Learn the Art of Facilitation
with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg & Joy Roulier Sawyer
Do you want to facilitate better writing workshops, meetings, coaching sessions, therapy groups and more? Would you like more expert guidance, tools, and resources? Or perhaps earn a living from your facilitation? We can help!
We believe good facilitation fosters greater effectiveness, creativity, and vitality in our workshops, meetings, projects, and possibilities. It helps us act and interact with intelligence, awareness, care, and vision. Well-facilitated sessions -- whether a business team meeting or a community creative workshop -- make optimum use of our time, expand our imagination, and help us reach our goals.
That's why we're offering The Art of Facilitation, a 9-week comprehensive facilitation class held Sept. 21 - Nov. 16, 2023. Our course is offered via Zoom and online, and it's full of expert guidance and resources.
We are Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and Joy Roulier Sawyer, and we both make our living from facilitating workshops, classes, meetings, and coaching sessions, as well as other venues. Yet we also have a passion for personal transformation -- for changing lives and cultures and even the world -- one person at a time. Please join us consider joining us if you'd like to do the same!
What You'll Learn
Our class meets you where you are. We'll offer you practical approaches adaptable to your facilitation practice, across a wide span of meeting and workshop methods. Learn how to:
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Make your meetings or workshops hospitable and inclusive.
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Open and close sessions in innovative ways that build group cohesion.
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Understand your role as a facilitator and how to hold healthy boundaries.
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Pace your sessions in rhythm with the work of the group.
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Balance individual and group needs while creating a welcoming atmosphere.
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Mediate challenging situations and personalities respectfully and effectively.
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Guide your team, group or community toward deeper listening, creativity, and connection.
What You'll Receive
We believe writers, creatives, educators, therapists, coaches, entrepreneurs, leaders, and others can benefit from our Art of Facilitation class. And, upon completion, you'll receive an Art of Facilitation certificate. In each class, you'll receive:
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Weekly 90-minute Zoom sessions (5 p.m. PT/6 p.m. MT/ 7 p.m. CT/ 8 p.m. ET) Thursday evenings Sept. 21-Nov. 16.
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An accessible and artful online site with guiding essays and best resources.
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Weekly podcasts just for you, often featuring expert guest teachers who are visionary facilitators in the arts, business, nonprofits, and beyond.
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Reflections and best practices for the care and feeding of the facilitator.
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Discussion forum to help you coalesce what you're learning.
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An Art of Facilitation resource hub with lots of carefully-curated, best-of-the-best resources.
Please join us for our supportive, skilled, and compassionate class for a one-of-a-kind transformative experience!
Who Our Classe Serves
Our class bring together people who work in writing and the arts, business, public policy, social change, education and training, coaching, therapy, medicine, healing arts, and spirituality. We believe we can learn far more about ourselves and our facilitation practice by expanding our horizons beyond our usual sphere of work. Some examples of people who have benefited from our class include:
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Writers, artists, or expressive arts facilitators
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Team leaders and managers
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Therapists, realtors, and others ready to expand from one-on-one work to groups
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Community and neighborhood leaders
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City, county, or state staff
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Clergy and spiritual teachers
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Classroom teachers and college faculty
Join Us For a Free Discovery Call
About Your Facilitation Path
We're delighted to visit with you one-on-one to find out more about your facilitation experience, goals, questions, and quandaries. Our 20-minute Discovery Calls with one of us are a chance for us think through, discuss, and dream on your facilitation possibilities. We also can talk about your questions about our upcoming class.
About Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg & Joy Roulier Sawyer
With more than 50+ years of multi-venue experience between us, we're passionate about empowering you to do excellent facilitation work in your community--and to help you earn a "right livelihood" (as the Buddhists would say) as you do so!
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, founder of Transformative Language Arts, she has been leading community creative, healing, and social change arts workshops for years, and she's trained and supervised many graduate students in facilitation. She studied meeting facilitation and organizational development through Quaker, bioregional, and grassroots traditions and teachers, and over the last 30 years, she's facilitated hundreds of meetings for groups and businesses and trained dozens of community groups and entrepreneurs. She is the past Kansas Poet Laureate and author of 24 books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. Read more here.
Joy Roulier Sawyer has been facilitating counseling groups, community gatherings, spiritual congregations, and writing workshops since 1995. A retired licensed professional counselor and poetry/journal therapist and supervisor, she now uses her therapeutic expertise to facilitate writing outreaches to those experiencing homelessness, mental health challenges, addiction, and women transitioning out of incarceration. A widely-published author and poet, she recently revised and updated the third edition of Biblio/Poetry Therapy: The Interactive Process, a seminal textbook for writing and healing practitioners. Read more here.
A Transformative Class That Meets You Where You Are
Our online and Zoom-based approach provides you with ample guidance, supportive interaction with peers, excellent resources, and real-time human interaction. You'll also have access to our facilitation sources hub, a private online center with best practices bundles for workshops and meetings, plus links to tried-and-true and cutting-edge resources. Complete our class and earn a certificate in the Art of Facilitation.
Good Facilitation = Better Meetings, Workshops, Retreats & More
Let's make the most of our work together through more focused, productive meetings and transformative workshops, classe,s and retreats. Our training embraces both meeting and workshop facilitation, because we've found that a deep dive into facilitating both venues is both valuable and necessary.
Visiting Podcast Teachers
We're thrilled to feature guest podcast teachers -- visionary facilitators in the arts, business, and nonprofits -- who share their wisdom, advice, and insights in special podcast interviews with Joy and Caryn just for students in our class. Guest teachers include -- from left -- Bea Briggs, Vi Train, Marianela Medrano, Vanita Leatherwood, Caleb Winebrenner, Seema Reza, Sydney Fowler, Suzi Q. Smith, and Ken Lassman. Read all about them here.
