Session 2: From Neutrality to Transparently Caring for Everyone

Tuesday, December 19th

Neutrality is the gold standard in conflict facilitation, and it is a standard that sustains the status quo in a variety of ways we aim to explore in this session. When we orient to liberation, we unleash a fountain of care for everyone, which puts us in a position of leadership and active commitment to responses that work for everyone involved. This commitment is what pulls us towards liberation and vision. Making this commitment transparent increases trust and starts the process of weaving togetherness, moment by moment. For example, every transition is an opportunity to weave togetherness if we commit to all of us being in agreement about who is the focus. These micro-agreements, well before we do anything with the content, are how we build sufficient trust and goodwill to address the issues at the heart of the conflict.

Here are some of the key points we plan to engage with in this session:

• Choosing whether people speak to each other or to us based on capacity to listen 
• Discerning what to be transparent about, when, and how, based on what will support togetherness 
• Supporting trust through repeatedly sharing the “why” behind our facilitation choices 
• Distinguishing between taking a side and advocating for all needs 
• Learning to notice where attention and energy flow regardless of who is speaking 
• Deepening capacity to see the difference between checking with another person while maintaining focus on the first person and fully shifting focus to another person 
• Developing practices for how to attend to situations where no one has capacity