Social Change Facilitation

Reflections on my experience at the ‘Facilitation for Social Change’ conference at Commonground May 2008.

As soon as I received notice about this conference in an email a couple of months ago I knew it was for me. I knew it would be a great conference and I knew there would be a fascinating gathering of people. So I decided to go almost immediately on first reading about it. That is an extremely rare thing for me, who likes to think of myself as a deep and critical thinker. I’m not prone to spontaneous decision making. I also hate conferences and get so fed up with how they promise so much and fail to deliver. But I knew some of the folk organizing this conference and I have a deep trust and respect for them and the venue they have created themselves for just such an event. So it never occurred to me that my expectations might be dangerously high or setting me up for disappointment like a Hollywood blockbuster and I arrived on a high.

Before the formal program had even begun I’d been given three significant thoughts through conversations over dinner and breakfast. Conversations and thoughts that drew together many of my life experiences, when seen through the lens of someone else’s similar experience. These are the richest parts of conferencing. We had some great workshops and some not so great ones (well from my perspective at least) but the Open Space “law of two feet” enabled me to do what I needed to do while leaving others to do theirs. Gradually we built a common understanding about what we meant by facilitation for social change and the issues around it. We swapped and created wisdom – and contact details! It was really quite a full on experience, not a moment to loose – for talk, work, space, games, music and sleep – but without ever feeling rushed. And then it was time to end and to reflect on what it was we’d given each other. That’s when it came to me, we’d created a new identity, that of being a Social Change Facilitator; an identity I could embrace.

Thankfully that was only the formal end, because it was really a beginning. And so the work went on over dinner, party, breakfast and even the drive home. This is where I sit now trying to put big thoughts into small(ish) words.

So what is a Social Change Facilitator?...

as someone asked me after dinner. Well it’s something between a facilitator and an activist. An activist is someone with passion and vision for a better world who takes action to try and bring about some form of change in the world. They take a view, find others who share that view and work as agents provocateur to stir things towards change. A facilitator practices neutrality and offers this as a gift to any group. They understand group processes and bring a range of processes and techniques to help the group achieve its purpose. They are at the service of the group and are willing to go in any direction the group desires provided that is safe for all participants and true to the groups agreements and processes.

Social Change Facilitators bring together parts of both. They share with the activist a desire for change and enough passion to step beyond complete neutrality to intentionally stimulate something. However they believe that social change requires bringing together people from divergent and opposite perspectives. They share with facilitators the skills and enough neutrality to create spaces where people from contrasting perspectives can feel safe enough to express their fears and hopes. Social change facilitators don’t have a set view of the change they are aiming for but believe that if they can hold people from all ‘sides’ and enable them to truly dialogue then change will emerge (possibly in some previously unimagined form). Social change facilitators work with groups but also with movements and in fact society as a whole in their pursuit of social change. They can do this both as professionals and as amateurs; in fact if amateurs are not included then this field is probably losing more than half its inspiration and workforce.

For me this conference and this concept are a culmination of my life so far. It draws together my experiences in social activism, nonviolence and facilitation, three broad identities I have never totally grasped. It utilises my natural inclination for getting and helping groups interact and achieve while looking at the big picture of where we are all going. It captures my sense of vocation with the VicSRC and places it in a broader context but one which is specific enough that I can draw on support and advice from colleagues in the field.