Example Workshop Container

PURPOSE, CAUTIONS, AND CONTAINER
Purpose and what we’ll work on:
These workshop are for groups and individuals who would like to communicate more clearly and kindly, who would like to shift organizational culture to handling conflict more constructively and proactively, and/or who would like to support other people in your community in conflict.

In them, you will learn principles and have an opportunity to practice through exercises and role-plays skills such as:

• self-connection,
• receptive communication,
• expressive communication, and
• conversation support.

To me, community-based, peer communication and facilitation support is important because it’s a way that we can embrace our interdependence. We can help each other through the inevitable challenges that occur from working, living, making decisions, and relating together. We can do this as peers and members of a coherent community, rather than as expensive, detached professionals.

Cautions
I am a community-based peer facilitator. I’m not accredited by any organization. I am not a licensed social worker or therapist.

Aspects of interpersonal communication and facilitation are culturally dependent, and this material would require cultural translation for use in other contexts.

Working with people, especially around stressful situations and topics entails risks. Working within our own communities and as peers mitigates some risks (such as reduces misunderstandings and imposition of cultural assumptions) and increases other risks (such as fellow members of one’s own community being upset with one for facilitation efforts or their impacts).

Be aware of your own limits and remember to call on professional support, such as social workers, therapists, and mediators if you feel it makes sense. For example, I require folks I work with in individual or group processes to be also working separately with a professional if addiction, violence, or risk of suicide/self-harm is involved.

I do not claim to be the originator of these ideas. I am merely organizing things I’ve learned through the kind mentorship of others, workshops, experience, study, and reflection.

Use your own judgment and decide what you think about each idea shared here. I am neither presenting these ideas as an authority nor guaranteeing that what I currently think is correct. My thoughts have changed repeatedly over time, and I believe yours will too. It’s all a work in revision, is imprecise, includes some nuance and forgets others, and is only meant to offer directions to explore, not procedures or dogma to adhere to.

I intend to care about each person in this group and the group as a whole. Holding those things in tension can mean that the group may feel slighted when I tend to an individual or an individual may feel slighted when I tend to the needs of the group.

Container for the Workshop: Personal Sovereignty and Confidentiality
I’m going to frame some things differently than many facilitators do.

First, I can’t make this space safe and it would be out of integrity to promise you that. I don’t know all of you, we’re not a group that has commitments to each other, and so I can’t know what participants will say or protect participants from difficult feelings about what other people say. This is a risk I enter into by choosing to facilitate and that you enter by participating.

I’d like to support you in your sovereignty, which to me involves deciding how vulnerable you would like to be, what you do and don’t want to share with this group. It takes courage to share vulnerably. So make this an appropriately courageous space and engage with the amount of courage that is right for you right now.

Second, we’re not going to have a container where we ask for agreement from everyone that what’s said here stays here because:
1) I can’t guarantee that
2) Asking people to decide in 30 seconds if they’re ok with that ground rule promotes false or coerced consent
3) And I don’t want to prevent you from getting to talk about your experiences here
Instead, I ask us all to be thoughtful and share about our experiences here in ways that tend to be more protective of members, such as:
– not using specific names to talk about what someone said
– focusing on your experience instead of other people’s words.

In addition, if you want to discuss something someone shared in the workshop afterwards, I encourage you to do a consent check: tell them you had a thought about something they said (don’t name it yet), and ask them if they’re open to talking about it.

Last, all exercises are optional. It’s ok to sit and observe and not say anything, to say pass, or to use a hand-gesture to wave me on if I check in with you when you don’t want to say anything.