Strengthening A Community's Facilitation Skills

Program Curriculum

Agencies and organizations, volunteers and citizens are often expected to interact in collaborative groups. For citizens to become more familiar with facilitating, they need to experience facilitating. How do they gain the necessary skills and experiences? This highly experiential workshop's emphasis is about designing, conducting and evaluating facilitation training for citizen volunteers.

Participants will:

• assess facilitation needs based on the IAF (International Association of Facilitators) facilitation competency framework.
• analyze and use needs assessment data to design a facilitation curriculum.
• critique program designs to assess the developmental aspect of facilitation skills.
• design and present one short, experiential learning module that meets one of the competencies.
• learn the principles of small and whole group feedback.
• Identify best practices needed to team teach the facilitation series.
• Explore the sustainability of releasing the training to the community.

Learn how the five-part 20 hour Maine training (now in its sixth year) has evolved to include a 24-hour advanced training to help community members deepen their facilitation competencies, as well as a qualitative research project design measuring the societal impact of having community facilitators.