Facilitation is the process of guiding and supporting a group’s time together in order to achieve specific outcomes. Like the captain of a ship, facilitators steer the conversation, keep activities on track, and help everyone reach their goals by promoting teamwork and open, effective communication.
To us, facilitation is an extension of what we do best: unburdening the guest. Our Facilitation Services team is here to help you do the best possible work in the best possible way while you’re with us. We want to help your team achieve meaningful results and create a collaborative space for participants to explore all possibilities, which is atypical of the meetings most of us encounter in a work environment.
So, what does a successful facilitation look like at the Institute? What counts as a win? Our own facilitators are here to tell you about it.
Payton Christenberry
Associate Director of Programs“For any facilitation completed by the Institute, we like to produce a final report for the client. With some third-party facilitations, you’ll get notes from the room, and you have to work with what you can parse out of that. We try to take it to a higher level and create a story, which I love. Our reports show how you came in, the problems you described, the ideas you proposed, where you ended up at the end of the day, and how you can take everything to the finish line and achieve the desired goal. Everything about our facilitation method, like the Rockefeller Ethic, is a participatory and collaborative process. It’s not just a meeting. It’s a journey that we all go on together.”
Meghann Ray
Senior Program Officer“At the end of these facilitations, someone invariably says, Wow, I didn’t think we could get to this on our own, or, Wow, this really changed my thinking! This team takes great pride in being the experts in helping you get the most out of your meetings. We’re not the experts on the specific problem at hand, but experts in helping you get to a solution that works best for your needs. Getting you to what you want is ultimately the best feeling.”
Molly Thomason
Education & Evaluation Officer“The root word of facilitation means to make easy, and our ultimate goal is to make problems easier for participants to understand and solve. There’s a moment in almost every facilitation where the group starts to ‘get it,’ and it all makes sense to them. Once you’ve reached that point, as a facilitator, you can almost just sit back and watch. To be able to see our work make that happen is a wonderful experience.”
Aaron Keith Kennard
Program Officer“I love it when I look around the room and every space of wall and whiteboard is covered in charts and sticky notes. It represents so many ideas that the group was able to create together. Our facilitation team designs and creates spaces for these ideas to be shared. We’re the ones charting, putting the sticky notes up, and ensuring the environment stays conducive to collaboration. There’s so much value in seeing that, both for me and the participants.”
Kimberly Bolin
Program Officer“For me, it’s when I see participants smiling and laughing with each other. The people we work with often don’t know each other or have never worked in the same room with each other, especially when it comes to our Institute programs. Seeing that means a connection has been built. We’re guiding participants through these different exercises that may have silly names or initiating dialogues completely new to them, but every single person ultimately leaves having shared in something that didn’t exist before.”
In the past year, we have provided over 3,000 hours of facilitation services to more than 500 participants. Our facilitators come from a wide variety of backgrounds and are well-trained to use a variety of meeting design and facilitation techniques to help you and your group be successful. Some of the places we have honed our expertise include:
- Essential Partners Dialogue Training
- Training from Facilitator & Executive Coach Barry Goldberg
- Facilitation courses taught by the Clinton School of Public Service
- Public deliberation training from the Kettering Foundation
- Community and economic development through the University of Central Arkansas’s Community Development Institute (CDI Central)
- Program evaluation through the Arkansas Public Administration Consortium (APAC)
It would be an honor to welcome your team to the Institute to take advantage of our professional facilitation services and enjoy all that Petit Jean Mountain has to offer, but our nimble team can also travel to your location or facilitate virtually. Please submit the form below if you would like a member of our team to reach out to you!
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