“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
— African proverb
Facilitation
We help groups have the conversations they need to advance change. Whether you’re navigating a complex decision, strengthening a team, or bringing diverse voices together around a common goal, our facilitation services help turn conversation into clarity and collaboration into action.
Lyons-Newman Consulting facilitates strategic planning retreats, board retreats, community convenings, and multi-stakeholder collaborations for nonprofits and foundations across the San Francisco Bay Area and California. We bring a community-organizing approach, the warmth and discipline that good facilitation requires, and decades of nonprofit experience.
We facilitate:
Strategic planning retreats and working sessions, typically as part of a longer strategic planning engagement.
Board retreats, including board best practices training, governance retreats, and board-staff retreats.
Staff retreats focused on team building, vision setting, navigating organizational change, and other strategic priorities.
Community convenings that bring together people and organizations around a shared purpose.
Multi-organization collaborations, including funder collaboratives, cross-sector working groups, and coalitions.
Our facilitation approach
Our facilitation is highly engaging and interactive. We create inclusive spaces designed to build trust, foster belonging, and enable people to contribute their best thinking. Through deep listening, empathy, and careful attention to your group’s dynamics, we help participants feel heard, navigate complexity, surface diverse perspectives, work through differences, and make meaningful progress.
We don't apply a prescribed methodology; we select the approaches and tools that best fit your goals, context, and people. We use meeting agreements, decision-making tools, small-group work, and other participatory practices to help groups do their best work. We draw on a range of facilitation approaches and frameworks — including design thinking, Liberating Structures, Technology of Participation (ToP), participatory facilitation, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and collective impact and adapt them flexibly to the needs of each group.
Our community-organizing approach to facilitation means designing every session to foster meaningful participation, inclusion, and belonging — with explicit attention to whose voices are included, whose perspectives may be missing, and how power shapes the conversation. In addition to serving as a strategic thought partner, our role includes helping groups build the understanding, alignment, and shared commitment they need to make good decisions and move forward together.