Making contact: togetherness in a time of disconnection
The IF Certificate program is designed for practicing facilitators and coaches, guides of groups, leaders and conveners who are working to influence group norms, team dynamics, and organizational culture.
Building on the Next Stage Foundations curriculum, this six-month immersion will empower you with the awareness and insight to work with the hidden and hard-to-name dynamics in groups, teams, and organizations.
Mastery in the Art of Facilitative Leadership
Who is it for?
If these statements describe you, we encourage you to apply:
The Integral Facilitator Certificate program is open to graduates of Next Stage Foundations. Building on an existing understanding of working in an integral way with groups, this program invites you into a deep and nourishing container for dedicated practice, coaching, and peer learning.
Each cohort in the program reflects the wide range of contexts in which Facilitative Leaders find themselves today. If you are working with groups ongoingly, as a facilitator, guide, convenor, coach or trainer, you are familiar with the subtle and nuanced challenges of guiding groups. This program is designed to develop your awareness, insight, and ability to respond to those challenges.
- You have existing experience guiding and leading groups in some capacity (as a facilitator, coach, trainer, leader, or convener).
- You are actively leading and facilitating groups, communities or teams today.
- You are motivated to understand and work with the complexity and challenge of facilitating group dynamics (including conflict, power, and shadow) firsthand.
- Inner work—be that coaching, self inquiry, spiritual practice or other—is not new to you.
- You appreciate dynamic, experiential and unconventional learning environments.
What to Expect
How it Works
A Design for the Whole Self
The learning journey is designed for whole person, community, and systems learning. As a participant, you will focus equally on inner work, facilitative practice, peer collaboration, your context and your intention, and immersive experiences that are uniquely designed to engage you at your personal learning and leadership edge.
Your learning experiences will include direct instruction and personal coaching, meditation and reflection, live demonstrations, consistent live facilitation practice, ample feedback (both verbal and written), role play and simulations, group exercises, peer collaborations, journaling, discussion, and group exercises.
Practice Creates Mastery
Mastery in the art of facilitative leadership develops when we immerse ourselves in the facilitation of group engagement, conversation, and collaboration. Freedom and flow with what is showing up becomes an unconscious competence. The hard-earned reward for effort is the confidence to delight in letting go.
A dynamic blend of learning, practice and personal coaching
The program is designed around regular engagement over the course of several months.
Program Elements
In Person Learning Intensives
Join us in beautiful Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada for two live “in real person” learning intensives. Each intensive offers powerful experiential learning and practice and deep connections with peers and faculty.
You will also gain access to materials and resources on the course site, which can be accessed 24/7.
October 21-23 is the first in-person intensive.
Self-As-Instrument – Personal & Group Coaching
This includes an initial 1:1 coaching session to clarify your developmental focus for the program, and developmental coaching sessions throughout.
Mastermind Calls & Connections
Your online community HUB will be the center of action throughout the program and a great space to share, ask questions, and network with other learners. In addition, we will gather three times for live mastermind calls to address emergent questions and practice challenges and integrate our learning.
Practicum / Reviews
You will engage in hands-on facilitation experiences in a dedicated focus area in your context/work, in the last phase of the program. An IF Faculty member will partner with you to complete two review cycles of facilitated sessions and you will receive powerful grounded feedback and mentoring.
Capstone Portfolio
Throughout, you will create an integrative portfolio that encompasses your learning from your facilitation engagements.
You will refine your embodied presence and agility in response to complexity, challenge, and uncertainty in the room.
Peer Practice Groups
You will join a small group of peers for mutual inquiry, discussions and experimentation of the learning that arises through the program.
In past programs, study groups – or pods – have been not only powerful in their own right, but also created the foundation for treasured long term relationships.
How to join us for 2024
- Complete the Next Stage Facilitation program. (The prerequisite.)
- Apply for the certificate program using the button below.
- Fill in the form, and submit your non-refundable $500 USD application deposit. We will refund your deposit if you are not accepted into the program.
- Watch for your confirmation and complete your final enrolment.
Applications for 2024 are now open!
Tuition is $11,299
**Application Deposit, Travel, Meals and Accomodations are excluded. **
**6-month payment terms are available upon request.**
Fill out the application form below to get started.
Questions about logistics, program elements or dates? Read the brochure below.
Your Instructors
Rebecca Ejo Colwell
Founder, FACULTY LEAD
Rebecca is a master integral facilitator, executive facilitator, strategist and integral coach, co-creator of Integral Facilitator programs, and the Founder of Ten Directions. She draws from over thirty years of partnering with leaders on a wide range of transformative initiatives, in and across almost every sector. Rebecca practices ‘how we can be better together’ with lightness, curiosity and a willingness to play in the unknown. “I am not sure who I am, but when I am with you – when we are together -I can discover something meaningful that is both personal and universal.”
Lauren Tenney
Principal, Faculty & coach
As a consultant, coach, facilitator, and member of the IF Faculty, Lauren’s way of being offers a bridge between the invisible and the concrete. Her natural way of sensing and naming what is hidden and implicit brings clarity and movement to those around her. Lauren masterfully supports inner work as a more efficient pathway towards impactful and meaningful engagement in our teams, organizations and communities.
Cléo Burke
Principal, Faculty & Coach
Cléo is a gifted teacher and coach who conveys her own devotion to embodiment into all aspects of her work and many contributions to developing leaders. Her teachings and practices build muscle for everything from working with complexity to uncovering particular dynamics and patterns that liberate and refine our fullest embodied capacity for facilitative leadership.
FAQ
This program is open to Next Stage graduates only. Graduates from both the online and in-person Next Stage programs may apply. If you are getting your prerequisite Next Stage in April 2024, let us know that you intend to apply for the IF Certificate this year.
Absolutely! Successful applicants are engaged in group work of some kind—be that meeting facilitation, convening discussion or community groups, leading trainings or learning sessions. The type of group work that you are doing is flexible, but it is essential to the design of the IF Program that you have a context in which to practice the skills you are developing.
This is a 6 month program with ongoing engagement . We will have two in-real-person retreats (October and February) balancing the time together with best that the virtual classroom can offer us.
There will be supplemental resources provided throughout for your optional engagement, with occasional practices. This is not a scholarly program – it is largely experiential – aimed at holding you in a dynamic relationship with your growing edge and learning intention.
You will have live coaching sessions, and will establish your developmental focus and the schedule with your coach. Our integral coaching approach provides a strong developmental container with a combination of 1 to 1 coaching sessions, as well as coach-led sessions in a small group.
The program is designed to include emphasis on live practice. There will be opportunities for live facilitation practice spontaneously in many of the live training sessions. In addition to these in-program practice opportunities, participants are expected to design a practicum, and also be engaged in approximately 5 hours per month of live group work of some kind. This can be formal facilitation, or more informal convening, guiding, management, training, etc.
Certification requires full participation in all program elements, including the two in-person retreats.
For people interested in the IF path, and for whom travel is not possible, we can offer a customized developmental coaching program with one of our integrally trained coaches; as well as facilitation supervision including observation and feedback. This remote approach would not result in Certification.
Reach out to one of our faculty members to discuss these options.
Your tuition investment includes everything inside the program itself: including personalized custom coaching program, two multi-day retreat programs, learning sessions, masterminds, two personal practice review cycles, peer practice, access to the community hub and course site, office hours, and course materials.
Travel and room and board are not included in tuition – please read the description below.
Yes! Reach out to us to discuss. Payments include a small administrative fee to cover our banking costs.
We are thrilled to include two in person retreats this year, in beautiful Nova Scotia, at the intimate Oceanstone Resort and Spa.
Plan to fly into Halifax International Airport YHZ (direct flights from many cities). We will provide means for self-organizing to facilitate your arrival, including rideshares from the airport.
Once you are registered, you’ll get information on how to book your *accommodations package* (including room, breakfast, breaks, lunch and dinner) at the venue. Rooms will be allocated on a first-served basis.