facilitation means “to make easy”. We truly live in a golden age of facilitation tools and skills, and Yana takes a lot of joy in making things easier for her clients through high-level facilitation.
“Yana is a superb facilitator, trainer and consultant for communities who want to live together collaboratively. She facilitated a retreat for Bellcohousing last year, and we participants had the most honest and compassionate interactions I had experienced as a group. She sees clearly, she is very aware of the group, and she had a relatively low key approach, while at the same time effectively keeping a group on target. She understands the dynamics of living together as a group over time as a community.
"We had a couple of thorny issues that needed attention. With her compassionate understanding but clarity of insight, a long standing painful issue was finally spoken. Yana supported the “outlier” while attending to the pain of the entire group. It was as though a boil had been lanced.... Her work was so well received, that our Board and our committee that works with interpersonal conflict brought her back for two more days. Her work is stellar. We have been invaluably helped."
--Ann Fussel, Bellingham Cohousing
Yana has branched out in the past 7 years to start taking what has been learned in the communities movement and finding ways to export those lessons to broader contexts. Residential community is like a small social experimentation bubble for developing thinking, techniques and skills, and Yana is one of the best translators of that work. Any organization that has community building as a core tenant of their work can benefit from these lessons.
Yana can facilitate your annual retreat, a strategic planning process, or a tough meeting. She also offers an 8-week online facilitation training a couple times a year, and will do a training specifically for your group on request. Finally, Yana is able to lead teams in large public meetings facilitation on hard topics.
The Cooperative Culture Handbook is one of the offerings that helps bridge to the wider culture.
Yana has developed a series of tools to help forming intentional communities gain clarity and skip making some very common mistakes.