The mosaic of facilitation

Community facilitation; putting the pieces together

Community Works has facilitated nearly two hundred workshops over the last twelve years. This equates to a lot of experience of what works and what doesn’t. More importantly, it shows how our partners and clients organise their projects. They commonly include some kind of process that brings people together to learn, to tackle a problem, to share information, to design a program or to explore different perspectives on a subject.

Most of the workshops we have facilitated have involved community people, local, non-government or civil society organisations participating in a social, economic, health or education initiative. The approach we have developed is highly participatory and designed for people who do not necessarily spend much of their lives thinking or talking about projects in workshop settings.

We call this approach community facilitation. It is made up of a mix of methods and techniques for working with people, most of which start with an outline plan for the process and then respond to what people in the group say or do. We have found that there is not a recipe for facilitation that can be provided in the form of a manual. Instead, we see community facilitation as a set of pieces. Let’s call them tiles. When applied in the right way, they come together to create a picture. This is the mosaic of effective community facilitation. This guide is designed as an introduction.