by Debbie Lynangale and Sara Barnes
MV Mediation and other community mediation centers offer the service of facilitating meetings for various organizations and groups. As neutral facilitators, our service providers can take charge, make sure there is balanced participation, and help the group to be clear about agenda items, decisions and future action items.
Do you manage group meetings? Staff, Board of Directors, Committee, Condo Organization, Workshop, etc.,meetings? Some of the best experiences in our lives have come out of gatherings of people, working together to achieve shared goals. Some of our notable worsts as well.
Managing a meeting is not simple. The various participants each have their own interests, bandwidths, and personalities. “It was like herding cats” and “The bomb throwers came to play!” and “OMG––just, people--that’s my summary of the meeting,” have all been answers Sara received recently when asking others, “How did the meeting go?”
Running groups is a skill that can be learned––often with trial and error. Those of us who are experienced meeting facilitators have learned from our mistakes. The authors Debbie and Sara, along with our compadre David Ross, have decided to pool our facilitation experiences and create a new ten-session course. Participants will develop skills in methods to build community, ways to balance that all voices are heard, strategies to stay on track with agendas, ways to deal with challenging group behaviors, and ideas about getting work done collaboratively.
Any and all interested in becoming a better meeting facilitator are welcomed to come to the course. It will be interactive––we will base our teaching on dilemmas that the participants bring––and we will ask all involved to keep information private so everyone feels comfortable to share their difficulties with the group.
Join us beginning October 16 from 4 to 6 pm on Mondays on Zoom, and become part of the course Facilitation for All. Register here or send an email to info@mvmediation.org.