NACRP Facilitator's Certification Program for Community-driven Planning

Last year, in partnership with the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners (NACRP), which is convened by the People's Climate Innovation Center, we launch a facilitator's certification program for community-driven planning. Our goal is to grow our collective capacity across our movements and communities to facilitate community-driven planning projects to address the impacts of the climate crisis and other social, economic, and political crises. Waiting for public planning or corporate solutions has consistently left impacted communities dependent, displaced, and disenfranchised. Community-driven planning on the other hand, brings affected community members together to develop shared visions, solutions, and power-building strategies. Facilitating Power designs the curriculum and leads on facilitation of this first-of-its-kind program. Our first cohort of organizers and community-based facilitators launched in 2023 experienced and demonstrated the power of facilitative leadership approaches to community change.  

This year, we launch the 2nd annual cohort of the facilitator certification program with organizers and community-based facilitators from throughout the country seeking to deepen their practice of community-driven planning. In designing this program, our intention is to practice not only bottom-up approaches to planning, but bottom-up approaches to certification at well. The program is grounded in the principles & practices of popular education; cohort members tap into their own community knowledge and learn from each other as much as they learn from the lead trainers; and they are evaluated not by the program leads, but by the community members who participate in the planning process.

To complete their certification, cohort members will:

• Attend an in-person training to forge relationships with the rest of the cohort and collectively prepare to co-design their planning projects with their communities, using popular education methods
• Participate in 8 monthly online learning sessions organized around Facilitating Power's framework for facilitative leadership: SEED HARVEST WEAVE
• Provide and receive peer coaching to support each other's growth as facilitative leaders who are accountable to their communities, and to troubleshoot challenges as they arise
• Be evaluated by community members who participate in their community-driven planning processes using an evaluation process and tool developed by Facilitating Power
• Write a blog about their experience facilitating a community-driven planning project and their lessons learned through the process