This course offers practitioners insights and skills in group facilitation, a powerful therapeutic approach that fosters healing connection with self and others. We will cover areas including understanding and developing purpose, establishing and sustaining safety, working with mandated and voluntary participants, creating and maintaining growthful, inclusive environments for clients, stages of group development and how to work within each stage, handling conflict in groups, the therapeutic value and purposeful use of activity, self-awareness as a practitioner and dynamics of oppression and power. This presentation aims to empower participants to facilitate groups spaces of healing connection and transformation with a diversity of participants.
Learning Objectives:
Demonstrate knowledge of how to foster safety, mutual support and empowerment of participants in a group through intentional facilitation.
Demonstrate awareness of and knowledge about addressing dynamics of power and oppression among participants and between facilitator and participants.
Demonstrate knowledge of the importance of and how to develop purpose of a group.
Demonstrate knowledge of the stages of group development.
More about Shira
Shira Sameroff, LCSW is a therapist, coach and teacher with experience rooted in decades of practice with people of diverse identities, ages and life stories in a wide array of settings. Professional roles have included therapy, supervision, professional development training, coaching, teaching, community organizing, transformative decluttering and a decade and a half on the leadership team of a community-based social work agency in Brooklyn, NY, US.. Shira weaves a range of therapeutic healing modalities including IFS, Hakomi and other holistic, somatic, nature-based and anti-oppressive practices into her practice. Shira offers therapy, coaching and professional development for individuals and organizations around themes including group facilitation, working with shame, oppression-ending practices, giving and receiving feedback, empowering practice with youth and tending to self as a practitioner. Shira’s approach is collaborative, intuitive, creative and full of heart and is rooted in my own lived experience of healing, learning and emerging.