Seed by Seed: Facilitation training at Massey Wellington

Finding good training around facilitation is hard to come by, that’s why when the Lifehack crew saw that Seed by Seed in collaboration with the good people at the Massey University Centre for Public Health Research we knew it would be good!The training was attended by people from across the country, with a mixture of academics, youth workers and employment consultants. Working at this intersection provided opportunities for everyone to share stories full of rich examples of people leading and being part of initiatives that support young New Zealanders to Flourish.The Seed by Seed facilitators Mischa and Danielle treated us to a variety of different tools to energise groups of young people – included in this was blind sword fighting, creating sculptures from newspaper, and more. The idea was to go through a list of exercises and find out as a participant what the effect of them is on the group, as well as individuals. The conversations post-exercise were directed at finding the different ways we can create spaces that are safe as well as conducive to learning.

Unpacking the different exercises as we did them allowed us collective insight as into how they would be received by a group as well as what kind of issues you might run into when facilitating such an experience. Additionally when it comes to experience, we talked about how different exercises are constructed, and how to use them in a specific context in order to arrive at a particular outcome. Having such a clear pathway for using these tools was much needed for us to really see the value that we can deliver as facilitators when working with young people across Aotearoa New Zealand.
We can’t speak highly enough about this training, Mischa and Danielle are awesome – if you’re in Toronto look them up and keep connected with them via the SeedbySeed Facebook page.