facilitation

Nonprofit Team Retreats in the San Francisco Bay Area and Beyond

I’m extremely pleased to be offering team retreats for nonprofit leadership teams in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. 

Typically two days, these facilitated retreats offer a chance for your nonprofit’s leadership team to have in-depth conversations about the issues that matter most for your organization, craft a vision for the future, reconnect as a united team, and so much more.  

In the past few years, I’ve found particular joy in working with nonprofit leadership teams, which is why I’m making this a major focus of my offerings in 2025.

What is a leadership team? The answer to this question depends on the organization. Typically, a leadership team includes the executive director and the top-level staff (sometimes called the executive team or the leadership team) and may include all managers or all directors at an organization.

What are some of the problems leadership teams face? Nonprofit leadership teams can face any number of different problems: disagreement about the future of an organization, communication issues, knowledge gaps, uncertainty about the future, unresolved disagreement and personality conflicts, resource management issues, work style issues, and so much more. Left unchecked, these problems can fester and become bigger problems later. Building deep connection across the leadership team around the organization’s mission is the first step to mending these fractures.

Sometimes, there isn’t a problem at all – but an opportunity. Even teams that are working great together and in total alignment can benefit from a retreat. A retreat can help the team adopt the same strategy, identify opportunities for improvement, and celebrate recent wins.

Retreats are uniquely impactful. I’ve restructured Groundwork Strategy in the last few years to prioritize in-person retreats specifically because I’ve seen how effective they can be at creating lasting, positive change at an organization. A well-executed retreat can be a catalyst for massive evolution in an organization, where crucial conversations unfold safely and new visions for the future are co-designed by participants.

Through custom leadership team retreats, teams are able to:  

  • Identify the biggest points of tension and uncertainty among team members and proactively address those issues;
  • Rebuild relationships that have gotten out of alignment;
  • Design a shared vision for the future of the organization;
  • Make crucial decisions;
  • Address burn out among team members;
  • Build key skills that will help leaders be far more effective;
  • Create a sense of connection and teamwork that will help the team thrive; and
  • Inject new energy and purpose into a leadership team.

Leadership team retreats are not the only retreats I offer; you can also reach out for retreats for your full staff, coalition, board of directors, or other teams within the organization.

If you’re curious about working together to plan a retreat, don’t delay. Schedule a meeting today and we can talk about your hopes for the organization.

Please note that I currently offer in-person retreats, either in the San Francisco Bay Area or beyond. I do not offer remote facilitation (over Zoom or similar) nor do I offer hybrid facilitation (where some participants call in and some are in person). That’s because the retreat I co-create with you will be designed to be a catalyst for change, connection, and renewal—and I haven’t found any way to reproduce that virtually.

Feature photo generated by AI from WordPress.

5 Facilitation Hacks for Large Groups

Last week I finally made it out to part of the Nonprofit Dev Summit hosted by Aspiration. I had hoped to be there all three days, but work obligations got in the way. While there, I noticed a few tricks that I thought helped create a space that was more safe and inclusive, techniques I plan to unabashedly steal the next time I’m working with a very large group of folks who don’t know each other:

  1. Lanyards colored-coded for photo privacy. As a privacy advocate by profession as well as by passion, this one delighted me. Participants were offered two lanyard choices when they arrived: blue and red. Blue indicated that the participant didn’t mind being caught in photos, whereas red meant no photos as all—including being in the background of someone else’s photos. This can bring a small but important measure of comfort both to folks who may risk their lives to attend activism events as well as for anybody who wants to minimize their digital footprint.
  2. Pronoun options on nametags. Participants were invited to indicate their gender pronoun in Sharpie on their nametags when they first walked in. (Learn more.) I loved this because it surfaces pronoun preferences visibly whenever you are speaking to someone. I also appreciated that it was entirely optional—no one had to put themselves into a pronoun box if they didn’t want to, or publicly indicate anything about their pronoun at all if it would make them uncomfortable.
  3. Clearly identifying who can be approached if a problem occurs. I really appreciated how every person affiliated with Aspiration was named and publicly acknowledged at the beginning, with the specific suggestion that these folks could help out if at any time someone in the conference felt uncomfortable or concerned. Two improvements I would make to this: give staff members a special shirt or hat, so that folks can identify them at a glance in a crowd; repeat the process of identifying staff members multiple times. I wasn’t there the entire conference and so I can’t say whether this was repeated, but it’s the type of information I think needs to be reiterated a few times throughout the event for latecomers. I also hope these staff members were available during after-hours events, since I imagine that may be where many issues could crop up. (I didn’t go to any of the happy hours connected to the conference.)
  4. A preference for plain language. The conference organizers specifically asked that participants use plain language, avoiding inside-baseball jargon and acronyms. (For example, “teaching the trainers” instead of “TTT” or “The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the law governing email privacy” instead of ECPA.) This is so necessary for international participants for whom English is a second language (there were many) as well as anybody who might be easing into a topic for the first time. No movement can grow unless it can welcome in newcomers, and language choices can either alienate or invite participation from new folks.
  5. Diversity in participant-leaders. Aspiration’s meeting facilitation style relies heavily on creating small groups run by facilitators who are themselves attendees of the conference. This generally requires Aspiration to ask a number of people at the conference to serve as small group facilitators. (While people can volunteer, often Aspiration ends up requesting people take on this role.) I noticed that the facilitators chosen were diverse—people of color, people across the gender spectrum, and people from a range of different age groups. I did a quick tally while I was at the event, and it seemed that about half of the group facilitators were female-presenting. I don’t know if that was done intentionally, but I appreciated it.

This isn’t a comprehensive list of everything the conference did to create comfort for the participants, nor is it a list of everything a conference should do to be inclusive and safe (if you know a good list for the latter, please let me know because I’d love to read it). But as I’ve been thinking more about large group facilitation, I appreciated seeing these practices work seamlessly at the conference.