Episode 18: Facilitator Archetypes: Navigating Institutions as Community Engaged Facilitators
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Facilitator Archetypes: Navigating institutions as community engaged facilitators, a conversation with Muna Mohamed, Stuart Poyntz, and Ammarah Syed with the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective. Hosted by Sherry Ostapovitch.
Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:00:13] Welcome to the WhyPAR Podcast, a project of the youth research lab at OISE - the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. My name is Sherry Ostapovitch and this episode of The WhyPAR podcast is the third and last in a special series produced by the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective. The PeCEP project was created to explore, generate, and share knowledge about facilitation practices that support community-engaged work across different sectors. In this special series of three podcasts, members of PeCEC reflect on their experiences as community-engaged facilitators, confronting some of the dilemmas and tensions, as well as the opportunities and joys of working with, in, and for communities.
Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:00:13] This podcast episode entitled, Facilitator Archetypes: Navigating institutions as community engaged facilitators is a conversation with Muna Mohamed, Stuart Poyntz, and Ammarah Syed. They discuss how facilitators can use the archetypes of the doula, the smuggler and translator to better understand their work with communities and institutions. Learn how facilitators can leverage their power to work towards justice and safety for the communities they are accountable to.
Muna Mohamed: [00:01:24] My name is Muna and I'm joined here today with Stuart and Ammarah, and we're going to be chatting a little bit about how, as facilitators, we occupy spaces within institutions and how that presents some really unique challenges for us. And so before we begin, I thought it would be great to just introduce ourselves and talk about who we are and how we've landed in this work. So my name is Muna Mohamed. My pronouns are she/her. I am a community facilitator with roots in social justice and social movement facilitation, specifically around state sanctioned violence and its impacts on Black communities in Ottawa. And I'm also a ceramic artist, and I'll pass it to Ammarah.
Ammarah Syed: [00:02:05] All right. Thank you, Muna. Yeah. So my name is Ammarah. My background is in harm reduction, community work, uh, grassroots organizing and arts-based wellness. Uh, I facilitate and create workshops around arts-based wellness as radical self-care.
Stuart Poyntz: [00:02:22] Thanks, Ammarah. It's great to be here with you all. My name is Stuart Poyntz, and I wear a number of hats. I am the director of a community-engaged research initiative at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. I spent a long time working with young people, mostly in art organizations and art centers in cities across Canada, um, other places around the world, and very interested in how facilitators help to bring institutions and communities into relationships with each other. Thanks.
Muna Mohamed: [00:02:55] Awesome. So we've been exploring together just this idea and this relationship that facilitators have with institutional spaces. And these relationships vary depending on the facilitator and the kind of role they occupy. So sometimes, as facilitators, as people that are hosting um, sessions, workshops, as people that are being containers for a group conversation or for getting to a very specific purpose, we either are sometimes parachuting into these institutions to host something or to hold some kind of space, or we're really deeply embedded in them. And we come from a number of different institutions. We come from, at least in this research project, we come from academic institutions, community-based contexts, really client support, harm reduction based contexts, education and adult education and community contexts. So it's really vast. And what's really been a key point, or that's resonated for many of us in this work, is that there are so many possibilities and limitations that exist in navigating institutional spaces. And often as facilitators, we're balancing this tension that exists between community and institutional needs. And then, of course, there's financial constraints and dynamics of facilitation. So as facilitators, we're often navigating our roles in the kind of work that we take up and that creates implications in our relationship between community and the institutions that fund us and resource what we do. And then also, we carry this role in helping communities manage those financial constraints and resourcing the communities that we work with. I wanted to ask Ammarah, as we think about these institutions and the dynamics that we hold with them, what are some challenges that arise? What are some challenges that exist within this relationship that a facilitator holds with institutions?
Ammarah Syed: [00:04:46] So when we talk about institutional dynamics, financial concerns are a huge issue that our communities deal with. We often come across a lot of tension between institutions and communities, due to very little leeway between the rigid structures and policies that institutions mandate for the funds being allocated, and the unforgiving nature of any discourse from this status quo, which is very rooted in colonial structures and capitalist systems that we are essentially trying to push against. There's also irresolvable tensions that become created in navigating these relationships, and facilitators are often having to deal with the crux of this because they are playing different roles, navigating between the institutions and the communities. And so as such, they take on a lot of different kinds of labour, and the labour that people have named seem to have common archetypes.
Muna Mohamed: [00:05:58] Yeah, Stuart, did you want to share a little bit about how we got to this concept of archetypes? When we were thinking about the roles that folks occupy in institutions?
Stuart Poyntz: [00:06:08] Yeah, I think that many folks who are listening to the podcast will recognize that facilitators face a whole number of different challenges. Being the in-between figures between institutions and communities. And so what we wanted to try to do in this conversation was set up archetypes that capture some of the work that facilitators do, the really specific and unique work that facilitators do, the power that they have in their hands when they do this work, how that helps and works at negotiating relationships between institutions and communities. And our idea about archetypes was to capture the sense that there are common patterns across fields. Archetypes help us to name those patterns, help to recognize our roles and our power in our place as facilitators. And also as I think we're going to talk about near the end is some of the cautionary notes we might want to keep in mind in doing facilitation work.
Muna Mohamed: [00:07:09] Awesome. So we have these three archetypes that we're going to move through and just chat about a little bit. The first is the doula. The second is the smuggler. And the final one is the translator. And stay with us. We'll unpack these terms a little bit more and talk about how they connect to facilitation, even though they don't sound like it immediately. So I wanted to first start with Ammarah. Could you talk to us about the doula archetype and how we arrived there? Like who is the doula and what's their power?
Ammarah Syed: [00:07:40] The doula is often the connector, and it's a very intimate space to be in. Other terms that are more accessible could be like the midwife or the mediator. The doula is the person who values and puts energy and time into the people who are being harmed. So the people who there is very little protection for, there are very little resources allocated towards. This is like the most front facing work that our archetype can do. It's often a role laid onto the intersectional people of our society, and more often than not, femme of color that are automatically often assigned these roles. They're in spaces where emotional labour is required. Often this labor is invisible but essential. So there is labour being done and not acknowledged, however, it is integral. So basically what doulas do is the care work. It's the work of humanizing intimate relations. It's tapping into the unnamed, whether it's the emotional labour that is invisibilized or micro-aggressions, or a whole range of things in between that we often don't notice palpably, but the effects are very real. These things have been systematically erased to serve the function of the institutions. What the doula does is often operationalize and name these intangible pieces in order to prevent harm. We have the roles of negotiating with different parties and showing up in authenticity around conflict that often happens, this unnamed labour that's happening. So naming it, negotiating with it, the cautions that we might extend to that role is where we're not being acknowledged as a doula, we burn out. There's powerlessness. You have a lot of circumstances where you can't do anything from the bureaucracy above you, and you can't do anything for the client and so it's just this kind of standstill where there's not much that can happen. A more fundamental thing that often does come into this role with is being socialized into this role. So the idea that they don't have a choice, which is so integral to name as a caution, because when you name that you're socialized into a role, you can then step out of it to see your power over your situation and your agency over that role.
Muna Mohamed: [00:10:08] Yeah. I feel like we kind of arrived at this archetype of the doula when we were talking about how facilitators are these vessels for bringing about change or being vessels of support. And this doula role can be so powerful because in institutions and systems that treat people like they're numbers, like really treat people, not like humans, the doula archetype is the person or the facilitator that does the work of moving past that, to build an intimacy with each client that they have, or to build an intimacy with people directly, which requires so much of yourself. And there is actually such a strength and almost courage in that to be like, I'm going to make the room to see your humanity and acknowledge your humanity and try to figure out how to navigate the system to give you what you need. And in our research project, when we were talking with those that facilitate in the context of harm reduction work or client support work at a very grassroots level, many of them are playing this doula function that is so radical in some ways. But as you named, there's like this layer of socialization and of it being challenging to remove yourself from that role because it requires so much of you.
Stuart Poyntz: [00:11:20] I would only add on that facilitation involves care, and it involves a kind of care in moments, sometimes of crisis. That's not unlike a doula who's taking care of somebody in the midst of birth, in the days and weeks that follow birth, when support and structures of care are really essential to making the route forward possible. And likewise in context of facilitation thinking of the facilitator as a doula is somebody who, as both of you have commented, they do things that are often invisible but are essential to how facilitation work empowers and enables communities to negotiate institutional dynamics and sometimes to confront institutions when they're not listening. I think what Ammarah had said about the cautionary notes are that this role, the facilitator, can become deeply exhausting, because carrying care is also a kind of burden that is hard to hold on to without times to recuperate, to reset, to revitalize oneself. And so the doula is both a space of real power and of real need in facilitation, but also one that needs itself to be... we need to be aware that when we're calling on facilitators to do more than seems reasonable. That's about the cautionary notes of being a doula at a time when too much is being asked and care of the facilitator is required as well.
Muna Mohamed: [00:12:47] For folks who are listening, both Ammarah and I are women of colour, and what feels really big about this doula role that we can't fully unpack here is that we're socialized to this extent of, like, we carry the doula role in everything that we do. Like in our families, in our friend groups, that the work of being, like, does this situation actually require doula in me? Is that what this facilitated situation needs, or have I been socialized to think that this is the only way I can operate of giving so much of myself to this space as a facilitator? And that question, I think, can be very liberating for us to do this distancing between our roles and the institutions and to also just take care of ourselves.
Ammarah Syed: [00:13:28] Yeah. And so the critical nature of asking ourselves that question is power, it is control. Because even in public, often, people will read us as that role. And it's like, I never met you, like, I don't know you, and yet you're still archetype-ing me in that role. So where do we find that control? So a quote that speaks into this is the different layers of accountability and who we're accountable to. Our accountability is to the community that we're working for and with but there's all these other outside factors that, you know, play an influential role. You know, you can get uninvited from certain tables, which limits your ability to do that work. You could lose your job. You can lose funding. So there's all these other things. So it's very easy to say, yeah, my accountability is to community first and foremost. But the reality is that there's all these other factors.
Stuart Poyntz: [00:14:29] What's so interesting about that quote is it really captures the tensions that facilitators in their role as doulas have to negotiate between facing the institution and wanting to support and bring forward the needs of the community. And being in that place puts them in a kind of divided role of helping and assisting. That's an awkward place to be. It's a straining and demanding place to be. And I think with the archetype of the doula, we wanted to draw attention to the real demand that's put on the body of the facilitator. Muna, you were saying earlier, with the way that that corresponds with the larger social demands that are put on certain people, that are read on to certain people's bodies.
Ammarah Syed: [00:15:16] Speaking directly to the bodies, just to paraphrase another quote, there's specifically a lot of talk about how our facilitators bodies are being affected by this. One of our interviewees said, my last job had a huge physical and emotional impact on me. It was an organization that does a lot of brilliant disability justice work and yet I was, you know, burnt out and not feeling supported in that space. It was very ableist, white and Zionist. But I had to discover that after months of hard work. So all this subtext that is contributing to the wear on our bodies.
Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:16:06] Stay tuned for the next part of Facilitator archetypes: Navigating institutions as community engaged facilitators where Muna Mohamed, Stuart Poyntz, and Ammarah Syed discuss how the smuggler facilitator can get resources from institutions into communities.
Muna Mohamed: [00:16:23] I wonder if we talk about our next archetype, which is the smuggler.
Stuart Poyntz: [00:16:28] That's you Muna.
Muna Mohamed: [00:16:29] That's me. I'm the smuggler. I'm the smuggler.
Stuart Poyntz: [00:16:31] What's that about?
Muna Mohamed: [00:16:32] Maybe actually, I'll read the quote, because I think the quote that we have from one of our team members, Casey, as we were doing this research, really captures the role of the smuggler, especially when it comes to financial dynamics and resources, how that connects with institutions, clearly. So Casey says, my facilitation practice, which speaks to my values in terms of resourcing communities, is about taking funds from granting streams and putting them into community members hands and households. And also about a DIY ethos, taking something small and making it bigger and making it more communal. And this is really the essence of the smuggler. The smuggler has such a deep accountability and responsibility to the community that they're working with and that they're serving, and that they care about. So that accountability is there across all the archetypes, but in the smugglers context they have this responsibility and they're, like, how can I finesse and sometimes manipulate the system to get the resources that are needed in communities hands? And sometimes this smuggler is finessing a granting system, using the right language to get grants into the hands of community members or money into the hands of community members. They think about resources so creatively, like they are not only thinking about tangible, like, money that goes into community, but they're thinking about what can be donated in kind. They're thinking about people and the power of volunteers. So the smuggler is really, really scrappy. That's the word we kept returning to when we talked about the smuggler is that they're super resourceful, they're really creative, and they really embody this DIY ethos that Casey named, which is that they are capable of caring for their communities. They are capable of finding the resources in order to support those that often don't get paid in the work that we're doing, especially with equity seeking communities.
Muna Mohamed: [00:18:26] So that's facilitators, that's grassroots organizations, that's communities directly through mutual aid. One thing though, and I'd love to hear what you guys think about some of the cautions around the smuggler, because what they're operating within is a lot of risk. So they have to evaluate frequently. They always have to evaluate the risk that they're holding, or that they're maybe navigating as they work with these institutions. And because some of the work is around manipulating or finessing these systems, sometimes depending on the position that you hold, that does pose a risk. Like Ammarah, you were naming how unforgiving some of these institutions are and that sometimes can harm the person who's occupying this role of the smuggler. And, you know, I think a lot of smugglers are okay with that. That's part of the smugglers nature, is that they're like, yeah, you know, I'll carry the risk of whatever comes with doing this work because it's so important. And that's their strength. There is courage in that as well. But it is important for anyone who is carrying that smuggler role to really consider. Is this a risk I'm comfortable taking? Just to know that within themselves because when you're trying to finesse these systems, there's that question of, is this role pulling me out of my integrity? Is that comfortable for me in this space? How is occupying this role of the smuggler really aligned with my own integrity and authenticity? And am I able to separate that role from who I am as a person, which is maybe someone who carries that integrity and that authenticity?
Stuart Poyntz: [00:19:54] I think it's fascinating the way you talk about the smuggler as negotiating risk, because there are times when we really do want to take on risk for the communities we're working with, and we see the need to play off institutions, work institutions, reset institutional relationships so that communities receive the resources, the support they legitimately deserve. And there's a beauty in taking those risks, but it's really important to hear you talk about the delicate dance that puts the facilitator in, because there's things at stake for them. There's a job, there's their own personal integrity. There are things that deeply matter and power relationships they've got to identify and know how to work with. At the same time, the sense of being able to make things happen is what the smuggler seems to highlight for us. And if the doula is the agent of care that makes things happen through care, the smuggler is the agent of happening by resetting and recalibrating relationships, which I think is a powerful place for facilitators to see themselves.
Muna Mohamed: [00:21:03] I think that's a brilliant framing, because you're kind of seeing the pieces of the puzzle come together. Like the doula facilitates this really important role of care, and the smuggler pushes us to just, like, think of resources differently as well.
Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:21:27] You’re listening to the last part of Facilitator Archetypes: Navigating institutions as community-engaged facilitators where Muna Mohamed, Stuart Poyntz, and Ammarah Syed talk about how translator facilitators negotiate and build bridges between institutions and communities.
Stuart Poyntz: [00:21:45] The facilitator is translator. It's like the third piece of the puzzle for us. We thought of a facilitator as a translator because facilitators are in-between agents. They're go-betweens. They negotiate, they build bridges between communities and institutions and they do this role in ways that move ideas and perspectives across community and institutional spaces, especially to help institutions to hear communities, when those institutions aren't listening. I think many communities find themselves in places where facilitators are helpful for taking their meaning and embedding them in institutions and helping them to come alive. Institutions aren't always ready to be active listeners. And I think some of our interviewees in the research, they told us about this. Rubén, one of our team members, talks about community-engaged means doing facilitation with people who are outside of dominant institutions, like schools or universities or the government. When the community thinks of itself as outside of institutions, facilitators translate those community needs so that they're heard and acted on by institutions. They make institutions understandable to communities sometimes as well. There's an immense power in this, we thought, because facilitators support communities to get their perspectives heard by those in power. Facilitators have the capacity to open up and make sense of institutional practices and protocols so they're not confusing. They can be, in this way, code switchers with the ability really to dance with the two partners that they're working with, this back and forthing, this give and taking.
Stuart Poyntz: [00:23:25] This role is supported by the power of deep listening, something that's absolutely essential. Another piece that one of our interviewees told us about, talking about the role of working with an Indigenous advisory circle. The job of the interviewee, she says, my job was just to listen, to provide information when asked. I wasn't there to dictate. I was really there to listen and present the work of the department and in response to the advisory circle doing the internal work of building buy-in, finding additional resources or other required resources to actualize what the community told us. There's a modesty that's part of this work. Sometimes being a translator is disruptive work. You're translating ideas and perspectives that institutions don't always want to hear. And in this way, it puts a facilitator in a role of being a disruptor of how institutions work. Some people love that role. For others, that's a tricky place to be, Because the truth is, structural power is hard to change. And I think facilitators know that most of all. So there's a delicate dance at stake here, but the facilitator is translator is agile and able in that dance with the two partners they're working with.
Muna Mohamed: [00:24:37] You know, I think sometimes what can be so valuable about people who occupy the translator role is that they actually have a deep understanding of both, like they deeply understand the institution and they deeply understand community and understand why they function. And they have to have that in order to do the translation work well. And I think they're also often people who internally are very open, are very adaptable. And I think maybe the caution, because in all of these, we're talking about how to separate maybe the self from the role. For the translator, it's saying between these two worlds, where do I find myself like stepping away from the dance to be like, okay, who am I? What are my beliefs? What is the truth without a filter? Without like a translation filter, you know. And I think sometimes that's what can feel hard is the moments where you're not thinking about how to communicate. You're just like feeling that it's hard and and honoring that truth. Sometimes it's hard to create room as a translator.
Ammarah Syed: [00:25:36] Speaking into that. You both spoke into the idea that you have to step into these roles and to know about each of these roles. That's why it is an archetype, right? It's because there's common threads, common code-switching, common ways of showing up.
Muna Mohamed: [00:25:55] I think that transitions us really nicely into, like, how do we maybe even bring these archetypes together to understand how to show up as facilitators and institutions?
Stuart Poyntz: [00:26:06] I think different facilitation projects require more of some archetype than the other, a movement between archetypes. I think what's true in facilitation is that we're often using these archetypes at strategically helpful moments. There are times, as Ammarah shared with us, that it's very clear that care and embedding structures of care is fundamental to allow communities to make sense of the situation they're trying to address and figure out and change often. But sometimes they need a facilitator who's going to be a smuggler, who's going to be like a pirate, who's going to go in and going to launch onto the ship of the institution and, and take some gold and bring it back. Sometimes it's a negotiator and it's a translator who's moving ideas back and forth to try to set new common ground or to find ways of making the ideas of communities that are hard to hear by institutions to make them hearable. I don't think these are exclusive roles. These are roles that we take on and use at different moments, as needed as required, by the job.
Muna Mohamed: [00:27:14] I think what helps with the archetypes as a way to think about our roles is that it brings that agency back. We can acknowledge that it's not easy, like there's there's always going to be this pressure. But we do have this agency to just think about, even as I'm going to have to, to tackle and be within these tensions of myself, the institutions that I'm in and the communities that I care about. I do have choice in how I operate, and I do have the ability to distance myself from these roles. This can be a hat I put on. I can wake up one day and go into a space and be like, I think this space as a facilitator, especially if you're a facilitator that takes on, like, different kinds of jobs, this community organization needs me to smuggle. Like, that's what they need and I'm going to wear that hat. And especially as someone who's connected with or been the doula in so many of my facilitation spaces, it's been empowering to think about the archetypes of something that bring agency back into my work.
Ammarah Syed: [00:28:09] I think even bringing in the archetypes and us being able to step in and out of them creates autonomy; it creates control. Autonomy and control is the number one way to combat trauma.
Stuart Poyntz: [00:28:23] Building on that, Ammarah, facilitators don't always control the situation they're in, so having multiple archetypes gives them the flexibility to mobilize robust agency.
Muna Mohamed: [00:28:33] Yes. That's it!
Stuart Poyntz: [00:28:35] And and that's important in response to trauma. That's important in response to immovable institutions. That's important in response to well-being and self-care.
Ammarah Syed: [00:28:47] I do want to say a quote that Rubén said, and it applies so perfectly. I think it was the revolution is going to be slow, and we have to find ways to care for each other during it. Creating something like archetypes off these systems of financial abuse is one way we can care.
Muna Mohamed: [00:29:08] You know what? I think that wraps it up beautifully. Thank you all for listening. We hope that these archetypes serve as a way for you to understand your work and your role in facilitation.
Ammarah Syed: [00:29:18] And the autonomy for you to remove yourself from that when you need to.
Muna Mohamed: [00:29:23] Whenever you need to. Exactly.
Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:29:25] You’ve just listened to Facilitator Archetypes: Navigating institutions as community-engaged facilitators, part of the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective special podcast series on The WhyPAR Podcast. Make sure you catch the other two episodes such as Saving or Engaging? Rethinking Community Facilitation where you can listen to facilitators reflecting on their own experiences of saviourism. Or listen to the episode, From “Oh shit!” to “Oh shift” where you can find out how facilitators navigate when things don’t quite go according to plan.
Details
This podcast episode uses 3 archetypes: the doula, the smuggler and translator to explore the role that many community engaged facilitators take in navigating the institutions that they work within and for. Through the lens of these archetypes, we expand on the ways that community engaged facilitators leverage their power or position to work towards justice and safety for the communities they are accountable to. Embodying these archetypes as a facilitator is often either a deliberate choice or a reflection of the unique gifts each facilitator carries with them.
Music and production by Sherry Ostapovitch
References and Further Reading
Ostapovitch, S. (2025) Facilitator archetypes: Navigating institutions as community engaged facilitators, a conversation with Muna Mohamed, Stuart Poyntz, and Ammarah Syed with the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective. (No 1.) [Audio podcast episode]. In The whyPAR Podcast. https://www.communityfacilitation.ca/resources/facilitator-archetypes
