Navigating Feedback: Deepening Collaboration in the Conversations We Need (1 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! 

Nourishing Traditions Pot-Luck Dinner

An evening devoted to the food principles of The Weston A. Price Foundation. We prepare foods that are nutritionally dense to promote health and overcome problems inherent in the industrial food system. For more information, click the link below.

Solidarity Civics

What can we do? How can we come together to process and respond to the real and lasting damage that could result from these regressive actions? How can we build grassroots power and community-led mutual support to ensure we stand in resistance and in solidarity?

Continue reading

Solidarity Civics

What can we do? How can we come together to process and respond to the real and lasting damage that could result from these regressive actions? How can we build grassroots power and community-led mutual support to ensure we stand in resistance and in solidarity?

Continue reading

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.

Mayor Noble’s Listening Tour: Ward 5 Meeting

City of Kingston Mayor Steve Noble is visiting each ward on a Listening Tour to hear residents concerns and answer questions. Mayor Noble and Ward 5 Alderwoman Teryl Mickens will host a meeting for Ward 5 residents on Monday, July 28, 2025. All Ward 5 residents are welcome!

A Generous Offer of Sound & Tea

Engather is a platform and movement to nurture a flourishing gift economy in the Hudson Valley. In turbulent times that require great strength, resilience, and community, this event serves as a collective moment to rest, relax, and nourish ourselves. Engather member and sound practitioner Evelyn Ellis will guide you through a 60-minute immersion with a variety of soothing instruments. Afterwards, we’ll have the opportunity to connect with others over tea. Mats and blankets will be provided, we encourage folks to bring additional items–pillows, eye masks, etc.–to add to their comfort during the experience.

Democratizing Work Primer

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 reading

Democratizing Work Primer

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 reading

Democratizing Work Primer

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 reading

Solidarity Civics

“The flood of 200+ executive orders in Trump’s first days exemplifies Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” – using chaos and crisis to push through radical changes while people are too disoriented to effectively resist. This isn’t just politics as usual – it’s a strategic exploitation of cognitive limits.”- Social post, sociologist Jennifer Walter

As we witness the speed and ferocity of the executive orders that have poured out of the White House in recent weeks, we might feel overwhelmed, shocked, and scared. “Project 2025”- the ruthless blueprint for dismantling civil rights and empowering the executive branch to serve the purposes of a right-wing agenda, spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation – is in full effect. The result: sweeping directives have plunged us into a bewildering sense of chaos. 

A raft of lawsuits has emerged as part of the resistance, as institutions scramble to protect programs and people, and expose the illegal nature of some of the executive orders. But still, the immediate suspension of funding, jobs, and programs across the federal government have put immigrant rights, abortion rights, LGBTQIA+ rights at risk and have started the project of rescinding commitments to social equity, racial justice, free speech, and environmental repair. Headed by an autocrat, a surveillance state that claims to be acting for efficiency’s sake is on the move.

What can we do? How can we come together to process and respond to the real and lasting damage that could result from these regressive actions? How can we build grassroots power and community-led mutual support to ensure we stand in resistance and in solidarity?

“Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” – On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder

We believe that it is more imperative than ever that we emerge from our individual attempts at staying grounded (as important as they are) and join forces. We invite you to a gathering. Our purpose is to hold space, a forum, for us to strengthen our understanding of what is happening and cultivate a collective sense of focus and action. We are joining the chorus of voices calling for local, regional, and state-wide networks to rise up to fill the gaps, to resist a narrative of helplessness, and to promote instead a tangible alternative to the chaos. We want to support and encourage a community response – with deep democracy at its core – exercising our ability to work collaboratively together, to make decisions through a lens of wisdom and care, and move into action. We will not be obeying in advance.

Take a look at the resources below to ground you in the specifics of the implications of Project 2025, if you can. But there is no homework here. You can also just come, to stand in a circle with all of us, as we process this moment and replenish our selves and minds for the work ahead.

Resources: