5 Tips for Powerful Community Meeting Facilitation

The fourth in a four-part series diving into the practical nuts and bolts of community engagement processes vis-à-vis community building and intergroup contact.

Introducing Optimal Contact

How can community engagement be a counterforce to our increasing social fragmentation, polarization, and loneliness?

Taking this challenge to heart will require a shift in community engagement practices. Rather than just soliciting input, we also need to bridge gaps between different identity groups and create a shared sense of belonging in the places where we live.

This requires a cross-pollination with critical insights from social psychology. The most important of these is Optimal Contact, the simple but profound mechanism at the heart of how humans move from “Us vs. Them” to “We.”

If you need a recap of Optimal Contact, check out this previous post, but below, I summarize its core conditions:

1. Optimal Contact maximizes the interaction between people of different groups.
2. Optimal Contact minimizes anxiety about intergroup interaction.
3. Optimal Contact induces empathy or perspective taking between people of different groups.

For this post, we’ll assume your Convening Group turned out a diverse and representative group of community members. And we’ll assume you’ve set up your meeting so that folks feel welcome and are sitting facing one another. Plus, you’ve primed the meeting with a succinct project background and behavior expectations, and introduced a constructive question.

Now what?

The Art of Facilitation

Facilitating community meetings is a blend of stage craft, improve comedy, conflict mediation, and group therapy. It is, in many ways, an ancient art.

There’s a lot of dimensions we could explore within the art of facilitation. In the interest of brevity, I’m going to focus on aspects that further our Optimal Contact goals. In particular, large group work at community events when all the participants gather in one space to hear each other’s contributions.

The first thing is to make sure the facilitator is introduced by a trusted community member. It could be a local political leader (beware, they like to talk!) or a community leader. This introduction will help establish your bona fides and minimize anxieties over any suspected biases you may bring.

Don’t worry if you are not from the “community.” It’s often more advantageous to be an outsider, since you will more likely be perceived as a neutral arbiter untainted by existing agendas or biases. Your #1 job as a facilitator is to protect the shared open space for participant contributions, and you don’t need to be intimate with the community to fulfill that role. Remember, your Convening Group will help you bridge the familiarity gap and set you up for success.

With that out of the way, there are some simple ways to structure your facilitation to contribute to Optimal Contact Condition #2 (reducing anxiety) and Condition #3 (inducing empathy or perspective taking).

1. Give participants a minute to write down their ideas and pick one.

Speaking in public causes anxiety for most people. Very few can spontaneously distill and then confidently articulate their ideas in public. By giving participants a few moments to jot down what’s in their head, you relieve the pressure of public speaking.

This then clears the space for participants to listen to each others’s perspectives as the meeting unfolds. They’re less distracted about what they are going to say and how they are going to say it.

When it’s their turn to speak, it’s also much more likely that folks will be concise and clear in their contribution. If they are not comfortable public speakers, then can simply read off what they wrote. What a relief!

2. Solicit Responses by going around the room one at a time.

By going around the room in a logical order, one at a time, you ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to speak. A popcorn approach, on the other hand, favors those who are the most confident or aggressive public speakers.

But more importantly, by going one at a time you take away the anxiety about when to raise your hand or when you are going to get called on. It may sound like a silly worry, but for many this can be a major distraction that prevents fully listening to other perspectives. If you know your slotted speaking moment is set, you can relax and listen.

3. Use your body and make eye contact.

Community Meetings are wonderful opportunities to fulfill Condition #3 (inducing perspective taking and empathy amongst different people). The empathetic component is especially important. It is the emotional mechanism that bridges group differences and allows us to see each other as fellow humans.

The ideal empathy moments are one-on-one in close proximity. However, we can’t do that in a community meeting with 50 or 100 people in the room.

Instead the facilitator can become a proxy for such moments by exhibiting the best techniques for empathetic listening.

This means using your body. Approach each participant when it’s their turn, say their name (they are wearing name tags, remember?), look them in the eye, and invite their ideas. Use body language to affirm that you are listening.

Everyone else will watch the interactions between the facilitator and respondent, and they will vicariously channel the curiosity and empathy that you bring to that moment. One by one, working your way around the room, you build a movement of collective empathy and perspective taking. Conditions #1, #2 & #3? Check!

4. Repeat back what you’ve heard.

Repeating back what you hear is a time-proven conversational tool to ensure that people feel listened to. As the facilitator and microphone-holder, it also ensures that the rest of the participants hear what folks say and follow along.

This seems basic, but I can’t tell you how often I see facilitators miss the “repeat back” step. Without it, folks can’t hear what’s going on, lose interest in the event, and stop listening to others.

This is also important because there should be a supporting team member with the task to…

5. Write everything down for public display.

Recording contributions on a shared display, typically on a flip chart or a whiteboard, allows a participant to see that they’ve been heard.

More importantly, they can see their ideas in the context of everyone else’s contributions. This loosens the grip on “my idea” and transmutes it into one component of a rich sea of potential.

With contributions displayed for everyone to see, other ideas start to bounce around and build off each other. The meeting then becomes a collective process of self-discovery and collaboration.

This is a secondary thrust that complements Optimal Contact: besides bridging group differences by minimizing anxiety and inducing empathy/perspective taking, a successful meeting will also reinforce a ‘superordinate group identity’. In non-jargon terms, it generates a larger sense of ‘We.’

This puts people from otherwise differing out-groups into a more encompassing in-group – ‘Us’ – that is rooted in the places where they live.

And given our national epidemics of loneliness and polarization, that’s a step in the right direction.

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What Else I’m Reading:

I’ve recently been enjoying the perspectives of Yascha Mounk and his media platform Persuasion. Check out this recent Persuasion piece, Much Of America’s Political Divide Is An Illusion, where Michael Baharaeen distinguishes between the fear and the reality of our political tribal factions,.

In Participation At Scale Can Repair The Public Square, Nathan Gardels provides of wonderful overview of new digital participatory tools the can help democracy adapt to our digital age and combat polarization.

In Trust in Government Is Up, but It’s Too Early to Pop the Champagne Corks, author Erin Norman makes some compelling link between civic engagement, trust in others, and trust in our government.