After 15 years of facilitating collaboration across Europe and beyond, I’ve learned that the best outcomes emerge when we work as partners. This isn’t about delivering a service and walking away—it’s about co-creating meaningful change together.
Based on a conversation with my co-collaborator Naomi Saelens and with help from Claude.ai, I put together this overview of what partnership can look like in practice, and what you can expect when we work together.
How We’ll Work Together
We Start with Clarity
Every collaboration begins with a clear briefing. What do you want to achieve? When will you know you’ve succeeded? Who needs to be involved? This isn’t about rigid plans—it’s about building a shared understanding of where we’re headed and what success looks like for you and your organisation.
We Build a Container Together
Now that we know what we will work on, we should agree on how we want to get there. What are key principles and values? How do we decide? This might sound tedious, but it’s actually quite practical: we’re making explicit the often-implicit agreements that make or break collaborative work.
Most importantly, we do this in the spirit of doing-it-together. When challenges arise—and they will—we navigate them together rather than pointing fingers.
We Focus on What Matters
My facilitation approach centers three interconnected pathways to meaningful change:
⛯ Building deep relations: within teams, between organisations, across differences. Strong relationships are the foundation for everything else.
⛯ Injecting creativity and well-being: because joy, playfulness, and care for ourselves and each other aren’t luxuries. They’re essential fuel for sustainable work.
⛯ Delivering tangible results: plans, decisions, next steps, agreements, and new ways of working together. We’re here to make real change happen.
These aren’t trade-offs. When we tend to relationships and well-being, better results emerge. When we make space for creativity and fun, concrete outcomes can flourish.
We Share Responsibility
Success (and failure) belong to all of us. This means you and your team make your own to-do lists, documentation, and follow-up reports—because you know best what you need to move forward and what will actually get used.
I’m not a consultant who writes you a polished report and disappears. My approach is learning-by-doing, where change happens one careful step after the next. I’ll support you in capturing insights and next steps, but the work stays with you, owned by the people who’ll carry it forward.
We Work with Co-Facilitation
I always work with at least one co-facilitator. Why? Because:
- Quality: Two or more facilitators can read the room better, adapt faster, and hold more complexity. And they can take different roles as needed to hold a successful process.
- Continuity: If one of us gets sick or has an emergency, your process doesn’t fall apart.
- Diverse representation: Different perspectives, experiences, and facilitation styles serve your group better.
- Modeling: We demonstrate the collaboration we’re trying to build. Having each other’s back, joyful relationships, owning up to mistakes.
This might sound expensive. But, after investing significant time and resources to bring your group together, why would you want to save costs on the facilitation that can make this a real success?
We Invest Time Properly
Quality facilitation requires space to breathe. My general framework for workshops, retreats, and other sessions:
- Preparation: minimum as long as the delivery time, with bigger teams or higher complexity we need longer (e.g. 2 days for a 2-day team retreat or 6 days for a 3-day partner-building workshop)
- Delivery: the workshop, retreat, or session itself
- Aftercare: minimum half a day for simple documentation and debriefing, longer for more detailed reporting, recommendations or follow-up
Aftercare includes feedback sessions, debriefing with organisers, refining documentation, and planning next steps. This isn’t luxurious padding—it’s what ensures your investment actually lands and creates the lasting change you need.
Who I Work Best With
I thrive working with nonprofit leaders and teams who:
✓ Are willing to shift perspectives and experiment
✓ Value process as much as outcomes
✓ See complexity as an opportunity, not just a problem
✓ Believe that joy and creativity are essential, not optional
✓ Are ready to work across differences in perspective, identity, and approach
✓ Want to build capacity, not just get through the next milestone
If your organisation is genuinely curious about improving ways of working together and willing to invest the time to make change stick, we’ll likely be a good fit.
What I Don’t Do
Let me be direct about work that isn’t a good match:
✗ Quick-fix workshops: If you’re looking for a half-day session to “solve” a deep organisational challenge, I’m not your facilitator. Real change takes real time.
✗ Resistance to shared power: If leadership wants to maintain all decision-making authority while appearing participatory, we’ll all be frustrated.
✗ Solo facilitation of large groups: Asking one facilitator to hold space for 100+ people for multiple days isn’t just exhausting—it’s a disservice to participants and to your mission.
✗ Business-as-usual consulting: If you want someone to tell you what to do, write you a strategy document, and leave, there are excellent consultants who do that work. It’s just not what I do.
What You Can Expect from Me
When we work together, you can count on:
☞ Full presence and adaptability: I read the room, sense what’s needed, and adjust in the moment while staying true to our shared purpose.
☞ Honest feedback and loving challenge: I won’t just tell you what you want to hear. I’ll share what I notice, ask hard questions, and try to push gently when that’s what’s needed.
☞ Deep listening and holding space: For complexity, for emotions, for the things that don’t get said in typical meetings, for what wants to emerge.
☞ Confidentiality and integrity: What’s shared in our work together stays there, unless we explicitly agree otherwise.
☞ A connectionist, holist, strategic approach: I see patterns, connections, and systemic dynamics. I think several steps ahead while staying present to what’s happening now.
☞ Warmth without fluff: I care deeply about this work and the people I work with, and I won’t waste your time with unnecessary process or jargon.
Ready to Explore?
If this resonates with how you want to work, let’s talk. I offer a free initial conversation to explore if we’re a good fit and what kind of collaboration might make sense.
Termin buchen or reach out directly at [email protected].
I look forward to hearing what you’re working on and exploring how we might collaborate!
