The Art of Facilitation in Funding Organisations
Facilitation as an unlock
Facilitation is often seen as a subtle skill — something that works so seamlessly it’s almost invisible. But within a funding organisation, where power dynamics, collaboration, and innovation intersect, facilitation is not just a skill — it’s an unlock.
I came to working with funders, initially through supporting funder collaboratives and ad hoc facilitation projects. These experiences gave me the impetus to step more deeply into the role and identity of a ‘funder’ and play with ways facilitation can be embedded into an organisation. This piece explores some of the different ways we’ve integrated facilitation into our ways of working at Thirty Percy over the last few years. Both what we’ve tried and some of the reflections and challenges that come with that.
Facilitation as Leadership
Often we think of facilitation being about the person at the font of a room guiding a process. But over time, I’ve come to see that facilitation isn’t merely a tool; it’s a way of leading, connecting, and enabling progress.
I like to think of myself as a facilitative leader. A facilitative leadership approach underpins much of my work. This involves designing processes, enabling others, establishing direction, and creating open, inclusive systems to meet shared goals. At other points really embracing emergence and working from that. At its core, facilitative leadership requires time, patience, and active listening. It’s about supporting others to bring their best contributions forward while ensuring the collective effort aligns towards a common purpose.
However, facilitative leadership isn’t always straightforward — especially in the philanthropic space. Some of the shadow can be that it takes time. It isn’t the traditional directive leadership that is expected. There are moments where I can feel people’s heads and eyes turn to me, looking for direction or reassurance. Is this me denying my own power and position, or creating the space and conditions for others to find the best step forward?
And while a facilitative leadership can be enabling, it’s rarely enough on its own.
Building a Network of Facilitators
I’m biased* but I don’t think there is such a thing as too many facilitators.
So much of our work at Thirty Percy has involved facilitation in some form. Where bringing in these skills in house doesn’t always make sense — particularly when you have funder power dynamics to design for, cultivating a wider network of facilitation skills becomes really important. Our wider network comprises some long term collaborators skilled in process and community facilitation — each who help bolster and bring our intentions to life. Be that Anya supporting Forest of Dean Climate Action Partnership work, Goldie with Gloucestershire Civic Leaders work, Abdul supporting our codesign work with Elders, and Camilla through the funding sprints. Their presence highlights something I’ve increasingly come to understand: facilitation skills can be surprisingly rare within funding organisations but can play a really important role to ensure our funding and support meets people and their needs in a more grounded and equitable way.
Their contracts are written so the accountability is to the purpose of the work, not to us as funders — to try and minimise any way we could sway or overly influence the work. While having someone separate from us and the organisation enables people to speak more honestly, some of these individuals have felt people interact with them differently knowing they have a close working relationship with us as funders. Perhaps an inevitability of where processes involved distribution of funds.
Bringing external facilitators
Even though I could design and guide countless processes, I soon realised the need to bring others with these skills into our work. Being a leader in an organisation, particularly a funding organisation, doesn’t always mean it’s appropriate for me to lead all processes. And there are some things that an external perspective is absolutely necessary to hold.
So quite quickly I found myself writing a brief for another facilitator — and in term a commissioner of such processes. But from the place of being the one responding to such briefs. That has led to some expansive work over the last 18months we’ve worked closely with a brilliant facilitator Camilla Gordon to support us evolving our funding to individuals. She’s helped to design and hold three’award winning funding sprints — bringing care, craft and fun to the process.
Not only has it enabled us collectively to distribute £3.75million to a community of changemakers(the Changemaker Trust Fund, Honouring Fund and Infrastructure Changemaker Fund) but it’s allowed us to challenge and disrupt our own ways of working, bringing new ideas to how we fund, supported the team to develop and form and be more able to adapt to a fast changing environment we’re working in.
There’s no way we could have done all of this without the rigour and fresh perspective and vast set of experience Camilla bought.
That’s not to say it’s always easy — we perhaps underestimated what it would take of her, and us. And despite doing this three times — each process bought its own set of challenges. But it’s been a really important part of the Thirty Percy story and approach.
Pushing the Boundaries: Supporting facilitators
I’ve often seen peers, myself included, thrust into positions of immense power and influence without sufficient scaffolding or support. It can feel daunting and, at times, isolating.
I know many facilitators, like coaches — are starting to explore the role of Supervision to support them. Providing a space to process what comes up for the individuals and how you’re holding this in a space, how it might unintentionally be influencing the group or a process. This becomes particularly important when you’re guiding processes that have power and money tied into them. Reflective practice really is critical for this.
But there’s more that I think can be done in response to this. We got to really test this with our third funding spring Oct — Dec 2024. Our sense was that more could be done to support Camilla who was facilitating and designing the process and facilitators and in turn those of us participating in the process. We also wanted to use this opportunity as a way to explore ways to build up facilitation skills — knowing the paths and routes into this work, or spaces to develop and deepen the craft aren’t always clear or obvious.
We turned this into a deeper investment in exploring what facilitation could look like when pushed to its edges. So complimenting Camilla’s space holding with:
1. A witness: inviting in a stranger
Really wanting to use this opportunity for others looking to deepen and develop their facilitation practice. We outlined the role to be — and Catherine Wilks stepped into the role
While in the sessions — Catherine was tasked not to speak, her role to really observe and notice the process. Some debriefing with Camilla between breaks — and supporting her to make choices about how to iterate. And a real rarity — as people used to holding space and groups — and adapt to doing that. It’s rare to be in a space and invited to notice. Catherine found it.
Catherine’s written about her experience of this role — and provides a really right insight into all the things that facilitators think about when creating spaces. Opening up the craft and considerations and the expanse of what that looks like. And for those of us who experienced the process — and opportunity to really consider our experience too.
We’re exploring how else to integrate this role of witness into other parts of our work too and I know Catherine is too. This role can really help people and processes really be seen, bring some accountability and make space for the reflective / learning that is so easy to deprioritise. Our original brief is here if you want to craft or integrate something like this into your work too.
2. Back of stage support
Any great band would have people behind the stage supporting the technicalities and practicals. Alessandro supported Camilla to process and download between sessions, in Ale’s words:
“My role in the debriefs allowed me to help surface key insights, challenge certain assumptions, and offer an external perspective. The process reinforced my appreciation for the importance of structured debriefing — not just for capturing lessons learned, but also for providing facilitators with the space to process their own experiences.“
When you’re iterating a process in response to a room it can be hard to keep track of the deviations and the paths you’ve taken. So Ale supported Camilla to track the week by week process as well as an optional reflection conversation for each participant to make sense of their role and experience. This provided an opportunity to see some of the dynamics that often play out in this work, but from a less involved and different vantage point.
We’ll be sharing more about our experience and roles as part of the International Association of Facilitators conference in Birmingham on 25th April 2025.
What does this mean for philanthropy:
While I think front of room or process facilitation is starting to be more understood. Facilitation often feels seamless when it’s done well. It’s invisible, intuitive, and deeply designed — but these very qualities can make it hard to value or justify.
Facilitation, especially within the philanthropic space — but not only — is about more than smooth processes or efficient meetings. It’s about unlocking potential — of people, ideas, and systems. It plays a critical role in creating safer spaces, cultivating trusting relationships that are the bedrock for any change work and creation of more equitable processes. But it can also do the opposite if not supported or invested in adequately.
It’s unfortunate if the reason our collaborations fail or break down is due to a lack of investment in the core elements. Sadly, this pattern seems to occur too often. By denying this essential investment, we’re limiting the full potential of what we can achieve and setting things up to fail.
If we as funders are to take responsibility and a duty of care for ethical, equitable and safer processes — we need to really design for this. Bringing a facilitator in is a good start — but there’s more we can do.
By valuing and investing in facilitation, we create the conditions for equity, collaboration, reflection, and transformation.
But here’s six things I think could be done on the path to this:
- Start small — test out bringing someone in to hold that conversation you might be avoiding / dreading / where you know you’re going to have to hold back
- Craft your briefs — get honest input from facilitators about what it really takes, are your expectations matching the commitment (of time and money)?
- Double the budget for facilitation — think about the support around a sole person or team to make your work deeper and more resilient. As a minimum offer to contribute to their facilitation materials or offer to buy this facilitation kit (a facilitators dream!)
- Build capacity in your own teams and those your support — there’s some brilliant people offering training and support for people looking to develop Art of Hosting, Holding Space from Ray Cooper, Facilitation 101 from Julia Slay, and deepen their facilitation skills and approaches Spark from the School of Systems Change, Tripod — training for social action and Navigate developing conflict facilitation skills.
- Invest in your programmatic areas ability to include more process facilitation in strategic design — we often focus on the outcomes of change, but not enough on how to achieve it.
- Hire in people with facilitation skills into your teams directly — particularly if you want to take a more relational approach to how you fund
To truly unlock the potential of facilitation in the philanthropic space, one facilitator isn’t enough. It requires a broader commitment to embedding facilitation as a core function, not just a support role.
- Disclaimer: I am hugely biased as I strongly identify with the facilitator identity. But ultimately — aren’t we all really facilitators of our own lives.
