Services
facilitation
(I (Justin) use a pedagogical or teaching and learning style of facilitation intended to help organizations, coalitions, and groups address questions of power, class struggle and political analysis of the conditions they are facing. I support people to move through a day long meeting, weekend retreat or more involved process. I rely on dialogue and questions to surface knowledge, build consensus, identify contradictions, as well as areas where greater clarity is needed. I have experience working in conflictual spaces as well as rooms where a few people are taking up a lot of space. I follow the engagement with a closing summary outlining potential issues to explore further and pointing out contradictions that could serve as a basis for future work.
strategic planning
I support organizations with the creation of strategic interventions or the testing of a particular idea that represents a potential shift in strategy. These kinds of processes are shorter in duration in terms of the development of the intervention and then we return for touch points throughout the process. This kind of work can help to refine the mission because it lets us create a strategy intended to get feedback from the current time, place and conditions, which can then allow further refining. Whether formulated in a 1-2 day process or a 2-4 month process, I help organizations answer such questions as who is the intended beneficiary of the work? What is the theory behind the work? What are the larger social dynamics/class forces that impact the work? What ideas and tactics do you want to test and how will you know if it is successful? The answers to these kinds of questions are at the heart of strategy.
program reflection
Too often, without the pressure of the settler capital class via a funding entity, we don’t reflect on our work and what it is and is not accomplishing. How well is it aligned with what we set out to accomplish when we began? Are the goals we set out initially the ones that we need today. I support organizations in reflecting on their work with participatory processes or where I collect and analyze the data. Every effort is made to keep the process as short as possible, only focusing on the key questions.