Meeting Facilitation
Expert support in managing change
As a facilitator for over 25 years, Sam facilitates conversations for groups to reflect on where you are now, where you’re going and how you’ll get there. Facilitation can be online, in-person, or both.
Drawing Change’s approach to meeting facilitation and strategic planning:
- Relational
- Strengths-based
- Creative
- Participatory
- Works with complexity
- Intersectional and anti-racism lens
- Ways of gathering that return us to wholeness
By creating the right conditions, strategic planning is a chance to have conversations that lead to paradigm shifts, shared understandings, and strong decisions.
We’re wiser together
Sam Bradd (MEd, he/him) leads the team at Drawing Change. With 25 years of experience helping people have meaningful meetings, Sam has worked as a graphic recorder and meeting facilitator in 11 countries.
Sam’s lived experiences inform his creative and facilitation practices: listen to what’s under the surface, find glimmers of joy, uplift equity, and return to wholeness.
Facilitating paradigm shifts
The types of strategic planning projects Sam facilitates most often (in Canada, the US and globally) are engagements focused on mission/vision/values, organizational system changes, internal governance, community partnerships, and where nuance and thoughtfulness is called for in the design–especially due to dynamics of power and voices of equity-deserving groups. Facilitation can be online, in-person, or a combination of both.
Nothing is one-size-fits-all. Each project is custom and unique for your event.
Impact
Leading change inside your organization? Expert facilitation can support innovation and clarity:
- Strategic planning
- Action planning
- Conference design
- Retreats
- Internal meetings
- Organizational/system change
- Quality improvement workshops
- Governance change
Engaging externally or with communities? Help people feel heard and support participation:
- World Café
- Journey mapping
- Dialogue-based events
- Focus groups
- Participatory research
- Open Space Technology
- Coalition-building
- Member engagement
Online and In-Person facilitation with Drawing Change
There’s a sweet spot of working with what might emerge, and planning ahead so we can help the group unlock their best thinking.
Key meetings Sam facilitated in 2020 – 2025, ranging from online to work across US/Canada in person:
- 6-month Action Planning for a US-based environmental conservation organization (online plus 3-day summit)
- Facilitating courses on participatory decision-making and consensus skills, including with emergent design (in person)
- Co-facilitation in community for Indigenous education visioning (in-person, co-facilitation delivery)
- Union leadership/staff strategic planning (in-person)
- University Sociology department retreat and planning (in person)
- Facilitation design and graphic facilitation with the World Cafe Foundation (in-person)
- Journey mapping for librarians and archivists related to decolonizing and reconciliation (in-person)
- Team facilitation for provincial gathering of peer support programs for a health authority (team facilitation, 3 days in person)
- Provincial network of HIV/AIDS service providers developing trans inclusion strategy (online)
- University Business faculty department planning (online)
- Dialogue professionals for a two-day staff retreat (online)
- Librarians deciding on new ways of working collaboratively (online)
- Mission-vision-values-goals with a health non-profit with a new Board (in-person)
- Organizational strategic planning for a national health organization online, including pre-work (online)
- Bioscientists launching a new initiative, including graphic recording (online)
- Online meetings with 40+ university-community groups planning participatory research (online)
- Full day supporting senior health leaders to launch an internal change initiative (in-person)
- 950 youth with community/university partners for an onboarding event in the early days of COVID (online, not a webinar);
- 3-day retreat for national environmental organization’s science and climate department (in-person); and much more.
Strategic planning can create transformative meetings that leave us better than when we started.