Tools

To build organizations to scale, we need productive, engaging, and purposeful meetings that keep people coming back. The following tools and facilitator behaviors, organized around suggested goals, can be adapted for many purposes.

“Breakouts” or small group activities are a standard and versatile tool for in-person facilitation - and they’re part of our online facilitation toolkit, too! This video offers tips for setting up and running technically smooth online breakouts to help your group connect and do great work together.

In online spaces, our bodies often get left out or left behind, but they don’t have to! This video introduces theory, examples, and practical tips for bringing body-based activities into your online spaces.

“Brainstorming” goes beyond just making a list! This video helps facilitators lead online brainstorming activities that are effective, engaging, accessible, and secure. Tips include how to leverage online tools in ways that aren’t possible when brainstorming in-person.

How to set up many simultaneous one-on-one interactions in your online training group; great for skill-building, for applying a principle you've just taught, for community-building, or for raising individual awareness.

Online meetings and trainings connect people across geographical distances and engage people who might otherwise be excluded. However, access to reliable, high-speed internet varies widely. To lead inclusive and powerful online spaces, we must treat technology as an equity issue. As facilitators, we can’t control participants’ internet access, but we can use strategies to support connection and learning regardless of bandwidth. 

Getting help can be hard. It runs counter to many of cultural values: independence, individuality, personal control, self-help, competition, to name a few. Activists tend to focus on skills on help others – but spend less emphasis on our own development. Getting help is necessary. If we are to grow, learn, not burn-out, and win then we need help. In this tool we create some space and time for people to think through how can they continue to learn and get help.

COVID-19 has created new challenges for facilitators and educators. Across the globe, people are being asked to lead groups online: teachers, trainers, professors, event managers, organizers, activists. Jeanne Rewa and Daniel Hunter swiftly wrote this booklet for this moment. Download free ebook or purchase print copies.

If you are used to training or facilitating people in person and are asked to train or facilitate online or over the phone, you might understandably feel a bit nervous. The good news is that most of what you already know and do as a facilitator in person also applies online and over the phone. With an understanding of the challenges and opportunities of this different medium, you can adjust the tools and approaches you already use, resulting in engaging and effective trainings and meetings online and over the phone.

Just like in in-person gatherings, people may try to “crash” your online gatherings. Online tech tools also allow people to mess with your spaces in different ways.  This handout names some of the ways that people might crash your online gatherings and ways to avoid and address them.

Modify these slides to use for your own meetings or use them as inspiration to create your own! See the speaker notes on each slide for how to use them.

There are many different tech options available for your remote team meetings, and all have different pros and cons. Here are just a few of the options available, with some of their pros and cons.

Follow these guidelines to make your online meeting/training content as accessible as possible to people with a range of eyesight abilities and vision challenges.

Some quick tips and guides for using Zoom breakout room features.

Some quick tips and guides for using Zoom breakout room features.

Spectograms can be used in online meetings and trainings! This video explains what a spectogram is, reasons why you might use one with a group, how to set one up, and ten different variations on a spectogram for online.

Facilitating Group Learning, by George Lakey, TFC co-founder, is an essential book designed to help educators, trainers, and workshop leaders.

This activity we learned from Ouyporn Khuankeaw, a trainer in Thailand who most often works with village development workers, women leaders, monks and nuns, and NGO staff. She finds that popular education/experiential education is easier for participants to get the most out of if they understand that it is actually a different model from the prevailing teacher-centered model.

A favorite tool! Maximize/Minimize Learning is a powerful tool to help participants take responsibility for their own learning and identify personal strategies for them to make the most of the training. Given that people have been taught not to take ownership of their own learning, this tool helps people take that ownership back.

A quick tool for skill-building and practice, where everyone is involved. It's an elegant role-play format, one of our favorites, known as parallel lines (sometimes referred to as "hassle lines").

• desarrollar la habilidad de realizar actividades diferentes (tal como recabar fondos) • otorgar una nueva experiencia a los participantes (tal como la intervención no violenta)

This approach to strategizing serves bottom-up preferences in building social movements. In Starhawk's terms, it serves power-with rather than power-over, and is inherently democratic.

How to set up many simultaneous one-on-one interactions in your training group; great for skill-building, for applying a principle you've just taught, for community-building, or for raising individual awareness.

By creating a buddy system, facilitators can create an intentional support structure for participants, increasing the speed and depth of learning in the workshop.

Here's an alternative to lecturing about a topic when you want important information to be transmitted: have people find their own successful experience! This tool uses individual work, small groups and then large group to help the group access its own wisdom about a particular topic (you decide the topic based on the elicitive questions you use: fundraising, carrying out a successful protest, leading a group, overcoming a challenge).

We invented this in response to trainers asking us: what do you do with a group that is genuinely clueless about its racism (sexism/homophobia/ etc.)? We found it works with low-consciousness groups and has tremendous value for experienced activist groups, too.

Those who most benefit from oppression want to convince us that they have the power and we don't. Nonviolent activism requires understanding that -- thankfully -- all power does not reside in the government or in multinational corporate power. So here's a tool adapted from Theatre of the Oppressed that offers a new perspective on power.

What's a workshop without some games? Well.... anyways, here are some of our favorites gathered from training around the world. (also known as ice breakers, light and livelies)

Looking for fresh ideas for your closing circles? Here are some of our favorites that we have used with different groups! E-mail us with new closing circle favorites.

This activity is designed to provide participants with an opportunity to share information about themselves in a low-intensity activity and warm the group up for deeper conversations. It's also a great way to get the group energized!

Team types is a straightforward tool for participants to learn about themselves through identifying themselves within four different categories. These four types each represent different aspects of how people may operate in group settings.

A quick exercise to help groups get an example of "What is strategy?" (as opposed to tactics and vision). All that's needed for this tool: a group and a blanket!

When putting together a workshop or meeting, there is much to consider. One consideration is the curriculum: does the content of each activity build on the previous in logical ways? Another is the people and their knowledge, situation, and preparation: does the design respond to the psychological needs of the participants in order to access the content?

A roleplay is an improvised dramatic enactment of a problem situation in order to find new and creative ways to respond. This may be done in preparation for an anticipated situation or for evaluating a past one.

Now a kinesthetic way of getting into the concept of comfort zones: step in and step out. This tool can be placed early in a workshop as a way of concretizing the concept of comfort zones -- as a bonus, this tool is a way to both talk about comfort zones and simultaneously builds the container as people actually step outside of their comfort zones through personal self-disclosure.

Back by popular demand, Berit Lakey's "No Magic Method": guidelines that will go a long way toward helping your group to meet both joyfully and productively.

A fun game to support in starting conversations around campaign strategy by playing leapfrog- with a twist!

The intention of the diversity welcome is inclusion. It can be long or short. The more parts or aspects of what is present are named, the more the participants are likely to feel welcome in their diversity. It is a ritual, so don't be bothered by the repetitive phrasing. Take your time with it!

Going through this exercise can help you identify what tasks are essential to event planning and where there is opportunity for skill-building and leadership development. Follow the questions – when done you can appropriately delegate tasks or volunteer for roles based on a sense of the big picture, as well as the opportunities for skill building.

A tool from the field of adventure-based learning (ABL), puzzle squares is a group challenge that helps to look at leadership issues and communication within a team. The goal is simple enough -- create a square -- but the process elicits key conversation about how decisions get made in groups, and how to communicate effectively.

This tool is a quick, easy tool that is effective at helping groups understand the different roles in making groups work: different leadership skills. Its based on a piece of feminist theory that understands different leadership skills: Task and Maintenance.

Whenever a new group forms people are always curious: Who else is in the room? This kinesthetic exercise allows peoples curiousity to show up and to learn about who is in the room. And, does it in a way that gets people working together.

In cross-cultural groups (like multinational or multigeographical groups) we find it useful to bring that cultural diversity into the room as a resource. This tool can be an early tool to help acknowledge that cultural diversity.

Here's a challenging exercise for practicing making decisions and communication. We've used it successfully in a number of settings -- US, Thailand, Sierra Leone, Canada -- and with groups of six people to over seventy! It's best for a middle-sized group -- around 15-25 people. In this adventure-based learning activity the challenge is fairly simple: to walk as a group from one place to another. The twist: the group must walk all in one line together with their feet touching their neighbors' feet the whole time

The simplest tool for cultural difference you'll ever lead! It's almost too simple to be it's own tool, but it works. The exercise: do a go-around where each person shares their full name and where it comes from. In a group from many countries and with wide cultural difference this inevitably opens up a whole field of difference. It's an easy, low-risk tool. Yet it can be powerful.

This tool is built to provide a group challenge and support in building team work. Scenario: Two people's movements in Mexico are growing rapidly in adjoining regions separated by a shallow river. The movements need to learn from each other how to deal with the repression from the armed forces. They agree to exchange teams of experienced people for a month so this mutual education can take place. Actually making the exchange, however, is highly dangerous because it means crossing the narrow river which has turned poisonous from polluting factories upstream. And the crossing must be made in the minutes between navy patrols which go down the river regularly. Can your entire team cross the river safely before the patrol comes?

Groups can love sharing stories of their worst meetings! Here participants get to act out the worst meeting ever, and then what a good meeting looks like. It's light and playful, and a great way to get into a discussion about how to make group meetings work well.

Picture this: a group of activists who’ve been planning a direct action come together for a regular meeting. Tensions are high, because two members posted something on their e-mail list that offended a potentially key ally. At this meeting, the group has to decide, by consensus, what to do about the incident, and reactions to the incident are split in several directions. It’s not an easy meeting.

As a facilitator, I am accountable to moving the group forward, not merely catering to the individual needs of the participants. By paying attention to what is “live” in a group and where it is at in its learning process, I can adjust my choices to emphasize points that will resonate the most.

We present some of the possibilities and limitations of using your B language as a trainer. As we get better at building broad-based social movement, multilingual spaces should become the norm, if they haven’t already, in our organizing. This reflection, stemming from our relatively limited experiences navigating between Spanish and English, is but a small part of the practice needed to recognize language as an intrinsic part of our politics, our vision, our strategies for change.

Ground rules as widely practiced are poorly understood and are often a waste of time. At worst they are pious rituals of political correctness designed to enforce mainstream norms. Too many facilitators limit themselves to using ground rules when other tools might work much better. Here’s why.

Most agenda reviews are a ritualized reading of a written agenda. It may take as little as five minutes (or less!), with a few logistical questions. However, when done with intention, agenda reviews can build safety, set tone, build rapport – even begin working conflicts that might otherwise get in the way of the workshop. Here are a few vignettes that may expand your sense of possibilities to make the review count!

Increasingly, trainers are inviting participants to take active roles in trainings, having keyed into the limits of a lecture-only approach. As the popularity of engaged training grows, all training approaches that aren’t lecture can get lumped together. But when we look closely, we see that different non-lecture approaches actually have different learning results. That is, the learning is in the details!