Listening Circles Facilitator Training

NOTE: We are looking for Northside residents facilitators for a training in late 2018/ early 2019. Please send Lisa an email if you’d like to know more or apply.

Do you want to be a part of helping people who come from different backgrounds and have opposing beliefs have better conversations with each other?

The Center for Community Stewardship (C4CS) invites you to become a Dialogue Circle Facilitator. In this training, you’ll learn tools and techniques to serve as a facilitator for small groups having productive and respectful conversations about challenging topics like policing, politics, gun control, and other topics.

Then you’ll be invited to practice these skills by serving as a facilitator for a series of Police & Resident dialogues circles (and other topics as opportunities arise).

Facilitators who have completed the training and two observation/ practice facilitation sessions will receive a small stipend each time they facilitate.

C4CS will be partnering with the Frank Zeidler Center for Public Discussion out of Milwaukee, who will be leading this training. The Zeidler Center has ten years of experience helping communities and organizations have challenging conversations in the Milwaukee area and internationally. We are working with the Zeidler Center to plan Police/Resident listening circles somewhere in the Dane County area, modeled after Zeidler’s work successfully holding these types of dialogues in Milwaukee.

Seeking Facilitator Trainees

We are recruiting 15 Northside community members who wish to be trained as facilitators. Training will take place in late 2018/early 2019 and will include lunch. You do not need to have any background in facilitation – you just need to be comfortable facilitating instead of participating in a conversation, taking notes, and redirecting participants when they depart from the group conversation agreements. We are particularly interested in having a diverse set of facilitators of varying ages, races, ethnicities, and professional backgrounds who are representative of our community.

If you would like to know more about the Zeidler Center’s training, you can click here. (Please don’t sign up on this page, but it will give some useful information about similar trainings they conduct in Milwaukee)

If you are interested in general facilitation training, please sign up for our newsletter to be kept in the loop about upcoming Facilitation and Collaborative Meetings workshops.