Before proceeding with this application, take some time to discern if this course is right for you.
"Participating in the FLOW Facilitation Training was a mind-opening and heart-opening experience. We didn't just learn important content related to each of the 10-steps - we felt into it. The sessions were well-organized, always full of thought-provoking materials, and gave plenty of space for us to practice key facilitation skills, be vulnerable and find joy in an amazing community."
—A.C., 2023 FLOW participant
Session Times:
Sundays: 16 February - 11 May, 5-8pm Eastern Time (U.S.). Skipping 20 April 2025. (Every Time Zone)
or
Tuesdays: 18 February - 13 May from 1-4pm Eastern Time (U.S.) Skipping 22 April 2025. (Every Time Zone)
As the overlapping crises of this time intensify, we see our communities becoming overwhelmed by grief, rage, despair, fear and other heavy emotions. We feel burn out tugging at our hearts and minds. We are wrapped up in a complex planetary predicament, and believe that it is our role in these times is to help create the conditions to transform to life-supporting paradigms. We feel inspired to help build them. But first, we have to create spaces to connect, process our heavy feelings, and heal.
We know that one of the greatest skills we can learn and practice in service of a better future is that of facilitating connection, growth, and healing. We must move through feelings of eco-distress and collective grief, while acquiring the skills to be with discomfort, pain, and tension without shutting down our hearts and our ability to connect.
Do you want to learn methods for building community spaces that help people acknowledge and process their heavy feelings and arrive at resilience, connection, and (re-)inspired actions?
Do you want to help prevent burnout in your community?
Do you want to help heal collective trauma?
Do you want to cultivate spaces to help your community process eco-distress and collective grief?
Apply to join the upcoming FLOW Facilitation Training.
About the 10-Step Program
LaUra Schmidt and Aimee Lewis Reau, authors of How to Live in a Chaotic Climate, created a unique 10-Step program that helps people process feelings like grief, anxiety, despair, and anger in response to large systemic crises like climate emergency, ecocide, systemic racism, classism, and state-sponsored violence. This program, 10 Steps to Resilience & Empowerment in a Chaotic Climate, has been proven to help folks rediscover their personal agency, reconnect to community members, and reinvest their energies in meaningful ways.
Learn more about our 10-Step Program by clicking here.
About the FLOW Facilitation Model
To help teach people how to facilitate the 10-Step program, LaUra and Aimee also created a unique modality of facilitation that helps people build emotional intelligence, practice courage, authenticity, and compassion, and cultivate supportive communities where possibilities for transformation and generation open. This FLOW Facilitation model has helped Good Grief Network gain recognition as an organization that can tenderly and intentionally minimize harm and encourage accountability in tension-filled, emotionally-charged spaces. Our facilitation model is informed by Climate Psychology, our formal education, and lessons from visionaries, scholars, and thinkers such as Joanna Macy, Amitav Ghosh, Francis Weller, Sherri Mitchell, Farhana Sultana, adrienne maree brown, Bayo Akomolafe, Staci Haines, Bob Doppelt, Terry Tempest Williams, Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, and more.
Just as a river flows but is guided by its banks, so too do our facilitators flow from moment to moment, step to step, session to session, creating brave, emergent spaces where participants can encounter their growth edges and identify their super powers within the supportive containers we create. Also like a river, the tributaries of ideas, perspectives, and inspirations that form our river eventually lead to a vast ocean of imagination, trust, creation, and healing.
FLOW Facilitation Training Curriculum
During our time together, you will learn how to effectively run Good Grief Network's 10-Step Program, a peer-to-peer support group where people come together to build community, process our heavy and painful feelings about the state of the world, and identify meaningful actions each of us can take. These are not therapy groups.
During our training time, you will learn:
- The values and philosophy behind Good Grief Network, which can serve as building blocks to inform your facilitation style and decision-making
- To create brave, emergent spaces that encourage authenticity, deep listening, and compassionate nonjudgment
- How to lead a number of grounding practices and embodiment exercises
- To reframe the collective predicament and help participants reclaim their personal and collective agency
- Best practices for setting expectations, managing tension and conflicting perspectives, and holding overwhelming emotions
- To increase your own distress tolerance and encourage participants to do the same
- Learn how to use poetry, music, and media to help cultivate open-hearted spaces
- Practices for tending to yourself and your own inner work in order to hold space as a facilitator
- How to FLOW with the group, by noticing your triggers and reaction points
- Ways of working with individuals and groups to deconstruct harmful cultural narratives in service of the heart-centered revolution
- And much, much more
This training is for people interested in growing their facilitation capacities, bringing the 10-Step program back to their communities, and/or learning the depth of the 10-Step philosophy. Additionally, if you want to faciltiate the 10-Step program for Good Grief Network, this training is a prerequisite.
Acceptance into this course also provides access for 1 year to the FLOW facilitation membership program that provides faciitation support, additional training opportunities, the potential to facilitate for Good Grief Network, and more.
FLOW Facilitation Training Logistics
There are two sessions of this training that will run concurrently.
We will meet for 3 hours per week, over the course of 12 weeks (13 weeks with one break). You will need to factor in another 1-3 hours for resources and out of course connection.
This application allows you to apply to either of the following course sessions:
Sundays: 16 February - 11 May, 5-8pm Eastern Time (U.S.). Skipping 20 April 2025.
or
Tuesdays: 18 February - 13 May from 1-4pm Eastern Time (U.S.) Skipping 22 April 2025. (Every Time Zone)
**These sessions will take place over a time change in the United States, which may affect your meeting time. If you live outside of the U.S., please note that we are changing times on 9 March 2025. For those in the U.S., your clocks will jump forward by one hour.**
We have three price tiers (in USD) for the 12 week course:
Solidarity Rate: $1,250
Full Rate: $1,450
Redistribution Rate: $1,650
As well as a number of partial and full scholarships available, and the ability to pay over three months.
"The FLOW Facilitation training is incredibly comprehensive, offering excellent teaching on how to be an effective facilitator while also doing a deep dive into understanding the topics of each step. I highly recommend this training for anyone wanting to support people through the global challenges in the coming years."
—E.C., 2023 FLOW participant
Very Important Notes:
We expect you to attend all 12 training sessions, barring extenuating and unforeseen circumstances. Because we are prioritizing small groups for this training, please only complete this application if you are available to attend each of the session times listed above.
We will meet weekly for 3 hours, and you will be expected to do 1-3 hours of coursework outside of our meeting space. We will assign additional lessons, articles, talks, podcast episodes to help you prepare for the weekly lessons.
GGN will host this course on our community-building platform, Mighty Networks. GGN will provide technological tutorials for those new to the platform, to help them get oriented. Each week, we will assign coursework on Mighty Networks to be completed before each session, and will suggest additional materials to help you dig deeper afterwards. We expect you to engage with the course, and by completing this application, you are indicating that you have the time and space in your schedule to dedicate to this training commitment.
Each of your training session calls will be hosted on Zoom by LaUra Schmidt and Aimee Lewis Reau. Familiarity with the Zoom platform is recommended.
This training will be hosted in English. We would like to be able to offer this course in other languages but are still a very small nonprofit organization and do not have that capacity at this time. We will use closed captions in each session.
You must complete this full application to be considered for this course. Because GGN is prioritizing small groups and participants with a diversity of lived experiences, not everyone who applies to this training will be accepted. GGN encourages you to apply for our next training if you don't make it into this one.
GGN is offering this training on a sliding scale, with several scholarships available. Please consider your relative levels of privilege, power, and resources before selecting your payment tier or applying for a scholarship. We have only a limited number of seats available in each tier; we also have a limited number of scholarships and will be prioritizing folks from marginalized identities and limited access to financial resources.
"This training is a salve for the times we must live through. Climate chaos and climate grief go hand in hand. We cannot escape the beautiful and horrifying times we are living through. Gaining skills to be a facilitator to bring people together and face this challenge is edifying and grounding. I have more strength for what is to come and I have greater tools to support the communities I work within to come to terms with our predicament with courage, and a little bit of hope."
—G.R., 2023 participant
You can contact laura@goodgriefnetwork.org directly with any questions about the FLOW Facilitation training.