Equitable Facilitation: Tips, Tricks, and Tools
This blog post is co-authored by Anvi Mridul and Rebecca Perlmutter.
“Before we begin, I want to acknowledge the power dynamics created by virtue of me leading this meeting. I also want you to know that while I would like this to be a safe space, I recognize this is a brave space, and I deeply appreciate your courage and candidness throughout this process”. This is how one of our Co-interim Directors, Virginia Roncaglione, opened our meeting as we started our collaborative work to create more equitable decision-making structures and processes and mainstream equity across Innovation Network. Our powerful and ongoing transformation is motivated by our team’s commitment to walk the talk as practitioners and individuals. Equity is one of the core values of our organization and we make conscious efforts to incorporate it into our practice.
We believe that equity will help us move away from an evaluation approach traditionally focused on numbers and impact without providing context, accounting for less tangible outcomes and growth, and broadening our definition of what success looks like to participants and community members. Instead, equitable evaluation is designed to support learning and improvement of the projects we are evaluating. In this way, equitable evaluation can challenge power structures, encourage participant ownership, and build collective power. One of the ways to incorporate equitable evaluation is through equitable facilitation of meetings.
Equitable facilitation enables us to collect diverse and comprehensive perspectives, data, and feedback that can otherwise be silenced by the loudest or most powerful voices in the room. Equitable facilitation can also help us achieve stronger processes and projects because the perspectives that we gather affect the focus of our project and everything we do afterward. As individuals and practitioners, our team strongly believes in the importance of incorporating equity in our daily lives and work.
As we continue to explore this method, we want to share some insights–tips, tricks, and tools– we have collected along the way that have helped us facilitate with intention and equity.
1) Understand, acknowledge, and mitigate the power structures and imbalances that may be present during facilitation efforts.
As our Co-Interim Director modeled, setting the stage can be a good way to acknowledge power structures. Explicitly recognizing the context and power imbalances that exist in the room helps address some discomfort and create a more honest and transparent space. In our experience, when those with more power, like foundations, frame the conversations to invite open feedback, it allows for more authentic engagement from the other participants.
While developing a meeting agenda, we think about who will be invited into the space, and how the power dynamics in the room may affect the contributions or answers to the questions posed. A trick we’ve often used to mitigate power dynamics is to have grantee-only spaces. Having a funder in the room when conversations about progress on outcomes or challenges are going on may limit the ability of some participants to provide their honest opinions. When this is not possible, we make conscious efforts to provide activities or spaces where those with the least power can fully engage. A tool that is particularly helpful in this effort is the breakout groups feature for online meetings. Using tools that introduce anonymity in your session can help ensure people feel safe sharing their opinions and elicit more honest feedback. In these cases, we create Google Jamboards, Murals, Padlets, or Mentimeters where we use the online equivalent of post-its, providing time for participants to answer questions and write down their thoughts without them being attached to an individual or organization. This provides opportunities for those who need time to process and takes away some of the fear of negative repercussions. In other instances, we have invited cohort members to facilitate breakout conversations with their peers, rather than an evaluator who could disrupt the dynamic and conversation.
It can be helpful to host different focus groups for different types of participants, allowing for those in different positions in an organization to freely provide opinions and feedback.
2) Humanize the process. In our practice, this shows participants that we appreciate their time and participation and understand the burden meetings may create.
Some tricks to humanize this process are to include participants in meeting agenda and timing decisions, provide a clear agenda, and provide spaces without cameras (in virtual meetings).
When we include participants in the decisions behind what topics will be included in the agenda and when meetings will take place, participants are encouraged to take ownership and participate more actively. Recognizing their agency within the process, shows how we, as evaluators, value their time and the burden our additional meeting requests may create. It can also help us create more equitable projects that challenge traditional hierarchies and value participants. While including many parties in the scheduling process can be challenging, there are some tools that help simplify the process. We’ve used Doodle, When2Meet, and WhenIsGood. While all are slightly different, these tools will help you find overlaps in the availability of participants and select the most popular time for your meeting.
Once the meeting is organized, it’s helpful to share the purpose and goals of the conversation, along with a defined agenda prior to the meeting so participants are informed and expectations are clear. Despite having a set agenda, we prepare to be flexible to accommodate additional agenda items that may come up at the beginning of each meeting, and try to recognize what parts of the conversation are inspiring more curiosity or energy, and adapt our focus to meet the needs and interests of participants.
For us, flexibility also means recognizing that while having cameras on can help us check the levels of engagement, people may have different situations that preclude them from turning on their cameras, especially at home and surrounding care responsibilities. And don’t forget to provide bio breaks, especially in sessions over an hour!
3) Strive to create trust by being forthcoming about expectations and objectives throughout your facilitation.
To establish trust, and create safer spaces, we like to start meetings by setting out community norms. These can be co-created with a quick brainstorm and carried over for future conversations. Some community norms we like include: have grace for people’s long days and other extenuating circumstances, avoid interrupting each other, it’s okay to have pauses or silences, acknowledge and respect that we come to these conversations with different experiences, and call in, rather than call out.
Another trick to create trust is to openly acknowledge and respect each individual’s situation. A way to do this is to always assume the best intentions, and hold back any judgment. When receiving comments, we also make a point to genuinely thank the speaker for their courage in speaking out and contribution to the conversation.
4) Follow an appreciative inquiry approach to encourage participants to reflect on their work and opinions from a strength-based perspective.
An appreciative approach has been particularly helpful for us in facilitating conversations, such as focus groups for data collection because participants stop thinking about what is missing and reflect on what helps them thrive. In a field overly focused on deficits, it is helpful to use this when funders are in the room and reduce pressure on grantees or evaluees. In some of our most creative data collection sessions, we have encouraged participants to respond to our questions by creating a collage of text, photos, and graphics to give them the space to visualize their responses and identify supports they need from a place of strength. This way we introduce a growth mindset, where evaluation participants can acknowledge the things they are good at, recognize where they are thriving, and help us create conditions to do forward-facing visioning.
While these are some tips, tricks and tools we use within our practice, our path to becoming more equitable facilitators is ongoing. We also recognize that there is no one size fits all approach, so it is important to understand the differences in context and how this can call for different approaches to equitable facilitation.
As we continue to learn and reflect on our path toward a more equitable evaluation practice, we recognize we do not have all the answers and are still exploring how to improve every day. We would love to hear your advice, or how you implement any of these suggestions. Please let us know the challenges you or your team face as practitioners, or other tips, tricks, and tools we may have missed!
You can also check out our August Evaluation Highlights for more helpful resources on this topic.
