Just Transition Primer (In-Person)

Let’s come together online to align understanding and action in support of effective, collective responses to the moment we are living in.

Soaring prices for living expenses make it increasingly difficult to secure our basic needs. Natural disasters are on the rise. Our entrenched political divides are laced with conflict and create a sense of insecurity. How do we make sense of these realities? Where can we glimpse the kind of possibility worth coming together to work for? This workshop provides an opportunity to connect, explore a shared vision of Just Transition, and consider the question: What will it take to build systems centered on care for each other and our shared home? What would it mean for many of us in the Mahicantuck (Hudson) Valley to be focused on social and ecological well-being? Join us, in community, to deepen your understanding of the Just Transition framework, principles and practices. Through video, reflection, story sharing, and small group discussion, you will:

  • See people from across the country describing aspects of Just Transition
  • Hear how other participants respond to the framework
  • Connect your own experience to extractive and regenerative economic paradigms
  • Gain a sense of the framework, principles and practices, and where they come from
  • Discuss ways you are drawn toward weaving one or more Just Transition principles and practices into your Good Work

** This workshop will be held in-person at The GWI Greenhouse

The Art of Facilitation: Participatory Facilitator Training + Happy Hour

We believe that practicing the art of facilitation creates equitable, productive, joyful, and connecting spaces, so that people can fully participate, contribute, and collaborate. 

If “facilitation” is, at its root, the invisible process of making things easier, how can we equip ourselves as facilitators to create ease and openness? How can we practice a form of facilitation that is in alignment with our values and in service to creating a more democratic and just world?

In this workshop, GWI workers will share their go-to facilitation practices, including how to prepare a facilitation plan, how to hold space during a gathering, and how to guide and organize a group towards a shared goal over time. We will go over tools and concepts that have been helpful to us in our work, whether as workshop leaders, cohort facilitators, or community builders. Our goal is to provide clarity and grounding for those stepping into the ongoing practice of being a participatory facilitator. We come to this work with curiosity and humility, and as co-learners on this journey with you!

This workshop is for seasoned facilitators and beginners alike. 

We invite you to join us if any of the following apply:

  • You yearn for more productive, collaborative meetings
  • You hold the responsibility in leading or co-leading a class, working group, or team
  • You sense there might be better ways for you all to collaborate in meetings but are not sure how to shift things
  • You seek a more democratic process when making group decisions or gathering people’s input
  • You are hesitant to call yourself a “facilitator” but find yourself in that role a lot, and you’d like support!

We know that collaboration is not an automatic result of a desire to work together well, but flows from intentional, ongoing practices that develop the awareness and capacities of the members of the working group over time. Enter the facilitator.

For more on our approach to facilitation and some of the resources that inspire us, you can explore our Good Work in Groups collection. In particular, check out the post: How to be a Participatory Facilitator. 

The workshop will include formal instruction and will conclude with an informal Happy Hour for participants to further connect and share their experiences.

Navigating Feedback: Deepening Collaboration in the Conversations We Need (4 of 5)

Imagine you are supported to approach conversations you usually dread feeling grounded, clear, confident and compassionate. This 5-session workshop is focused on deepening collaboration in feedback conversations with practical guidance for how we can prepare and communicate in ways that are rooted in empathy for ourselves and others.

*Details on fees, sliding scale, and scholarship options can be found below.*

A conversation between you and your collaborator is looming. They’ve initiated it, and you’re dreading it. Or maybe you have some things to say, and you waver between wanting to give them a piece of your mind and wanting to just avoid it, pretending it’s no big deal. When we’re working with others, it is important to make space for feedback that strengthens both our shared work and our relationships. Often, we shy away from engaging if feedback isn’t 100% positive. It can be fraught. But there are ways of navigating feedback that hold the promise of growth, insight, and greater trust and connection. And not only that: we believe that learning and practicing skills and tools that tap into the generative potential of the tension that arises when we work together is essential to a Just Transition to systems centered on economic and social well-being and governed by deep democracy.

So what helps us access the transformative potential feedback can hold? 

During this 5-session, online workshop, we will explore practical strategies for navigating needed feedback conversations through the framework of the Feedback Spiral. The image of the spiral will remind us both that the process of feedback can be iterative and cyclical, as well as transformative and collaborative (vs. unilateral). 

What new insight might come as we move through the spiral that can help us find movement and hope in the stuck places?

Each session will include interactive content and practices to engage with real-time examples from your work and life. You will have the opportunity to be paired up with another participant for practice in between sessions. Because a shared experience with colleagues can make it easier to bring this language and these skills into your working relationships, we encourage you to sign up with one or more of the people

you work with! 

Through engagement with the Feedback Spiral, this course will support you, and the colleagues and collaborators who join you, to move through a series of replicable steps to help you prepare for offering as well as responding to offers of feedback.

The Feedback Spiral supports us to:

  • Understand empathy as a foundational posture and practice: what is it and why does it matter in navigating feedback? How can I regularly come back to empathy as a resource for needed conversations?
  • Connect to purpose: why does this conversation matter?
  • Observe and analyze power dynamics at play and lean into the responsibilities and growth edges of your positionality
  • Grow your capacity to distinguish between what happened and the meaning you’re making about it
  • Lean into taking accountability: how can I own what’s mine when there’s tension?
  • Make clearer, more doable requests, that consider more of the needs on the table, in service of having more effective agreements and strategies to tend to tensions
  • Grow your capacity to tune into the body as an important source of information, while also developing practices to stay more centered under pressure
  • Work with your defensiveness and learn to meaningfully integrate feedback
  • Develop an empathetic listening practice with a buddy between sessions as a foundational tool for resourcing yourself to show up better in navigating feedback

Session 5 will be a one hour Bonus Session co-facilitated by Nicole Bauman and GWI workers, beginning to explore institutional applications (how can your group or org integrate more liberatory and collaborative feedback practices, policies and culture) as well as starter resources for tending to feedback conversations when harm has been done.

This workshop series complements Navigating Conflict: Building Resilience for Your Working Relationships by delving deeper into applying nonviolent communication skills to feedback conversations. If you’ve participated in that workshop, the focus on feedback in this series will bring in new material alongside a refresher on the concepts and practices of Navigating Conflict. Because this series will include a condensed introduction to nonviolent communication, Navigating Conflict is not a prerequisite. At the same time, we encourage you to consider joining us in September for Navigating Conflict to strengthen your understanding and experience with this conflict resilience paradigm and practice! 

Navigating Feedback: Deepening Collaboration in the Conversations We Need (5 of 5)

Imagine you are supported to approach conversations you usually dread feeling grounded, clear, confident and compassionate. This 5-session workshop is focused on deepening collaboration in feedback conversations with practical guidance for how we can prepare and communicate in ways that are rooted in empathy for ourselves and others.

*Details on fees, sliding scale, and scholarship options can be found below.*

A conversation between you and your collaborator is looming. They’ve initiated it, and you’re dreading it. Or maybe you have some things to say, and you waver between wanting to give them a piece of your mind and wanting to just avoid it, pretending it’s no big deal. When we’re working with others, it is important to make space for feedback that strengthens both our shared work and our relationships. Often, we shy away from engaging if feedback isn’t 100% positive. It can be fraught. But there are ways of navigating feedback that hold the promise of growth, insight, and greater trust and connection. And not only that: we believe that learning and practicing skills and tools that tap into the generative potential of the tension that arises when we work together is essential to a Just Transition to systems centered on economic and social well-being and governed by deep democracy.

So what helps us access the transformative potential feedback can hold? 

During this 5-session, online workshop, we will explore practical strategies for navigating needed feedback conversations through the framework of the Feedback Spiral. The image of the spiral will remind us both that the process of feedback can be iterative and cyclical, as well as transformative and collaborative (vs. unilateral). 

What new insight might come as we move through the spiral that can help us find movement and hope in the stuck places?

Each session will include interactive content and practices to engage with real-time examples from your work and life. You will have the opportunity to be paired up with another participant for practice in between sessions. Because a shared experience with colleagues can make it easier to bring this language and these skills into your working relationships, we encourage you to sign up with one or more of the people

you work with! 

Through engagement with the Feedback Spiral, this course will support you, and the colleagues and collaborators who join you, to move through a series of replicable steps to help you prepare for offering as well as responding to offers of feedback.

The Feedback Spiral supports us to:

  • Understand empathy as a foundational posture and practice: what is it and why does it matter in navigating feedback? How can I regularly come back to empathy as a resource for needed conversations?
  • Connect to purpose: why does this conversation matter?
  • Observe and analyze power dynamics at play and lean into the responsibilities and growth edges of your positionality
  • Grow your capacity to distinguish between what happened and the meaning you’re making about it
  • Lean into taking accountability: how can I own what’s mine when there’s tension?
  • Make clearer, more doable requests, that consider more of the needs on the table, in service of having more effective agreements and strategies to tend to tensions
  • Grow your capacity to tune into the body as an important source of information, while also developing practices to stay more centered under pressure
  • Work with your defensiveness and learn to meaningfully integrate feedback
  • Develop an empathetic listening practice with a buddy between sessions as a foundational tool for resourcing yourself to show up better in navigating feedback

Session 5 will be a one hour Bonus Session co-facilitated by Nicole Bauman and GWI workers, beginning to explore institutional applications (how can your group or org integrate more liberatory and collaborative feedback practices, policies and culture) as well as starter resources for tending to feedback conversations when harm has been done.

This workshop series complements Navigating Conflict: Building Resilience for Your Working Relationships by delving deeper into applying nonviolent communication skills to feedback conversations. If you’ve participated in that workshop, the focus on feedback in this series will bring in new material alongside a refresher on the concepts and practices of Navigating Conflict. Because this series will include a condensed introduction to nonviolent communication, Navigating Conflict is not a prerequisite. At the same time, we encourage you to consider joining us in September for Navigating Conflict to strengthen your understanding and experience with this conflict resilience paradigm and practice! 

Navigating Feedback: Deepening Collaboration in the Conversations We Need (3 of 5)

Imagine you are supported to approach conversations you usually dread feeling grounded, clear, confident and compassionate. This 5-session workshop is focused on deepening collaboration in feedback conversations with practical guidance for how we can prepare and communicate in ways that are rooted in empathy for ourselves and others.

*Details on fees, sliding scale, and scholarship options can be found below.*

A conversation between you and your collaborator is looming. They’ve initiated it, and you’re dreading it. Or maybe you have some things to say, and you waver between wanting to give them a piece of your mind and wanting to just avoid it, pretending it’s no big deal. When we’re working with others, it is important to make space for feedback that strengthens both our shared work and our relationships. Often, we shy away from engaging if feedback isn’t 100% positive. It can be fraught. But there are ways of navigating feedback that hold the promise of growth, insight, and greater trust and connection. And not only that: we believe that learning and practicing skills and tools that tap into the generative potential of the tension that arises when we work together is essential to a Just Transition to systems centered on economic and social well-being and governed by deep democracy.

So what helps us access the transformative potential feedback can hold? 

During this 5-session, online workshop, we will explore practical strategies for navigating needed feedback conversations through the framework of the Feedback Spiral. The image of the spiral will remind us both that the process of feedback can be iterative and cyclical, as well as transformative and collaborative (vs. unilateral). 

What new insight might come as we move through the spiral that can help us find movement and hope in the stuck places?

Each session will include interactive content and practices to engage with real-time examples from your work and life. You will have the opportunity to be paired up with another participant for practice in between sessions. Because a shared experience with colleagues can make it easier to bring this language and these skills into your working relationships, we encourage you to sign up with one or more of the people

you work with! 

Through engagement with the Feedback Spiral, this course will support you, and the colleagues and collaborators who join you, to move through a series of replicable steps to help you prepare for offering as well as responding to offers of feedback.

The Feedback Spiral supports us to:

  • Understand empathy as a foundational posture and practice: what is it and why does it matter in navigating feedback? How can I regularly come back to empathy as a resource for needed conversations?
  • Connect to purpose: why does this conversation matter?
  • Observe and analyze power dynamics at play and lean into the responsibilities and growth edges of your positionality
  • Grow your capacity to distinguish between what happened and the meaning you’re making about it
  • Lean into taking accountability: how can I own what’s mine when there’s tension?
  • Make clearer, more doable requests, that consider more of the needs on the table, in service of having more effective agreements and strategies to tend to tensions
  • Grow your capacity to tune into the body as an important source of information, while also developing practices to stay more centered under pressure
  • Work with your defensiveness and learn to meaningfully integrate feedback
  • Develop an empathetic listening practice with a buddy between sessions as a foundational tool for resourcing yourself to show up better in navigating feedback

Session 5 will be a one hour Bonus Session co-facilitated by Nicole Bauman and GWI workers, beginning to explore institutional applications (how can your group or org integrate more liberatory and collaborative feedback practices, policies and culture) as well as starter resources for tending to feedback conversations when harm has been done.

This workshop series complements Navigating Conflict: Building Resilience for Your Working Relationships by delving deeper into applying nonviolent communication skills to feedback conversations. If you’ve participated in that workshop, the focus on feedback in this series will bring in new material alongside a refresher on the concepts and practices of Navigating Conflict. Because this series will include a condensed introduction to nonviolent communication, Navigating Conflict is not a prerequisite. At the same time, we encourage you to consider joining us in September for Navigating Conflict to strengthen your understanding and experience with this conflict resilience paradigm and practice! 

Navigating Feedback: Deepening Collaboration in the Conversations We Need (2 of 5)

Imagine you are supported to approach conversations you usually dread feeling grounded, clear, confident and compassionate. This 5-session workshop is focused on deepening collaboration in feedback conversations with practical guidance for how we can prepare and communicate in ways that are rooted in empathy for ourselves and others.

*Details on fees, sliding scale, and scholarship options can be found below.*

A conversation between you and your collaborator is looming. They’ve initiated it, and you’re dreading it. Or maybe you have some things to say, and you waver between wanting to give them a piece of your mind and wanting to just avoid it, pretending it’s no big deal. When we’re working with others, it is important to make space for feedback that strengthens both our shared work and our relationships. Often, we shy away from engaging if feedback isn’t 100% positive. It can be fraught. But there are ways of navigating feedback that hold the promise of growth, insight, and greater trust and connection. And not only that: we believe that learning and practicing skills and tools that tap into the generative potential of the tension that arises when we work together is essential to a Just Transition to systems centered on economic and social well-being and governed by deep democracy.

So what helps us access the transformative potential feedback can hold? 

During this 5-session, online workshop, we will explore practical strategies for navigating needed feedback conversations through the framework of the Feedback Spiral. The image of the spiral will remind us both that the process of feedback can be iterative and cyclical, as well as transformative and collaborative (vs. unilateral). 

What new insight might come as we move through the spiral that can help us find movement and hope in the stuck places?

Each session will include interactive content and practices to engage with real-time examples from your work and life. You will have the opportunity to be paired up with another participant for practice in between sessions. Because a shared experience with colleagues can make it easier to bring this language and these skills into your working relationships, we encourage you to sign up with one or more of the people

you work with! 

Through engagement with the Feedback Spiral, this course will support you, and the colleagues and collaborators who join you, to move through a series of replicable steps to help you prepare for offering as well as responding to offers of feedback.

The Feedback Spiral supports us to:

  • Understand empathy as a foundational posture and practice: what is it and why does it matter in navigating feedback? How can I regularly come back to empathy as a resource for needed conversations?
  • Connect to purpose: why does this conversation matter?
  • Observe and analyze power dynamics at play and lean into the responsibilities and growth edges of your positionality
  • Grow your capacity to distinguish between what happened and the meaning you’re making about it
  • Lean into taking accountability: how can I own what’s mine when there’s tension?
  • Make clearer, more doable requests, that consider more of the needs on the table, in service of having more effective agreements and strategies to tend to tensions
  • Grow your capacity to tune into the body as an important source of information, while also developing practices to stay more centered under pressure
  • Work with your defensiveness and learn to meaningfully integrate feedback
  • Develop an empathetic listening practice with a buddy between sessions as a foundational tool for resourcing yourself to show up better in navigating feedback

Session 5 will be a one hour Bonus Session co-facilitated by Nicole Bauman and GWI workers, beginning to explore institutional applications (how can your group or org integrate more liberatory and collaborative feedback practices, policies and culture) as well as starter resources for tending to feedback conversations when harm has been done.

This workshop series complements Navigating Conflict: Building Resilience for Your Working Relationships by delving deeper into applying nonviolent communication skills to feedback conversations. If you’ve participated in that workshop, the focus on feedback in this series will bring in new material alongside a refresher on the concepts and practices of Navigating Conflict. Because this series will include a condensed introduction to nonviolent communication, Navigating Conflict is not a prerequisite. At the same time, we encourage you to consider joining us in September for Navigating Conflict to strengthen your understanding and experience with this conflict resilience paradigm and practice!