Gathering Well: Creating Community at Work - Option 1

PROGRAM SUMMARY

What does it mean to create, be in, long for, perhaps resist, and steward community? How does our relationship to and practice of being in community show up in our work contexts, whether it be in person, online, or a hybrid of both? In this session, we’ll experience some ways of gathering online that we hope make meaningful conversation, reflection, discernment, boundary setting, and listening possible. We’re especially curious to centre equity, access, distributed power, and interrogate dominant culture and hierarchy in our time with you. 

AUDIENCE

All AAPS members are warmly invited to gather together to experience, contribute to, and reflect on gathering well, what it means to work as community, and to consider our work as community building. Not sure if this session is right for you? Please contact sarah.muff@ubc.ca.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

We hope more than anything you have an experience of a great community-building gathering with fellow AAPS members. You may also expect to leave with:

• Possible facilitation structures that can adapt to multiple contexts for gathering well
• Ways to disrupt how dominant culture expects and conditions us to be in community and gatherings
• A sense of excitement and possibility that we can gather and build community well online while also tuning in to in-person and hybrid settings 
• Ideas and tools that you can take back to your team

HOW YOU WILL LEARN

• Zoom meeting platform
• Solo reflection
• Meaning-making conversations and responsive listening in small break-outs
• Harvesting and sharing insights without ‘reporting back’ 

PARTICIPATION

ABOUT YOUR FACILITATORS

Keira and Zsuzsi met in June 2015 on the territories of the Lheidli T’enne over a campfire. It was one of those moments where we immediately knew we had found “our people” in one another and have been in deep partnership ever since. We’ve had the joy and responsibility of working since then with folks across the stolen Indigenous territories of so-called “BC” through our shared facilitation and adaptive/emergent strategy practice.

We’re guided by the brilliance of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy and many Liberating Structures and Adaptive Strategy communities of practitioners. We also share a commitment to a lifetime of fumbling our way towards anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and dismantling white supremacy culture in ourselves and the work we do. 

A little bit more about Zsuzsi…

Zsuzsi Fodor (she/her) is a white woman of French and Hungarian Jewish ancestry. She’s recently uninvitedly settled on the territories of the Snuneymuxw People. Along with being a facilitation nerd, Zsuzsi is rooted in food justice community and practice and has woven in and out of working in/with higher ed, public health, colonial government, non-profit, and community organizing for the last 15 years. She will always say yes to going to a drag or burlesque show and has been known to squeal at the sight of salmon runs returning home.

A little bit more about Keira…

Keira McPhee (she/they) is a white woman of Scottish, English, and Irish ancestry, currently living way on the other coast in beautiful Mi’kmaqi (Nova Scotia). They’ve just completed training as a psychotherapist building on 30 years of counselling and facilitation working in higher ed, government, and community organizations enacting food and land justice. She dreams in sci-fi, grows unruly gardens, plays and dances to weird (according to her son) and wonderful music of many genres.