A Training for Facilitators and Leaders
Designed specifically for facilitators, coaches, and leaders who want to elevate their ability to navigate complex group dynamics and support productive inter-group exchange in an increasingly polarized world.
Why now?
Today we find ourselves living in unprecedented transitions. The global scope of crises we face are disrupting how we live, work, and love, and the changes only continue to escalate. As facilitators and leaders in this context, we are called to be more than neutral parties helping groups find common ground. We must often take courageous stands that disrupt groupthink on all sides of the political spectrum, advocate for our shared humanity, and create powerful invitations that reveal novel ways of being together.
The most effective facilitators today know when to maintain neutrality and when to boldly invite groups toward what's possible—creating spaces where our diversity and our profound common humanity are both honored. In a world of increasing polarization, where fear, anxiety, and resentment drive us apart, those who can build bridges and hold space for transformation are needed more than ever. Beloved Community offers a framework and practice for standing in the liminal space between the world as it is and the world as it could be, developing the hearts and minds needed to embody and enact respect, care, and equity in all spaces we inhabit.
Beloved Community is the antidote to our fractured politics and unbridled ethnocentrism. It offers more than just a set of skills—it provides a framework, a vision, and an unrelenting commitment to everyone and our shared humanity. This way of being and doing was powerfully modeled by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis throughout their lives and work. In this training, we are borrowing their approach and applying it specifically to the domain of group facilitation and conflict resolution.
At its core, Beloved Community recognizes that effective facilitation requires spiritual development—not in a religious sense, but in the profound work of clarifying who we are in relation to others. This training centers compassion as a powerful force in responding to division and pain, while acknowledging that our evolutionary journey, both spiritually and developmentally, revolves around settling the fundamental question of what is self and what is other.
As we deepen our understanding of who we are, we become more effective bridge-builders, able to source our actions from genuine compassion rather than reaction. Beloved Community is a practice of standing in the liminal space, serving as a bridge between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be, honing hearts and minds to embody and enact respect, care, and equity in the spaces where we work, live, and play.
Enter the Bootcamp
This bootcamp provides rigorous practice and skill-building for professionals who work with teams, organizations, and communities, equipping them to become instruments through which a better future can transform itself.
By developing advanced techniques to bridge divides and transform conflict, participants learn to embody the future they wish to create, allowing new possibilities to take shape within themselves before manifesting in the groups they serve.
The training creates environments where diverse perspectives can thrive together, recognizing that the future we seek must first find form within us as facilitators and leaders.
trainings
Beloved Community Bootcamp: A Training for Bridge-Builders is a 5-day immersion for leaders, facilitators, coaches, organizers, consultants and others to build the self awareness, leadership skills and facilitative capacities to enact Beloved Community and build a thriving future for all.
Each day of training will include:
- Embodiment exercises for wellbeing
- Group practices to grow capabilities interpersonally, emotionally, and cognitively
- Zen meditation and teachings on compassion and love
- Opportunities to connect to nature
What you will receive:
- New ways of being that enable powerful new choices and actions to enact clarity, compassion and love
- Real-time coaching and feedback
- Increased capacity to navigate uncertainty, difference and conflict
- Tools and frameworks to work transformationally with individuals, teams and communities
this training is for you ...
- If you are clear that ethnocentric, rivalrous dynamics are an evolutionary dead-end. And, that we need to discover real and enlivened ways to embody Beloved Community.
- If you are a facilitator, coach or consultant who is looking for novel ways of sensing, feeling, and thinking about us-them dynamics.
- If you are a leader working at two levels - the job you were hired to do & humanizing the workplace. You desire to grow your skills in working with difference in service of creating more coherence and wholeness.
- If you are interested in reacting less from ego and more from your innate wholeness.
- If you have a learner-mindset: you are open, humble, and yearn to learn.
learn
Letting Our Differences Have Their Way With Us
Gabriel Wilson is an Integral Facilitator with the organization Ten Directions and a Lecturer at Stanford University. This post originally appeared on the Ten Directions blog. In my experience, any time we engage in a conversation about our differences with an intention to prove the other side wrong, we’re heading for a dead end. When we take…
What Do You Stand For?
Our identities are beautiful, resilient and dynamic. But sometimes, our attachment to them can contribute to unhealthy polarization. In this episode Jennifer talks with facilitator, advisor, and author Gabe Wilson about how to relate more fluidly to our multiple identities with this question: what do you stand for? As an African American/Brazilian Gabe shares pivotal…
Letting Our Differences Have Their Way With Us
Gabriel Wilson is an Integral Facilitator with the organization Ten Directions and a Lecturer at Stanford University. This post originally appeared on the Ten Directions blog. In my experience, any time we engage in a conversation about our differences with an intention to prove the other side wrong, we’re heading for a dead end. When we take…
What Do You Stand For?
Our identities are beautiful, resilient and dynamic. But sometimes, our attachment to them can contribute to unhealthy polarization. In this episode Jennifer talks with facilitator, advisor, and author Gabe Wilson about how to relate more fluidly to our multiple identities with this question: what do you stand for? As an African American/Brazilian Gabe shares pivotal…
beloved bootcamp trainers
lisa gibson
Lisa Gibson is a transformative facilitator, coach, educator and systems change consultant. With over 25 years experience in local and international work at multiple scales, she supports individuals, teams and organizations to bring their whole hearts forward in creating a more just, caring and sustainable world. Lisa’s work with diverse clients focuses on a range of issues, with a particular focus on supporting the inner and outer leadership capacities required to affect change in a world with increasingly complex political, economic, environmental and cultural challenges.
Lisa is a certified Integral Facilitator, and holds a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Victoria, and a Masters in Gender and Development from the University of Sussex. She is also a founding instructor and curriculum designer in a wide variety of social innovation, systems change, facilitation, mindfulness programs and more globally, including the Social Innovation Certificate at Simon Fraser University. Lisa is a transmitted Zen teacher in the Soto Zen lineage. She is grateful to be based in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded Coast Salish lands and waters of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Wauthuth Nations with her two children and partner.
gabriel wilson
Gabe, founder of Freedom & Fairness, unlocks the transformative power of radical collaboration to foster greater freedom, fairness, and compassion in organizations and society. As a sought-after facilitator, advisor, and co-author of "Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart" and "Waking Up and Growing Up: Spiritual Cross Training for an Evolving World," he expertly navigates the intersection of social justice, purpose-driven enterprises, design thinking, human psychology, and group dynamics.
With a diverse client portfolio spanning executives and leadership teams at Fortune 500 companies, global non-profits, foundations, and government agencies, Gabe brings a wealth of experience to complex collaborative challenges.
His Beloved Practice Community serves to train coaches and facilitators who view their craft as a path of self-discovery. Through these programs, he nurtures a vibrant community of practice that serves as a place of refuge and development during these challenging times, enabling practitioners to be of greater service to others in this transformative era.
Gabe's academic foundation includes advanced study in adult developmental psychology and leadership through Stanford's Masters program in Policy, Organization, and Leadership Studies (POLS). As a former lecturer at Stanford University for the innovative "Designing Your Life" program, he taught both undergraduate and graduate students how to apply design thinking principles to personal and professional development. A certified Integral Facilitator, Gabe deepens his practice through meditation in the Zen lineage at the Two Arrows Zen Center.
