Group Facilitation: The ART of Trauma-Informed Facilitation

This one-day training equips facilitators with tools to engage participants using trauma-informed Approaches, Responses, and Techniques. Trauma-informed facilitation creates brave spaces for individuals to integrate information and share their experiences, in ways that support authentic connections, with themselves and others. Using scaffolding techniques, facilitators will learn how to build safety in the room, engage participants respectfully when disclosures happen, and create brave spaces for discomfort and shift to happen.

“Know” Knowledge & Understanding

• Understand what trauma-informed facilitation is and how traumatic experiences can shape how people learn, participate, and connect in groups.
• Learn the ART framework (Approach, Response, Techniques) and how it supports safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment.
• Recognize key concepts related to safety, self-regulation, credibility, authority, and belonging in facilitation.

“Do” Apply Skills & Practice

• Apply the ART framework to plan and facilitate sessions that manage boundaries, forge common ground, build collaboration, and navigate challenging dynamics or opposing views.
• Practice specific strategies for maintaining their own regulation, balancing power, and responding when participants are distressed, disengaged, or in conflict.

“Be” Professional Growth & Transformation

• Develop a facilitation presence grounded in trustworthiness, transparency, and humility, seeing themselves as both teachers and learners in the room.
• Cultivate confidence in their authority and competence while staying attuned to participants’ needs, cultural context, and lived experience.
• Embrace a strengths-based, relational identity as facilitators who intentionally foster safety, connection, and belonging at the individual, family, community, and systems levels.