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 in part by a Research Practice Partnership Grant from the Spencer Foundation,  brings together skilled community facilitators and organizations working in community arts, HIV and harm reduction, adult education, youth engagement and activism, anti-racist social movements, Indigenous Sovereignty, community organizing, community-based or engaged research, and more.

Organizational partners on this project include 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 University of Toronto, and it is Co-Directed by Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández, from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and Sarah Switzer, from the Centre for Community Based Research. In everything we do, we strive to adopt a non-hierarchical collaborative approach to leadership.

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?

  • “Building relationships with all of the incredible people involved in this project has been completely transformative. Over the past three years, it has been such a gift to have learned from so many brilliant colleagues and to work together to cultivate processes that are thoughtfully and intentionally grounded in values of care, justice, and equity.”

    Ally Crockford

  • “These three years, I have learned how facilitation is about intentional intimacy, which requires attentiveness to discomfort and a disposition to embrace it with care.”

    Andrea Vela-Alarcón

  • “Critical conversation and observation bring us together and connect us to a wider thread of understanding. The beauty of having creative and academics in dialogue is that we illuminate nuance, bring the unseen to the forefront, and build thoughtful spaces for understanding and collaboration.”

    Angie Aranda

  • “I have experienced such deep care and curiosity through my work on the data analysis, retreat planning, and report writing teams for this project – a project that is so collaborative in its intention and processes. Learning from what others have shared about their facilitation journeys has helped me take stock of my own experiences and reflect, with immense gratitude, the communities I have engaged with and learned so much from.”

    Annie Chau

  • “The most memorable part of the project for me was the in-person retreat in April 2025. This was my proper introduction to the project team members as someone who joined a little later on. I was met with so much warmth and left the retreat so filled, being able to immerse myself in a variety of arts-based and anti-racist/anti-oppressive considerations when thinking about facilitation. Thank you for this opportunity!”

    Asli Mahdi

  • “This project has made me think deeply about expectations and repair in community-engaged research, especially through the example of building collaborative relationships with other community-engaged facilitators that are grounded in reciprocity and care. Moments of repair and non-disposability were especially powerful when folks had different visions—choosing to mend relationships, and foreground curiosity about difference, rather than move on when challenges arose.”

    Casey Burkholder

  • “One of the most memorable moments of this project was hearing someone speak about realities and nuances of frontline facilitation that I’ve experienced but never found a way to voice. It felt like a moment of recognition around the complexities of this work, and the level of inner awareness and outer consciousness it requires of the facilitator themself.”

    Erin Howley

  • “She works hard for the money!”

    Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco

  • “The most memorable part of this project was the people I worked with - diverse in background and perspective, yet united in their commitment to community engagement. Collaborating and exchanging ideas with them deepened my understanding of community-engaged facilitation.”

    Hani Sadati

  • “The PeCEP project has been one of the most rewarding and challenging projects in my academic career. In this true “participatory” adventure, I am continually learning from and inspired by the wisdom of my fellow community-engage facilitators. At every turn, we encounter each other with generosity, candor, humility, and care, while holding each other accountable and being open to the shifts in practice that our work inspires.”

    Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández

  • “Finding supportive spaces to think deeply about facilitation, from an equity-informed frame is rare. Learning from others –including our team and a wider network of community-engaged facilitators has been an incredible experience. Together, we reconceived what collaboration looks like in practice. Our collaboration has stretched me, challenged me, lifted me up, soothed me, bolstered me, and enhanced my facilitation practice ten-fold”

    Sarah Switzer

  • “It has been inspiring to meet and work with so many incredible community facilitators who work across and with such a diversity of contexts and communities. Collectively sharing knowledge and experience around how and why we facilitate the way we do has encouraged me to think more intentionally about my own facilitation practices in ways that I am so appreciative for.”

    Sherry Ostapovitch

  • “This project gave me access to a community of facilitators. Facilitators who were thinking through similar problems, who demonstrated an intentional commitment to similar values and who cared deeply about the communities they work alongside”

    Susanne Nyaga

  • “The incredible generosity, care and brilliance of the people involved in this project, from community, health, Indigenous, art and academic spaces has been an inspiration. I have learned from many and am grateful.”

    Stuart Poyntz

  • "The most memorable aspect of this project for me is the connection to diverse facilitators doing amazing heart led work. As a community engaged facilitator travelling northern Manitoba my work often feels very isolated so knowing there are many wonderful people strongly engaged in anti-oppressive facilitation who want to create resources, connect, build skills and share knowledge is a tremendous blessing as I continue to strengthen my life work."

    Vanessa Anakwudwabisayquay Cook

  • “This research project demonstrated for me what community-engaged facilitation that is values-driven, justice-oriented, and rooted in reflexive praxis can be when intentions are matched with corresponding concrete actions.”

    Wendy Ng

Project Timeline

Year 1

Co-designing the Project:  In year one, we took time to learn and grow together, as we collaboratively designed our research. We refined our guiding research questions, developed our methods (i.e., how we would answer these questions together), and explored with whom and how we would share these learnings.

Year 2

Sharing our Stories: To explore our questions, we hosted interviews with our team members and focus groups with our larger networks. We conducted 21 online interviews amongst our team members and 5 focus groups within our networks, reaching 31 community-engaged facilitators. Each focus group was hosted by an organizational partner working in a different sector.

We carefully and collaboratively analyzed the findings. An analysis working group composed of 8 team members (all community-engaged facilitators) carefully synthesized and reviewed interview and focus group data. We met often to discuss what we were learning, within our working group, and with the larger team.

Year 3

Exploring and Expanding: To deepen our understanding of what we were learning together, twenty-six facilitators – team members and select focus group participants – came together over a 3-day in-person retreat to deepen our analysis and collaboratively develop resources for other community-engaged facilitators. We developed the resources showcased on this website, such as cellphilms (short videos made on a phone), collages, zines, and podcasts. After the retreat, we planted seeds for how and where our work might grow.

Living Agreement

In this project, how we worked and walked together was as important as the outcomes we achieved. Our entire team was involved in research design, data collection, analysis and knowledge sharing. During year 1, over many conversations, we collectively crafted a living agreement that outlined how we would work together, premised on the principles of generosity, intentionality, participation, anti-racist and decolonial practice, and transparency. We revisited this agreement often.

See Acknowledgements