2025 Cohort of Facilitators Certification in Community-Driven Planning

In April 2025, two dozen community organizers and community-based facilitators from across the country came together in Atlanta Georgia to kick-off the 3rd cohort of the NACRP Facilitator Certification Program in Community-Driven Planning.

Each member of the cohort has a peer coach, someone within the program who they build a deeper relationship with, who has significant knowledge of the unique realities of their community, and who can be a supportive sounding board as they design and facilitate community-driven planning processes around the issues that directly affect their people. 

During the in-person training in ATL, which is followed by monthly virtual sessions, we focused on building connections to each other and to the practice of community-driven planning strong enough to sustain their participation over the next nine months. We explored the principles and practices of facilitative leadership and popular education as core methodologies for fostering community vision, community power, and community-driven solutions. Folks collaborated to design and facilitate exercises for one another grounded in relationship-building, tapping into community wisdom and expertise, cultivating critical consciousness and liberatory power

Over the course of the monthly sessions we will explore visioning, consensus-building, creative methods for harvesting community insights, priority setting, solutions development, power-building, and weaving community insights into a coherent plan. In the next several months, we will be excited to share reflections from cohort members and their stories of the processes they are facilitating in their own communities.