Groups and Teams

Click here to speak with Laura about how she can help your team

I bring my Co-Active coaching skills, years of experience, and a wide variety of professional training to work with your group or team as a facilitator.

A good facilitator helps your group build stronger relationships, stay on track during meetings, openly discuss contentious issues, and reach consensus. By definition, a facilitator makes things easier.

I look at an outside facilitator as the person who guards the process – the group will bring the content and the ideas, and the facilitator can provide them with processes to explore the content and to reach agreement. An external facilitator is especially useful if the group is tackling an emotionally-charged issue, or if the leader has a position on the issue that might prevent his/her neutrality as a facilitator, or if the group feels “stuck” and an outside push can help the group get unstuck.

My expertise lies in designing and facilitating group events according to what the group (or leader) has identified is needed. Sometimes this means running a workshop on trust, or communication, or active listening. It might mean a workshop that helps the team get to know each other better and become closer as a group. Sometimes this means facilitating a visioning session, an idea-generating session, or a priority-setting session.

My approach is to work closely with the leader (or appointed group members) in advance, to find out what is needed, and then to design and run a workshop according to the identified needs.

I bring to my work six years working within non-profits (environmental, youth, and international development sectors), experience in public sector institutions (education, project coordination) and a wide variety of professional training in adult education, learning and personality styles, consensus-based decision-making, mediation, and anti-oppression theory.

Click here to contact Laura about working with your group

Clients:

My areas of specialty are the non-profit and social change sectors. Clients have included:

• the University of Toronto’s Leaders of Tomorrow Program
• the Youth, Development, and Peace Network – North America
• Engineers Without Borders Canada
• The Otesha Project
• the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation
• Canada25.

What clients say:

We had one goal to achieve, and in doing so, we had to bring together a hundred plus participants, from completely different backgrounds, with completely different objectives and ulterior motives, all the while operating in multiple conference formats. At the end of the day, I think we did just that, and really, it would have been far beyond impossible (think atomically impossible) without your intuitive, level-headed, calm and graceful facilitation.

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Laura was instrumental in creating a culture of better facilitation and appreciating and incorporating different learning styles. I personally am a better facilitator through Laura’s role modelling and coaching.

Click here to send me a note.
I’d love to talk with you about how can I be of service to your team

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