Our partnership and project was born out of a shared desire and commitment to build a community around facilitation, as a way to advance social justice.

This project, funded by a Research Practice Partnership Grant from the Spencer Foundation,  brings together skilled community facilitators and organizations working in community arts, health and harm reduction, adult education, youth engagement and activism, community organizing, community-based or engaged research, and more.

Through a collaborative approach, we co-designed our research together, as guided by the following questions: 

  1.  How do our commitments and values shape our facilitation practice? How is our facilitation practice accountable? And to whom is our facilitation practice accountable? 

  2. Why do we facilitate the way we do? How do we make visible these facilitation practices? 

  3. How does our facilitation approach change depending on who we’re working with and for? How do we build relationships across and within difference(s)?

  4. How does our lived experience and positionality inform and shape our facilitation practice? And how does our facilitation practice shape our lived experience?

Community partners on this project include the Righting Relations,Neighbourhood Arts Network, Women and HIV/AIDS Initiative, and the Community Engaged Research Initiative at Simon Fraser University. The grant is held at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, by Dr Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández, and co-led by Dr Sarah Switzer, at the Centre for Community Based Research. In everything we do, we strive to adopt a non-hierarchical collaborative model of shared leadership.