About Facilitating Power

3.10_Transforming_Power.png Facilitating Power does not simply provide facilitation services. We partner with our clients to build a thriving culture of participation to advance community-driven solutions.

Rosa González is an educator, artist, and innovator dedicated to transformative social resiliency who has been active in helping to build the field for climate action and racial equity. She is the founder of Facilitating Power, a consultancy designed to cultivate, through deep partnership, the practice & pedagogy of a living democracy. She collaborates with organizations, agencies, and community leaders to transform the culture of community involvement in relevant planning and decision-making. She is the author of the National Association of Climate Resilience Planner’s Framework on Community-Driven Climate Resilience Planning. She also authored the Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership, which offers a framework to build pathways to strengthen and transform our local democracies across the US. Rosa is currently finishing her first book, SEED | HARVEST | WEAVE: Facilitative Leadership for a Living Democracy, which reflects on her over 25 years of experience in popular education and transformative facilitation to offer a practical handbook for community-based facilitators and organizers who want to deepen their knowledge and expand their strategies for community-driven leadership, planning, and governance. In addition to her work as a scholar of training and facilitation. Rosa earned a Masters in Latin American Studies from Stanford and a Masters in Education from the University of San Francisco. Still, work is guided by the lessons she takes from her deep commitment to the study of ancestral wisdom. Rosa is also a theater practitioner who has toured across the United States as a co-founder of the performance trio headRush whose mission was to activate new voices to advocate for educational equity, climate justice, and immigrant rights.

Notes about Approach

Facilitating Power workshops are based on concrete tools and frameworks that have been collaboratively developed and/or tested and reviewed by a range of equity practitioners. Participants gain content and insights from presentations on key tools. And yet, the workshops are not primarily didactic or content-heavy. Instead Facilitating Power uses a facilitative leadership approach, in which the tools and frameworks serve as springboards for dialogue among participants to assess their own contexts, and develop their own analyses of what is needed to move forward collaboratively towards shared goals and desired outcomes. Facilitating Power facilitators are highly skilled in creating the conditions for healthy dialogue, proactive analysis, solutions development, and leaning into generative tensions as needed. We use interactive methods that give groups the opportunity to simulate existing opportunities and challenges, tap into collective knowledge, and practice needed shifts in culture and practice to advance more equitable outcomes. The goal is not to provide people with the answers, but instead to create the conditions for the group to put forth their own answers. In this way, people develop solutions that are most relevant to their contexts, and have more ownership over their practice.

Core Values

We are dedicated to Community-Driven & Collaborative Leadership guided by:

INTERDEPENDENCE	INQUIRY	INNER STRENGTH	INTEGRATED POWER
Deep collaboration and mutuality between people and across systems	Conscious and consistent learning and awareness about the self, community, cultures, issues, and ecosystems	Space for people to develop emotional, intellectual, and spiritual fortitude needed to face and transform challenges	The capacity to affect change at the intersection of economic, cultural, personal and political power

Facilitative Leadership

A facilitative leader cultivates balance, giving equal attention to process and product. The skills of facilitating power fall into three clusters: Seeding, Harvesting, and Weaving. Together they form a comprehensive approach to facilitating collective action and transformation:

SEED

To seed is to 1) embody the values of your vision, and 2) consciously select and design structures and processes that embody the vision, values and purpose of a given effort

HARVEST

To harvest is to listen deeply to insights generated by a group that can expand awareness and help move the group to the next stage of their development. The goal is not to capture everything but rather to listen through a conscious filter for those pieces of knowledge and understanding most connected to the deeper purpose that has brought the group together.

WEAVE

To weave is to strategically synthesize the harvested insights into shared narratives that inspire the group to action and evolution.

Methodologies

There are two powerful methodologies that offer a wealth of tools for putting facilitative leadership into action in creative ways. When you combine facilitative leadership with Civic Theater and Popular Education methodologies, you are -- FACILITATING POWER...

Civic Theater: Interactive situation-based processes for critical dialog & informed action

Popular Education: Creative problem solving through praxis (theory x practice). Click here for Fundamental Practices of Popular Education for Community Organizing.

To connect around possible collaboration and other offerings, please contact: [email protected]

Testimonials

Rosa's facilitation approach has created space for me to dig deep for understanding the inequities in society, and to tap into my gifts to contribute to our community healing and justice efforts. While challenging her students, trainees, and audiences to critically analyze problems in our communities, she prompts us in generating solutions and actions that draw on our passion and collective power. She honors all perspectives and makes us feel comfortable to take risks and explore possibilities. Rosa doesn't empower us with the information and instruction, she empowers us with processes that guide us to find our own power and creativity for real, sustainable, community transformation work.

Gerardo Marin
Co-Director of Rooted in Community

Rosa is an incredible trainer and facilitator who combines skill and soul to create a transformative learning community at her trainings. The popular education techniques she uses both honor the collective wisdom of the group and help participants deeply understand the training content. As a colleague and co-trainer, Rosa was a pleasure to work with; eager to integrate new curricular elements and tailor training material to local realities.
Sean Thomas-Breitfeld
Co-Director of the Building Movement Project

Rosa's facilitation is transformative! She brings compassion, honesty and directness to her facilitation and these qualities help the group be focused on learning with integrity. Rosa also contextualizes subjects and learning in history and systemic realities so that we can feel the impact of what we are learning and be able to apply it on our lives. As a queer woman of color this is particularly relevant to my feeling supported and safe as a learner.
Carolina Morales
Interventions Director Communities United Against Violence

Rosa helped us take our curriculum to the next level by showing us how to incorporate tools that open up the room for people to really connect on a human level.
Heather Box
Founder The Million Person Project

See more testimonials.