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Sometimes the right group of people, the right facilitation team, and the right content all come together at just the right time and in the right container to create magic. This past spring, Movement Matters experienced precisely such a magical moment at our 2024 Advanced Facilitation Training (AFT). Our team worked tirelessly in the months leading up to the advanced training. We took a curriculum that had already worked well for us in previous years and we dialed in on the places that we instinctively felt had to be strengthened. We breathed life, ritual, culture, art, spirit, and healing into every aspect of the three days, both as a training methodology and as content to be learned. We invited elder artist Baba Ras D to join our already dynamic facilitation team and accompanied him as he deeply incorporated song and rhythm into each day of the gathering. We watched with awe as people shared their stories, called in their guides and ancestors (human and more-than-human), danced, mourned, sang, and created community with-in rhythm. We demonstrated in real time that when we truly move together, our hearts beat in unison, our brains sync, and we create genuine transformative relationships of trust, action, and belonging. Beginning with the application process, we thoughtfully cultivated a tremendous group of participants, spanning two continents and three languages. We met the challenge of making the AFT a fully integrated trilingual space, recommitting to practices of language justice and deep connection through and beyond spoken language. This AFT cohort came from hyper-local grassroots groups, regional labor unions, and national coalitions. We had native relatives from Hawai’i–Kānaka Maoli–, from the Eastern Cherokee Nation, and the Potiguara Peoples of Brazil join other organizers from across the US representing Black, Afro-descendent, Brown, white, and immigrant communities. Folks shared their culture and stories. They built enduring connections across distance and identity. As participants created profound community over the three days, they also practiced advanced skills around the incorporation of arts and culture-building in facilitation practice. We wrestled with how to engage community members fully in our individual work while also holding a disciplined focus on the issue at hand. We learned techniques for conceiving and incorporating popularized graphics and physical movement-based practices to unlock creative potential when envisioning solutions. We dialed in on appropriate practices for building the content and methodology for engagement based on where a group is in its development. These kinds of magical movement building moments need to be held up, celebrated, and aspired to. If we are to build spaces of radical joy, visionary imagination, expansive learning, and transformational power within our organizing work, we have to experience them for ourselves, integrate them into our bones, reflect on how to create them for others, and practice how to create the conditions to do so. As trainers and capacity builders, it is easy to become jaded, to take for granted the work that we are privileged to do, to believe change within our movements is not going to happen. The Movement Matters team owes a sincere debt to each of those who shared space with us at the AFT for rejuvenating us, pushing us to aspire to this level of inspiration in all of our work, and showing us that it is possible. As we collectively move into another round of profoundly contested struggle in this country, as climate change and racialized capitalism threaten the world’s survival, these numinous animated spaces are critical to keep us moving forward, committed to building decolonized power for the world that can be, and skilled enough to move us in that direction. Connect with us for more information on our Advanced Facilitation Training. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national and international partners. Comments are closed.
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