My name is Yana Ludwig, and I’m inviting you to join my Community-Centered Facilitation course this summer!

I know that’s a bit of a bold ask on my part. You may have no idea who I am. You may feel like your community doesn’t need any more training. You may feel like it’s too much of an investment. I get it. I’ve spent 27 years living in communal groups and I know sometimes getting professional training feels unnecessary and maybe even a bit invasive: how can a stranger possibly know what we need?

But I do know community. I know that it is complicated and hard to live together. I also know that when it works it is – to quote a fellow community founder I had dinner with this week – utter magic. I know that trying to cooperate when we’ve been trained from childhood as Americans to be very good individualists and competitors makes collaboration and real care of each other a lot harder than it needs to be.

I started down the path of learning the skills of better group process because I saw projects – both communities and activist spaces I was part of – fail. It’s heart-breaking. Not just because a lot of human suffering happens when sincere, meaningful projects fail – which is bad enough – but also because every time a project fai

ls, the world loses potential to become a kinder, more inclusive, more sustainable place. And boy do we need those things right now!

One of the most important skills for communities to do better is good facilitation. This course – along with my collaboratively written book The Cooperative Culture Handbook, which is our course “textbook” – is the distillation of some hard-won wisdom I have gained in all my years of community living, founding, and serving intentional communities as a trainer, consultant, and fellow learner on this journey.

So I guess I am being bold and saying: I DO know some things about what your group needs. And I’d very much like to share those things with you this summer.