In this introductory workshop, GWI provides a window into the kinds of relational shifts that facilitate a culture of shared leadership. We touch on the tools, policies and practices that support democratic decision making, and offer a glimpse into how they can be put into action. You will emerge with a sense of how to start taking steps towards sharing power in your organization or working group.
Continue readingIn this introductory workshop, GWI provides a window into the kinds of relational shifts that facilitate a culture of shared leadership. We touch on the tools, policies and practices that support democratic decision making, and offer a glimpse into how they can be put into action. You will emerge with a sense of how to start taking steps towards sharing power in your organization or working group.
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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:
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.
Let’s come together 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:
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:
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.
In this lightly-facilitated gathering, we aim to provide a space for all of us to share our approaches, challenges, and learnings as we experiment and grow in our practice as facilitators.
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Please join us to celebrate the Good Work in the region at our Summer Soiree!
Expect delightful nibbles, tasty tipples, and a joyful gathering of like-minded people.
We are bringing together the many wonderful people, organizations and communities in our network to honor all the ways we have partnered with you! Learning, building, exploring, changing, and evolving together, while supporting each other’s Good Work. Plus we have fun doing it!
Is your business, org, or working group facing a challenge on your journey toward sharing power, leadership and decision-making? Sign up today to connect with GWI and other orgs engaged in practicing democracy at work and ready to listen and offer feedback and support.
Good Work Institute shares and celebrates your commitment to a democratic workplace! And we know it’s not easy. There’s a lot of learning and unlearning to do along the way. Thankfully, there’s a growing community to learn from and with. Alongside other opportunities for learning and support, including weekly discovery calls focused on org-specific challenges and our annual online series of workshops focused on democratizing work, we’re excited to offer these quarterly facilitated discussions to connect, and give and receive support. Bring a challenge to share, an openness to listen to others’ struggles, and a willingness to share from your experience. Together we’ll cultivate a healthy ecosystem of democratic workplaces in our region (and farther afield). This offering is intended for those in the Mahicantuck (Hudson) Valley who are actively engaged in the practice of sharing power, leadership and decision-making, including those who have participated in our online workshop series “Democratizing Work: Ways of Sharing Power, Leadership and Decision Making” or “Shared Leadership and Democracy in the Workplace”.
In this lightly-facilitated gathering, we aim to provide a space for all of us to share our approaches, challenges, and learnings as we experiment and grow in our practice as facilitators.
Continue readingIn this introductory workshop, GWI provides a window into the kinds of relational shifts that facilitate a culture of shared leadership. We touch on the tools, policies and practices that support democratic decision making, and offer a glimpse into how they can be put into action. You will emerge with a sense of how to start taking steps towards sharing power in your organization or working group.
Continue reading
How can communities ensure that their voices genuinely shape the policies and decisions that impact their lives, their neighborhoods, their cities?
While participation is central to democratic ideals, meaningful influence in government, education, nonprofit, and especially corporate decision-making remains rare. Too often, “community engagement” is reduced to public relations—accessible primarily to those with time, access, and insider fluency.
This talk introduces Creative Instigation: an approach to authentic engagement that blends the field methods of documentarians and ethnographers, the strategic rigor of community organizers, the contextual depth of qualitative research and journalism, and the grounded imagination of socially engaged artists. The goal is not performative participation—but durable institutional and social change.
Drawing on complex, multi-year projects spanning rural Maui County, metropolitan Phoenix, activist communities in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the corporate landscape of a global biotech firm, Fern Tiger will describe creative efforts to rebalance power and confront social, economic, and political inequities.
At its strongest, Creative Instigation does more than inform decision-makers. It elevates historically marginalized voices, reshapes narratives, and catalyzes solutions rooted in lived experience. In a time of eroding trust in institutions and widening inequality, authentic engagement is not optional—it is foundational to democracy itself.
About Fern Tiger
Fern Tiger is the founder and creative director of Fern Tiger Associates (FTA), based in Oakland, California. The firm is grounded in the belief that “with reflective strategy and innovative design, positive and constructive social change is not only possible—it is inevitable.”
Trained in art and media, with advanced study in human–environment relations, and art and cognition, Fern Tiger built a transdisciplinary approach to strategy and research—one that bridges creative inquiry with policy and systems thinking. Her work has led to professorships in diverse departments from art to public policy and urban studies; she has served on the faculties of Pennsylvania State University, Washington University in St. Louis, Arizona State University, and the University of Washington Tacoma. Fern has published and lectured broadly on topics related to the nonprofit sector, authentic community engagement, and the dynamic intersections of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. www.ferntiger.com
This event is offered by GWI in partnership with Radio Kingston & Rough Draft Bar & Books
Join us as we welcome Báyò Akómoláfé to the GWI Greenhouse for an author talk. A posthumanist polymath and “trans-public” intellectual, Báyò Akómoláfé has produced a vast body of work that presents a startling picture of the world in perpetual process and radical relation. Through an ever-growing archive of books, articles, interviews, social media posts, workshops, and rituals, Akómoláfé seeks to interrogate the fundamental assumptions and epistemological gaps in our current culture in crisis.
You can experience more by visiting Dancing With Mountains where Bayo offers an invitation to inhabit the cracks where the world is still being made.
Listen to The Good Work Hour episode from July 2024, Rethinking Our Relationship to Reality with Bayo Akomolafe
Báyò’s new book Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader presents a poetically arranged selection of Akómoláfé’s short-form writings, which draw inspiration from Édouard Glissant; Gilles Deleuze; Gregory Bateson; Octavia Butler; Fernand Deligny; Chinua Achebe; the adventures of Esu, the Yoruba monster-trickster and crossroads figure; and more. A tightly curated composition of aphorisms, anti-epiphanies, prose poems, and philosophical fragments, Selah invites readers into the thicket of Akómoláfé’s thought, weaving together threads of his most critically creative concepts—such as ontofugitivity, ecocognitive assemblage theory, parapolitics, and postactivism. Taking its title from an enigmatic Hebrew word that appears throughout the Book of Psalms—one that suggests a moment of ecstatic exclamation or musical notation—Selah is a book that can be read in an hour or studied for years, kept by your bedside or passed among friends like an open secret. For those already swimming in the depths of Akómoláfé’s language, as well as those encountering his dynamic body of work for the first time, Selah offers an accessible and ecstatic entry into a visionary thinker’s signature thought and poetics.
