5 Week Practice and Example-Focused Introductory Course to Convergent Facilitation

About the Event

This course is a new and augmented iteration of an in-depth introduction to Convergent Facilitation delivered by Paul and Verene in March 2024. We will have 2 extra special events: a CF Process Live Demo by Paul which anyone who has registered can either observe or participate in (by taking a role). The other is a Case Study Q&A session with Aimee Ryan (Event) regarding the California Pest Management project hosted by Sabine Virani who wrote the project’s case study.

If you have questions about this event please reach out to us at [email protected].

Requested Engagement

• Watch/Listen to the corresponding recording before each live session
  • We will offer video and audio recordings from the previous intro course for theoretical input
  • We will offer slides in PDF format along with the recordings
  • Recordings and slides will be made available 7 days before the live session
• Participate each week in a Q&A + Guided Practice live sessions
  • we offer 2 different time slots to accommodate people in as many time zones as possible
• Create an account in our Community of Practice (CoP)
  • We will give you specific instructions how to do this once you register
  • You need this to access materials (including the recordings) in the dedicated course space we will invite you to
  • Link to our CoP: https://community.convergentfacilitation.org

Dates & Times

The dates and times below are automatically adjusted to your device’s time zone.

• Week 1: Complementary offering (optional) - CF Process Demo
  • w/ Paul:Nov 8, 03:30 PM - 05:30 PM UTC
• Week 1: Session 1 - Introduction Course: Q&A and guided practice
  • w/ Verene:Nov 13, 09:00 AM - 11:00 AM UTC
  • w/ Paul:Nov 13, 03:30 PM - 05:30 PM UTC
• Week 2: Complementary offering (optional): California Pest Management Case Study Q&A
  • w/ Aimee (facilitated by Sabine):Nov 20, 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM UTC
• Week 3: Session 2 - Introduction Course: Q&A and guided practice
  • w/ Verene:Nov 27, 09:00 AM - 11:00 AM UTC
  • w/ Paul:Nov 27, 03:30 PM - 05:30 PM UTC
• Week 4: Session 3 - Introduction Course: Q&A and guided practice
  • w/ Verene:Dec 4, 09:00 AM - 11:00 AM UTC
  • w/ Paul:Dec 4, 03:30 PM - 05:30 PM UTC
• Week 5: Session 4 - Introduction Course: Q&A and guided practice
  • w/ Verene:Dec 11, 09:00 AM - 11:00 AM UTC
  • w/ Paul:Dec 11, 03:30 PM - 05:30 PM UTC

What is Convergent Facilitation? & Why learn it?

We live in a time of multiple devastating crises and challenges - could we come together to find a way to turn things around?

Convergent Facilitation (CF) is a powerful approach to facilitating collaborative decision making. It holds massive potential for those working to bring communities, stakeholders and movements together to address our most challenging problems.

It is a process for getting to a genuine agreement about how to move forward with any shared practical problem or disagreement. It’s particularly transformative with highly polarised issues, helping people find practical ways forward that address what really matters to everyone involved, in an efficient way. CF has helped people in a range of contexts around the World reach creative solutions to complex challenges, where no-one loses or is left behind. The principles of CF can enhance any kind of group facilitation and collaboration.

If you work with groups, organisations, communities or diverse stakeholders trying to make the World a better place, CF could make a big difference to your ability to:

• Find what is important to everyone in a group in a way that brings people together, even when that might seem impossible
• Support a group to come up with creative ways of fulfilling all the needs people have for a solution, in a meaningful way
• Check carefully for any concerns and actively engage with disagreement about any proposals or ideas, and respond by improving solutions until everyone can genuinely say yes to them
• Engage with imbalances of power and group dynamics, facilitating real collaboration
• Help groups move forwards in clear, effective ways

Where might you apply CF? & Who is this course for?

We are keen to offer this training to people who have a clear context to put their learning into practice, and in particular to people who are actively engaged in:

Participatory/Deliberative Democracy (e.g. People’s Assemblies, Citizen’s Assemblies, etc.) Community Organising Progressive Social Movements - trying to build a world that’s sustainable and works for all Mediation, Conflict Resolution, Collaborative Facilitation, etc.

What will the course involve?

This course will run over 5 weeks in November and December 2024, online. It will involve watching the 4 recordings of the March course by Paul and Verene (roughly 1.5hr each), participating in or observing a live demo by Paul (optional, 90mins), participating in 2hr-weekly Q&A and practice sessions based on the March course recordings, and joining a Q&A session with Aimee Ryan (optional, 90mins) to explore how she used CF to facilitate a major decision-making process in the area of pest management in California.

It’s entirely possible to take part in the course and not join Paul’s live demo and/or Aimee’s Q&A session. Recordings of these 2 events will be available for registered participants. Attendance to all live practice sesssions is highly recommended. Unless you took part in the March course, we have a high threshold request that you watch the relevant March course’s recording before joining the weekly Q&A and practice session you’ve signed up for.

Those sessions will consist of a brief recap of each session’s content, space for Q&A and practice in small groups.

Other CF facilitators might join the weekly live sessions to support Verene, Paul and participants.

After this Course

We are working on a new amazing coaching offering, that involves scenario based role-playing, facilitation and live coaching of the person facilitating by an experienced Convergent Facilitaton coach. We imagine this to be a very potent way to experiment with, practice and get immediate feedback on applying Convergent Facilitation process and principles. Besides that, we invite you engage with other learnerns and practitioners in our Community of Practice.

About Paul, Verene, and Aimee

Paul Kahawatte

Paul is a highly experienced mediator, facilitator and trainer, who has worked extensively in supporting people through conflict, collaborative decision making and the development of collaborative systems. Paul is one of the World’s leading practitioners of Convergent Facilitation, as well as mediation based in Nonviolent Communication (NVC). He draws on numerous other approaches in his work, including Restorative Circles, Aikido, Focusing, Relational Neuroscience and many others. He has worked doing mediation and facilitation in community and social movement contexts, as well as work in the field of deliberative democracy, and has run trainings in the UK, Sri Lanka, USA, Bangladesh and several European Countries. Paul was the lead trainer for the March 24 course.

Verene Nicolas

Verene is an experienced facilitator and certified trainer in Nonviolent Communication. She has delivered training and facilitated group decisions in many grassroots contexts. Her immersion in the Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL) community where CF is practiced daily gives her a deep grounding in the power of this approach to sustain ‘radical collaboration’ across differences of all sorts. Verene supported Paul in designing and delivering the March introductory course.

Aimee Ryan

Aimee Ryan is a Senior Facilitator at Ag Innovations, where she leads multi-stakeholder groups to collaboratively develop solutions that truly work for everyone. Aimee brings over a decade of facilitation, mediation and conflict transformation, and collaborative decision-making experience to her work supporting groups and complex change initiatives.

Learn more about Aimee here: https://aginnovations.org/about-us/ag-innovations-team/#toggle-id-6