EA - Community building: Lessons from ten years of facilitation experience by Severin T. Seehrich

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Community building: Lessons from ten years of facilitation experience, published by Severin T. Seehrich on February 8, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Epistemic status: Anecdotal but strong. Most of this is based on practical experience and things I learned through word-of-mouth.Here, I’d like to present some pieces of facilitation advice I’d give my former self. I’ve selected this list for things that I wouldn’t have found obvious at all, and that became crucial to the way I lead groups. I hope this post helps some of you run even better events.0. About me.I facilitated a number of different gatherings in a number of contexts over the last ten years: Retreats, discussion rounds, reading groups, authentic relating games, communication trainings, a secular solstice, meditation sessions, two sessions of a self-organized Krav Maga study group (my life sometimes takes weird turns), and probably a bunch of other things I forgot.Audiences I have experience with range from teacher trainees over political student groups and Esperantists all the way to EAs and rationalists. I trained with the Ruth Cohn Institute for TCI International and Authentic Revolution. I received mentorship from experienced counseling trainers, Circling/Authentic Relating facilitators, and an Active Hope workshop facilitator.In total, I probably gathered 1000+ hours of facilitation experience.So, here you go for the 80/20 version of what I've learned in these years.1. If you get the beginning right, the group almost leads itself. If not, you are doomed.When we enter a new group, all of us come with a number of implicit questions: Will these people like me? Is it safe here, can I show up with my edges and quirks without getting hurt or exploited? Will this be valuable for me?As a facilitator, it is my task to enable participants to answer these questions for themselves. If I don’t make space for that, the group I lead will be distracted by the unmet needs that underlie these questions: Belonging, safety, meaning.Saving time at the start of a group by ignoring these questions is not effective. Because then, people are only half-engaged with the topic at hand, and (at best) half-distracted by trying to figure out how to answer these questions despite my facilitation, not because of it.So, what can you do to help people answer them?a. Will these people like me?The best strategy depends on a number of factors: The group size, the task at hand, and, first and foremost, the duration and format of the group work. Is it a one-off evening event? A weekly recurring meetup? A weekend retreat? A recurring program with intense contact that runs over several months? The longer the group stays together and the more personal the task at hand, the more investment into trust-building is necessary. Not only upfront, but also along the way.A quick-and-dirty version of trust-building I like to do for shorter one-off events or recurring evenings should contain all of these three elements within the first 30 minutes:i. Greet participants personally and individually..or have a co-facilitator or veteran member of your community do it for you. Bonus points for not needing to glance at name tags, and for making a genuine effort to pronounce their names correctly, regardless of whether you know their native language.Of course, this is not possible in very large groups or online events. In those cases, you can cover part of this function by putting a lot of care into the opening mail, both regarding content and writing style.ii. Enable at least one 1-on-1-interaction with another group member.A short 1-on-1-conversation does wonders for turning strangers into friends. While talking to every group member 1-on-1 is overkill, it is massively grounding for new people in a group to know that they have at least o...