinars with  lots of interaction. I did this in my home for about 5+ years. People drove up to two hours to attend. I’d serve them breakfast and then we’d get down to fun learning using all the spaces in my home. It was fun. It forced me to write about topics and then refine each article based on what we learned together that day. I ended up with over 50 in-depth technique articles. I have had most of them on my website as for-sale products for quite some time.  Then I wanted to meet more people so I started co-creating virtually-offered curriculum with colleagues from around the continent, and then eventually around the world. That started in 2013. And, all along, I kept detailed records of what I did with every client, hundreds of facilitator guides, proposals, contracts, templates for strategic planning, teambuilding, etc. This amassed a lot of material. Eileen has been doing the same thing.

Just because I am moving into a different phase of my life (i.e., retirement from being over buzzzzzzzy!!), we don’t want what I have created to be wasted. Eileen Pippins, Errin Romayor, my long time colleagues and I hatched up and created a plan to share SO much with you.  Now if you are an entrepreneur offering facilitator services to your clients, or an in-house occasional or frequent meeting facilitator, you can access even more than what we have ever provided. We grouped everything into convenient packages and put all our training materials (PDFs, videos, blogs, templates, and other resources) into like categories. You want to know a lot about dialogue and engagement techniques? It is all in one place now. Available to you 24/7 if you wish. And, we add material as you go along so we do not overwhelm you with too much at the beginning. Eileen is in the process of getting much of her unique facilitator helpful materials ready to add to our membership site. If you keep your membership for a year or so, you will have hundreds of resources from which to choose.

Here is a short summary video from Eileen and myself telling you about why we are doing this, what we each bring and how the memberships work.

In case you are often like me, a bit too rushed to watch a video right now, here are the highlights:

Why:

We love working with people who are interested in facilitation. We want to grow this community around the world and make it easier for you and others to build your competency.

We want to make this as accessible as possible. We have two tiers of pricing for the Bronze and Silver and have kept the Gold to less than half of what we typically would make on other paid projects.

What we bring:

Eileen (Pippins) is a superb educator and communicator. She teaches in California and has been a trainer on the Foundational ToP course with me and others. She has immense knowledge of systems of oppression, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, systems theory in general and has worked with clients from around the world. She is funny and a pleasure to get to know. Eileen is a great entrepreneur and intends to be practicing actively for many years to come.

Myself (Barbara) knows a lot about certifying facilitators, has trained people in facilitation from all over the world since 2000. I am fun, authentic and care deeply about people and justice in the world. I want facilitation to be used to solve some of the biggest dilemmas we face. I think facilitation has a big role to play in resolving world peace, climate crisis, systemic dismissal and even erasure of whole facets of our beloved human race, and more.

How it will work:

Join Bronze, Silver or the Gold membership level. You get access to so many topical professional facilitator development resources.

The main difference is at Bronze you work on your own and decide which resources you will read or watch when.

At Silver, you get access to Eileen and I for Q & A sessions, a plethora of valuable templates you can adapt for any client or group, and some live virtual trainings. Our templates could save you so many hours of work – including contract examples, RFPs, facilitator designs and detailed activity instructions for your small groups, amongst many things.

At Gold, you are part of a closed small cohort for a year and get custom mentoring, feedback as you practice or test designs, and advanced level training. You will need to apply to be part of this cohort. We are accepting a maximum of 15 keen people with a wide diversity. There is a Google form to fill out on that webpage. Please do it soon as we need to choose amongst applicants by mid to late May.

Please feel free to explore what is available in Bronze, Silver and Gold on your own for now.

Reminder: The gold membership is extremely limited. Eileen and I will screen potential applicants and  are accepting a maximum of  15 people from around the world. We will take applications from this day until mid or late May and start in July 2022. We will accept those who represent a group of generational, racial, geographical  and other diverse identities. We are also looking for those who are committing to this path and have some experience facilitating groups in a variety of settings. We are asking for those who want to seriously “up their game” and will commit to supporting their peers in this group for one year! The price is too low for us to offer discounts at this level because of the time commitment we are putting to it.

Take a look at this short video where I screen share a bit of what you will get at Bronze and a quick overview of the differences in Silver and Gold. Hope to meet you soon!

P.S. We fully expect that there will be some pages with a couple of errors as we are trying to launch this for blog day; please reach out if you find anything missing.  Thank you for your patience!