Participatory Design and Facilitation

Are you running an educational and training program or hosting a conference and want to make it even more engaging, co-creative, generative for your participants? We can support you with innovative design and program facilitation to make your work come alive to whole new levels.

“The YES facilitation team put some of us out of our comfort zone to begin with. They created a different energy with movement, creativity and storytelling. They helped us to build culture  across departments that don’t usually work together. At the end of our session everyone was feeling relaxed and connected to each other.”

– Stephanie Meade, SVP Director of Marketing & Culture, New Resource Bank

Building Bridges Towards Your Impossible

“They say there is a doorway from heart to heart. But what is the use of a door when there are no walls?” – Rumi

One of the things that stands in the way of our impossible are the walls we place or have had placed between ourselves and others. Many of us long to work in diverse groups and teams, with people from a variety of backgrounds and life experiences, and yet, we don’t know how to build the bridges and create the kinds of relationships and cultures that make that possible. We sense intuitively that we are wiser together, and still feel stuck when it comes to actually generating the kinds of relationships across difference that feel meaningful and authentic. Join us for an exploration, using practical tools and skills, of what we can unlock in ourselves and with each other to open up and build the bridges that are vital for creating the world we want to see. Hint: It starts with listening from our hearts more than from our heads.

Conflict Transformation

Are you in a challenging situation, where there has been missed understandings, hurt, and stuckness? We can support you with powerful and simple tools to slow down, go deeper, see the wholeness and humanity of each person involved, and find meaningful solutions to carry forward.

“This is the right type of facilitation to offer organizations in transition. People need to come apart in order to get back together. YES’ facilitators are very talented, attentive, and present. They enabled a level of sharing that was unfamiliar with my board. It helped us move where we needed to go.”

– -Jim Ward, CEO, Senior Access

Community-building and Teamwork

Are you seeking to strengthen the ties within your team and/or wider community? We can support you with a variety of games, arts-based activities, creative challenges, storytelling practices, visioning exercises, and more, to bring you all together in robust and profound ways.

I had the pleasure to have Shilpa provide a workshop for a group of college freshman. The intentional manner of the workshop as well as all of the “life tools” introduced provided a great way for these students to connect to themselves and each other in a deep way and frame the start of their year with purpose and meaning- and set a foundation around values that will serve is well into the future.

~Rebecca Liebeskind, Change the World Program Manager, Verto Education.

Facilitation Coaching

Are you a facilitator or teacher and want to improve your skills and/or get insights into challenges you’ve had? We can support with our collective wisdom of over 100 people working for the last 30 years to facilitate passionate, powerful, healing spaces in a huge variety of contexts.

“As a decentralized nonprofit, our organization constantly has to problem-solve and move through complex conversations and situations together, and even though we’ve had this structure a long time, it hasn’t been without its conflict. That’s why we reached out to YES! and we are so incredibly grateful we did. Our session with Will taught us how to better listen to each other and how to better interact with and understand each other. Even though we can’t agree on everything, the session taught us how to try to communicate more effectively through checking in with each other more often and learning how to be more self-aware with what emotional zone we are in. The session allowed us to be vulnerable and open with each other in ways we had never been, and YES! created a safe environment to encourage us to push ourselves toward healthier dynamics.”