Facilitating Dialogue in Times of Rupture A 3-days in person training in Berlin to dive into new ways of practicing Facilitation. In collaboration with the Berlin Hub - Civil Society Forum Staying human together is the work of now Facilitating Dialogue in Times of Rupture A 3-day in-person course for civil society practitioners 16-18 October 2025 Berlin Organised in collaboration with the Berlin Hub – Floating Market of Ideas and Solidarity for Civil Society – a project by the Civil Society Forum. Here all details about the training Why this training is needed now? We are living through a time of immense rupture. Imperial wars, mass displacement, and authoritarianism are accelerating under the shadow of mass militarization — including the unchecked rise of AI-driven warfare and surveillance. At the same time, climate collapse, economic dispossession, and systemic violence deepen the wounds of imperialism and colonialism, displacing millions while far-right governments scapegoat the displaced for the failures of our broken systems. Trans and queer folks face escalating attacks on bodily autonomy, safety, and belonging. Everywhere, as the fractures of injustice widen and our pain deepens, those organizing against these atrocities are finding it harder than ever to stick together. In this era of mass disconnection, our ability to organize across our differences is becoming one of the most urgent skills of our time. Civil society actors — activists, organizers, artists, journalists, educators, community leaders, neighborhood and land defenders — are on the frontlines of these overlapping crises. We are asked to co-create spaces of participation, healing, and dialogue. But too often, the tools we’ve used lead to severing and fragmentation, rather than connection and coalition-building. We find ourselves in rooms where silence and fear dominate, where pain overwhelms, and where the risk of othering feels dangerously high. Facilitation — the role of guiding groups through conversation, conflict, collaboration, and collective transformation — can offer our movements so much more than crisis management. It can bring more ease in the midst of the most difficult conversations of our time. It can make room for lightness without denying pain, for connection without demanding resolution. When practiced with courage, care and consistency, facilitation can go beyond a mere toolbox for dialogue, and actually serve to shift the norms of how we share space and resources, collaborate to address shared challenges, and relate to each other and to our world — helping us to foster joy, cultivate solidarity and grow collective resilience. Facilitation as Holding Space Practice This course is an urgent invitation to rethink how we hold space, how we gather, and how we care for one another in this era of collapse and courage. Now is the time to: Reimagine facilitation as a radical relational practice — one that embraces and harnesses the power of our grief, rage, and even anxiety. Learn to be with both pain and tension without shutting down, and to move through conflict without treating each other as disposable. Hold space not just for dialogue, but for dignity and belonging — learning and growing as we go, while still showing up authentically This is a space for those who refuse to look away. For those who understand that silence is not safety, and that neutrality — in the face of violence, oppression, and erasure — is complicity. We don’t gather to smooth over tension or pretend pain isn’t in the room. We gather to face ourselves and each other in our wholeness — fully, honestly, and together. In this context, the call to facilitate is not just about learning and repeating a set of tools and techniques. It is an act of courage and radical imagination. It is resisting our fragmentation. It is how we create spaces for naming truths, holding contradictions, and honoring our shared dignity — even and especially while everything around us seems to be breaking. What will you learn? Through an experiential, participatory and conversation-based learning format, we will explore together: Deep listening and witnessing Power and group dynamics Setting spaces for connection Conscious communication Potential of stories and storytelling Trauma-informed practices for (co-)regulation Tending to disagreement, hurt, harm and conflict Harvesting collective intelligence Foundations of learning and session design Building community and connection beyond collaboration Inspired and informed by practices and approaches such as Art of Hosting, Theatre of the Oppressed, Work that Reconnects, Holding Change, Politics of Trauma, Resilience Toolkit, Trauma Informed Facilitation Meet the Hosting team - trainers Alice Priori (she/her) is an activist, community and process facilitator, Art of Hosting practitioner, and dancer. Mediterranean, lived in the Middle East and now based in Berlin, she is researching and practicing how experiential learning formats that center relationality, embodiment, and decolonial thinking can nourish new radical imaginations and cultures of care. Alice is the co-founder and coordinator of the CitizensLab e.V. CitizensLab e.V. is a Berlin-based NGO action-researching how to bring a regenerative approach into the field of social justice, societal transformation, and citizen engagement, integrating the cognitive, the emotional and the physical body as we seek to rewrite current narratives of democracy. Sarj Lynch (they/them) is a Berlin-based facilitator, participation designer and community care organizer with a lot of curiosity. They are interested in dreaming new realities and practicing utopias with people who care. They are a co-initiator of aequa (2018), the aequa Workshops Collective (2020), and Berlin Collective Action e.V. (2020). They are also a resident of Refuge Worldwide, hosting the monthly aequa Radio show. Growing up as the oldest kid of five in a single-parent household, their role as a teacher started from age 3, and their work in community organizing started around age 8. aequa is a community for social equity, solidarity and mutual support — an intersectional network of people and projects brought together by our shared vision of a world in which everyone can thrive. Together, we explore hope as a practice, becoming more capable together and growing our collective power in the process.