Facilitation
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
–African proverb
Nonprofit Strategic Planning Facilitation
We help groups have the conversations 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:
Nonprofit 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 nonprofit 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. Through meeting agreements, decision-making tools, small-group work, and other participatory practices, we 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.
Select Facilitation Clients
Our Facilitation Process
-
We talk with you to understand your goals, the context for the meeting you want facilitated, what’s at stake, and what you want the group to accomplish. Together, we articulate meeting objectives, identify who should be involved, and determine what will help create the conditions for a productive gathering.
-
We design a customized agenda and facilitation approach around your goals, meeting objectives, timeline, group dynamics, and participants’ needs. We typically engage participants in advance to gather their perspectives, help shape the session, build readiness, and create meaningful opportunities for their engagement.
-
As we facilitate the session, we create a space where people can participate fully. We take care of the process so you and your participants can stay focused on the work. We bring our experience, expertise, and strategic perspective to the conversation, offering observations, questions, strategic perspective, and consultation when helpful. We listen closely, track the dynamics in the room, and adapt in real time as the conversation unfolds — providing both the structure and expertise needed to help your group do its best work.
-
We capture key themes, decisions, areas of alignment and difference, and agreed-upon next steps in clear, useful written outputs.
-
We often provide follow-up support to help your team translate the conversation into action and carry the work forward.
When we’re done, you’ll have:
Greater clarity about the issues, opportunities, and decisions in front of you
A deeper understanding of different perspectives, priorities, and areas of agreement and difference
Thoughtfully considered decisions and priorities informed by the group’s collective knowledge and expertise
Alignment and shared commitment around what you’re trying to accomplish and how you’ll move forward
Greater trust, stronger relationships, and collective ownership that support continued collaboration
A clear path forward, with concrete actions, responsibilities, and next steps
A useful record of the conversation, capturing key themes, decisions, areas of alignment and difference, and commitments
Greater capacity to navigate complexity, work through differences, and make decisions together
A foundation for taking the next steps
In Our Clients’ Words
-
![]()
“Belinda helped our board and team to see eye-to-eye, get back on the same team together, and collectively envision the future we want for our organization and those we serve. It was a very healing and productive experience and provided numerous concrete next steps to keep us moving forward together in a healthier, more effective, and more joyful way.”
Jessica Hansen, MSW, Executive Director, Alliance for Smiles
-
![]()
“We have worked with Belinda for years. She is rigorous in her preparation, always asks excellent questions, and facilitates challenging conversations with tremendous skill and sensitivity. She brings to her work a clear-eyed view of the challenges that organizations like ours can face, based on her own experiences as an executive director as well as a consultant.”
Jason Marsh, Executive Director and Editor in Chief, UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center
-
![]()
"Belinda brings a rare combination of heart, mind and spirit to her work - she is instantly likable and trustworthy, and equally knowledgeable and strategic. Her keen intellect, deep organizational experience and warm personality are truly a winning combination. I recommend her without hesitation to any non-profit leader."
Ann Shulman, Former Executive Director, UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center
Related Case Studies
Facilitation FAQs
-
Both. Most of our planning meetings take place virtually, but we also value opportunities to meet and get to know our clients in person, when possible. Our retreats and facilitations take place in person or virtually, depending on the needs of the group. When needed, we can also conduct hybrid meetings with some participants joining virtually and others attending in person. Whether virtual, in person, or hybrid, we use interactive tools and participatory practices to engage all participants and support connection and meaningful dialogue.
-
We do both. While we can facilitate a one-time retreat, meeting, or convening, our facilitation services are most often part of a longer-term engagement.
Working with you over time allows us to understand your nonprofit organization and its context more deeply, build relationships, and support you, your team, and your organization across the full arc of your work — from preparation and engagement to decision-making, alignment, and implementation.
-
For a typical retreat, we recommend at least three to six months lead time to allow us to thoughtfully design the session and give you and your team time to prepare. We can sometimes accommodate shorter timelines, and we are happy to talk about what is possible.
-
Facilitation is typically an integral part of our longer-term nonprofit consulting engagements. We often:
Facilitate board, staff, and stakeholder meetings throughout strategic planning processes
Facilitate conversations with board members and staff leaders at retreats as part of our board development services
Convene stakeholders as part of community engagement efforts
Support multi-organization coalitions and other collaborations at various stages of their work
Facilitate grantmaking committees and foundation trustees as part of our grantmaking and philanthropy services
In these engagements, facilitation is not a standalone event — it is part of a broader effort to support your team in building understanding, navigating differences, making decisions, strengthening alignment, and advancing your goals and mission.
-
Engaging a facilitator means that your organization’s leaders can focus on being present with the content of the meeting and the people in the room, while the facilitator takes care of the process.
It is difficult for a nonprofit leader to both participate fully in a conversation and be responsible for guiding it. This is especially true when the issues are complex, perspectives differ, power dynamics are at play, or the decisions have significant implications for the organization. An outside facilitator can create the space for people to engage openly, surface differences, listen to one another, and work through difficult issues — while helping the group stay focused on what it needs to accomplish. This allows nonprofit leaders to focus on participating in the work, rather than having to manage the process, too.