Well-facilitated conversations onsite and online—those where participants feel engaged and heard while remaining focused on results rather than diversions—are essential to advocacy. All too often, however, our conversations become bogged down in minutiae or side-tracked by topics far removed from what initially drew us together.

Join us for this highly interactive workshop that explores key skills used by effective facilitators; ways to encourage lively conversations onsite as well as through online tools including Zoom, Slack, and Google Docs; and techniques for recovering from those moments when conversations begin to veer wildly astray from the agreed-upon reason for meeting to develop and implement advocacy efforts on behalf of libraries and the communities they serve.

Goal:

By participating in this session, you will learn how to more effectively facilitate conversations that produce positive results in your advocacy efforts.

During the session, you will:

• Explore at least three approaches successful facilitators use in guiding conversations toward positive, productive results
• Identify at least three ways to keep conversations on track to produce the results your conversations were designed to produce
• Explore how to use at least three resources (Zoom, Slack, and Google Docs) you can use to facilitate online engagement as you design and implement your advocacy efforts

Session Facilitator:  

Paul Signorelli, CLA Library Advocacy Training Project Manager and author of Change the World Using Social Media (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), has more than a decade of experience facilitating productive conversations and meetings in settings ranging from workshops and training sessions to employee assistance program sessions exploring topics including conflict resolution; running effective meetings; and assertive speaking and active listening.

About the Ursula Meyer Advocacy Fund Training Series

This program is part of an ongoing series of monthly online sessions organized offered through the Ursula Meyer Advocacy Fund Training Series; sessions are generally held online on the second Wednesday of each month, beginning at 10 am PT. The series honors the memory of Ursula Meyer, 1977-78 CLA President, California Library Hall of Fame inductee, longtime director of the Stockton-San Joaquin Public Library, and fierce advocate for library services and intellectual freedom. The Ursula Meyer Fund was established to provide for the training of librarians in all stages of their careers, and library supporters, in political advocacy and political action, in honor of Ursula’s belief that librarians need effective political skills to advocate for library support at all levels of government.