navigating contradictions in social movement facilitation

This project is ongoing-evolving.

This study-research-stewardship project centers on the experiences of movement strategists and consultants, in particular those who teach ‘liberatory’ or ‘anti-oppressive’ facilitation skills.

I contextualize and complicate paid movement capacity-building work and contemporary social movement facilitation as radical adult education. I analyze and ask questions about the professionalization of organizational capacity-building, and of social justice work overall.

I am interested in the broader challenges and perceived contradictions within such work, in particular to examine how colonial thinking persists in our experiments with activism and liberatory practice. By naming and tracing the complexities of their practice, I’m encountering how befriending contradictions is integral to transcending colonial thinking and structures.

The first stage of this project was completed via my graduate studies at NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, in the form of interview-based qualitative research and story stewardship, and resulting in my master’s thesis.

This writing analyzed the experiences of facilitation practitioners, demonstrating how they define this evolving work and its significance. I observe and emphasize that “liberatory facilitation” is a kind of pedagogy which (a) increases democratic decision-making and community governance, and (b) nurtures a culture of relationality by prioritizing trust, care, conflict transformation, and solidarity. Facilitation thus prefigures practices for shared power and alternatives to top-down institutions.

I also examined how these practitioners navigate the dilemmas of working both within and in resistance to the “nonprofit industrial complex.” They confront tensions on multiple registers, from their pedagogical approaches with learners/clients, to sustaining their paid work amidst capitalist economic precarity. They grapple with hierarchical organizational structure and culture, the commodification and co-optation of “social justice consulting,” and neoliberal ideologies of careerism and entrepreneurship.

These educator-practitioners make social movement facilitation work legible and inspiring, creating conditions for epistemological pluralism and experimentation, both for themselves and with learners/clients.

Keywords: social movements, facilitation, organizational change, adult education, democratic practice, nonprofit industrial complex, social justice consulting, paradox