For the facilitator
Six notes before you hold the room.
Practical reminders from the GainForest facilitator team. None of these are rules. All of them are mistakes we have made at least once and would prefer you avoid.
- 01
Don’t run a workshop you haven’t sat through.
Before facilitating, attend one of these as a participant. The hardest parts (silence after a refusal, a long pause in Lesson 05) only feel familiar from the other side of the room.
- 02
Consult before you teach.
Audrey Tang is explicit: “A formal statement concerning indigenous policy should be reviewed, shaped and led by the appropriate indigenous institutions.” If you are not from the community in the room, your job is to host the questions, not to answer them.
- 03
Treat ‘consultation’ as a red flag.
If your workshop is brought in to validate a decision that has already been made, decline. The point of the deliberative process is to let affected people draw boundaries early — not to apply a community-engagement stamp to a finished design.
- 04
Leave space for refusal.
Lesson 05 will produce silences that feel uncomfortable to facilitators trained in ‘collaborative’ rooms. Do not fill them. The refusal is the lesson.
- 05
Record the protocol, not the participants.
By default: no photographs, no recordings, no transcripts. The output is the agreed boundary document, the code of conduct, or the Garden Log entry — not a corpus of what people said in the room.
- 06
Plan the next session before you leave.
Workshops that don’t recur become one-off consultations. Schedule the next session before you pack up — a recurring practice is what turns the rest of the course into a habit.