Creating A Safe Space For Honest Conversations

facilitation

Lenspeace turns a lens on our relationships to ourselves, each other, and the planet. With all the cultural discussion surrounding mental health, community inclusion, global environmental concerns, and social responsibility, everyone is grasping at ways to have honest conversations that build inspired teams with impactful projects across ideological differences. An outside facilitator can save time, money, and energy when navigating these challenging discussions.

My practice in strategic facilitation is centered in the understanding that we are all unique perspectives falling on a spectrum of identity and experience. Each session is designed to build empathy, foster clear group communication, and simplify the process of socially sustainable creativity. I draw wisdom from collaborating professional psychotherapists, wellness practitioners, performance artists, sustainability designers, service designers, communications and ux designers, identity designers, creative directors, writers, witches, wizards, and unicorns.

My goals are to inspire inclusive and impactful outcomes for complicated problems. I collaborate and co-facilitate with and array of working professionals to balance the discussion and my skillset when necessary.

To help create a safe space we must be willing to:

The point of this work is to discover alignment and shared truths, while coming to agreeable outcomes together. No one person should dominate the perspective, discussion, or the emotional energy of the room, as we seek to honor that we are all humans having these experiences with input on the problems we share. We must each understand that creating a safe boundary for each of us allows us to show up to any room with authenticity and upholding those boundaries for shared safety are a responsibility of each of us during our time together.


The shared AGREEMENTS

I begin all of my sessions with what are called The Shared Agreements. A list of agreements can be created for every group of people working together. I’ve adopted the rules I learned from my friend and equity designer, Antionette Carroll at Creative Reaction Lab. These stand as the social contract to protect each person involved in the discussion and inspire vulnerable dialogue about hard topics. Getting past disagreement, creating space for underrepresented voices, learning to share power effectively, and weeding through ineffective processes often brings up complicated emotions as aspects of bias and ego are triggered. The work of social and creative change requires a lot of courage and humility, these agreements help to create the space for that growth to be possible, and for our work to reflect our values.

We created a timelapse video for the creation of our shared agreements poster print… you can watch the creative process of my most complicated handset type letterpress print to date.