CFOR Series: Facilitating our Future

We (Jean-Claude and Arlene) began planning the ‘Facilitating our Future’ Series in September 2020. We had a sense of joy as we often had over the years, when working with a simple, yet far-reaching idea that felt right to us.

When Jean-Claude passed away, some of us from CFOR and Processwork UK discussed what we would do about this Series. It was scheduled to start early in 2021. We decided to go forward, but to postpone until October.

Even on the day JC passed away, he was talking passionately and clearly about the importance of continuing to gather and study… When the Series begins, it will be close to a year since Jean-Claude passed.

The ‘Facilitating our Future’ Series focuses on the importance of processing our history and its current impact, in order to increase our personal and collective awareness, so that we might facilitate our future.

This is the basic idea which underpins all of our work. We are all too aware that when there are no opportunities to process this history and its ongoing impact, we are activated and manipulated into polarisations and violent conflict. But, this is an opportunity. Where we do have personal and collective awareness or consciousness, there is a chance to ‘stop the world’, to not just fall into the replay of these polarisations, and into the nightmare of history. This is the link between our personal and collective awareness and consciousness. This is where facilitation, psychology, spirituality and social action meet.

The Series

The idea is to learn from the rich experiences of our colleagues, friends and students, who will share their practice and insights in relation to a range of essential themes, and from different parts of the world.

The idea is to foster learning and intense study among us – to share with one another, with students, practitioners, and interested participants.

These sessions will give us an opportunity to learn about an enormous range of historic and current issues, while focusing on shared dynamics of accountability and collective trauma and the role of community facilitation.

This will not only be a rich feast of learning about history and current dynamics concerning different themes and places. It is also a chance to learn about how ‘worldwork’ and ‘processwork’ methodology supports personal and collective awareness needed to interrupt cycles of violence, and to find creative pathways to our future. It also makes for a juicy way to study process dynamics, and process interventions, in relation to  a wide range of  different contexts.

First we had a great long list of themes and colleagues we wanted to invite.

Due to time limits, we needed to choose only a few. But, we have the idea that if this Series ends up being a good learning experience, we can extend it into a longer term project, and include more themes and places over time.

Each theme is also very wide. Each facilitator or facilitation team will choose how they would like to focus. The facilitators and teams are also encouraged to link their work in this series with their ongoing projects and future dreams.

As we reached out to invite some of our colleagues, friends and students about leading a session, we received very strong and immediate feedback. We are touched by the relationships, team work and shared vision that underpins our learning together.