Five Fold Path: The Craft of Skillful Facilitation
The Five Fold Path
The Craft of Skillful Facilitation
February 12th to March 12th, 2025
Learn the tools of effective group process and skillful facilitation.
“Meetings: love them, hate them, but the work of the world cannot get done without them. The time, thought, effort and training we invest on making our meetings positive and productive will be well-rewarded by greater connection, satisfaction and productivity throughout our organizations.” -Starhawk
ABOUT THIS COURSE
Meetings are the heart of any organization. We get together in meetings for many reasons: to discuss issues, make decisions, set priorities and respond to crises. In meetings, we learn who our colleagues are, and decide whom we can trust. We may laugh, cry, rage, love and comfort one another, while dealing with the business at hand.
Productive meetings allow an organization to move forward, keep members engaged and give them a sense of empowerment and efficacy. Meetings can be cauldrons of group creativity or occasions of intimate sharing. And, of course, they can also be long-winded, fruitless, pointless arenas of frustration. The difference is often what makes or breaks a group.
Come learn the keys to effective facilitation for successful groups.
COURSE CONTENT
- Setting a safe and welcoming tone/meeting: Gain tools in setting up a physical space, setting an agenda, and creating a space where everyone feels they can show up and engage.
- Choosing the right process for the issue: Learn various techniques for visioning, fostering group creativity and participation, speaking from the heart, and decision-making.
- Working with conflict: Learn how good facilitators encourage constructive conflict — open disagreement about ideas, plans, and policies that never descends to the level of personal attack. When the group becomes deadlocked in a conflict, learn the tools for transformation so the group can move on.
- Communication: To function well, collaborative groups must pay rigorous attention to communication. Meetings are a key place where communication happens, so developing the tools of healthy group communication is key to success.
- Getting the right people in the room: Becoming aware of who needs to be part of the discussion at hand, who needs to weigh in on the decisions being made, and who needs to be informed of them.
- Developing a palette of facilitation tools: Facilitators do not direct nor control the group, but serve at its pleasure. Learn how to present topics, set the pace, maintain a productive tone, promote equity among members, summarize the conversation, cheer the group on, as well as how to reframe sticky issues.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
COURSE INFORMATION
- Location: Virtual
- Dates: February 12th – March 12th (5 weeks)
- Timing: Wednesday 6:00-8:00 pm PST
- Helpful Tool: Time Zone Converter
- Taught by Starhawk and Charles Williams
- All live sessions are recorded and closed-captioned.
- Access to resources, documentation, and recorded class content in the virtual classroom.
PAYMENT
- We are dedicated to making our courses as accessible as possible by offering:
- Early Bird tuition: $280!
- Sliding scale tuition: $300-$350
- Four-part payment plans: $75 at registration with 3 monthly payments of $75.
- Alumni tuition: $100 to retake this course.
- Amounts are in US dollars.
SCHOLARSHIPS & DISCOUNTS
- Group discounts and Diversity Scholarships available? Yes!
- See below for details.
QUESTIONS?
We are here for you. Reach us at: support@earthactivisttraining.org
MEET Your Teachers
Starhawk (she/her) is the co-founder and executive director of Earth Activist Training. One of the foremost voices in Earth-based spirituality, Starhawk is an author, activist, and permaculture teacher and designer. Her 12 books include such beloved reads as The Spiral Dance, The Earth Path, and The Fifth Sacred Thing. Starhawk drew from 30 years of living collectively to write The Empowerment Manual, which is the basis for her social permaculture course, Empowering Collaborative Groups.
Starhawk has been recognized by the Permaculture Institute of North America (PINA) as a leading figure in permaculture, and has been awarded dual diplomas for excellence in education and permaculture site design.
Best known as an articulate voice in the revival of Earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion, Starhawk is the co-founder of the Reclaiming movement, an activist branch of the modern Pagan religion. In partnership with Donna Read, Starhawk is the co-founder of Belili Productions film company, whose most well-known project was a trio of popular films on the Goddess religion.
Starhawk’s work in progressive activism has spanned generations and geographies. As a global justice and peace activist, Starhawk co-founded RANT: Root Activists’ Network of Trainers, and has taught non-violent direct action across North and South America, Europe, and the Middle East. She has been on the front lines of anti-nuclear actions at Diablo Canyon, Livermore Weapons Lab, Vandenberg Air Force Base, and the Nevada Test Site. She has been a witness for peace in conflict zones across the world, including Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Palestine and Israel.
As a teacher of magical activism and permaculture education, Starhawk’s life work takes her across the globe. She currently lives part-time in San Francisco in a collective house with her partner and friends, and part-time in a little hut in the woods in Cazadero, California, where she practices permaculture in her extensive gardens and writes. Her website is http://starhawk.org.
Charles Williams (he/him) is Earth Activist Training’s program director. A long-time permaculture educator and certified permaculture designer, Charles comes to Earth Activist Training through a love of the wild, faith that healthy communities can solve complex problems, and a belief that working with one’s hands is sacred work.
Over the past thirty years, he has stewarded many pieces of land, including Diana’s Grove in Missouri, Farm & Wilderness summer camp in Vermont, and Starhawk’s Golden Rabbit Ranch in California. His approach simultaneously promotes both the preservation of wild spaces and conservation of the domestic.
His deep respect for and relationship with the divine in nature informs all he does, integrating spiritual practices with land management. Charles also understands the need for healthy community, and knows that skilled human implementation is an essential part of any design. In these challenging times, he finds hope for the future through the interlocking, symbiotic relationship of spirit, community, and action.
As an accomplished tinkerer, Charles brings a wide range of practical and somewhat obscure hand skills. He has installed complex systems such as solar electric arrays, gray water filters, and veggie oil diesel conversions. He has implemented simple systems such as emergency water filtration, humanure composting toilets, and rotational grazing plans. He is talented in wilderness tracking, solo canoeing, gathering and tending wild edibles, starting fire by hand, and mapping. He loves to work with his hands, whether he is tanning hides or repairing a generator, and this love is reflected when he teaches EAT’s hands-on segments.
Charles believes that no problems are unsolvable as long as we work together to develop and implement our plan effectively and honor the holy in our work.
