Facilitating for Change: Building Skills and Possibility in the New Era
with Peter Forbes
June 2-5, 2026
4 day workshop
Room and meals $600
Tuition is waived!
This annual workshop teaches practical skills in facilitating culture change within organizations and coalitions. Our goal together is to share learnings and practices about how dominant culture organizations can evolve to be in right relationship with peoples, Tribes, social and environmental objectives in order to accelerate positive change. How does one embody that work within their organization, be open to the things we can’t see in ourselves, more fully recognize one’s privileges and use them for change?
From Alaska to Maine, from core cities to the most rural parts of this country, Peter Forbes has been co-creating large-scale collective change making efforts for 30 years. All of these efforts have been focused on how to grow a land-based culture in North America that leaves nobody out. Every summer for the past 15 years, Peter brings what he’s been learning back to Knoll Farm to share with other facilitators, organizers and edge walkers at Facilitating for Change, a four-day workshop that is being held twice in 2026 and one final time in 2027.
Facilitating For Change
Consider the last 6 years: An international pandemic, the social uprisings around the murder of George Floyd, the unresolved legacy of the 2020 Presidential election, massive changes to our federal government, the militarization of our cities. How does one know safety? How does one convey safety? Regardless of organizational mission statements, how must we connect and aid one another? What is possible to repair, and what is the role of conservation and philanthropic organizations in that repair?
Today, catalysts, defenders, and peacemakers need the awareness and skills to push their organizations towards the needs of this moment. Relationships across boundaries, and between cultures and ideas, create opportunities for different worlds to learn and repair together. Literally and symbolically, this means creating and conveying safety. Facilitation is about confronting the obstacles to those relationships by understanding our power and privilege, and using it for justice and equity. This enables people to move forward together to find what they long for, where their true power lies, and how to live more equitably.
Facilitation is the art of communicating safety to people whose experience in the world is unsafe, and the art of revealing power and privilege to those who have it and refuse or are unable to see it.
Facilitating for Change provides participants a rich opportunity to gain personal awareness and explore real applications for how to improve individual and group leadership skills. We aim to look at creating positive change among very different people and to welcome participants into a community and lineage of facilitative leadership. This workshop will help you to answer these questions:
- How do I translate what I care about most in a way that brings about a real response in someone else?
- What does it mean to be a facilitator today?
- What are the most effective ways for me to carry and embody change within and for my organization and/or community?
- Who am I in this work? What is my long work – the work that’s bigger than a job or title or project, work that arises from my identity, values and purpose?
- What do solidarity and mutual aid really mean and ask of me?
- What does this moment, this new era, ask of me?
- What does it mean to transform privileged places and spaces? What does that ask of me and of others?
What this workshop looks like
Four days of dialogue together, three nights around a fire.
Each day begins with breakfast at 8am and a morning session in the barn or at an outdoor meeting space at Knoll Farm, followed by a break for movement and lunch at 12pm, and an afternoon session. Participants have several hours before dinner at 6pm to explore the farm on their own, rest, swim, walk, reflect. Evenings we gather around the fire for programming. Sauna and hot tub before bed. The final day is case studies from your organizations.
More on Peter and Knoll Farm
The co-founder of many important organizations and collective actions like Center for Whole Communities, the Oregon Land Justice Project and First Light, Peter has slowly and methodically built a unique practice of facilitative leadership. This work has resulted in real, material wealth redistribution, moved the needle on rebuilding relationships to land, and helped our region make progress towards land justice and real social change built through sincere relationship. Grounded in principles of relearning history, recentering others, and returning things, Peter’s approach makes it more possible for dominant culture to become accomplices to others through mutual aid and reciprocity rather than charity.
Peter is also a place-maker. For 25 years he has been creating a practical, visible body of work called Making Refuge that is the next generation of what land conservation could be about: being in service to people and community. This work done at Knoll Farm has quietly and consistently transformed the field of conservation by showing that its purpose and strength has always been relationship. Through decades of convening and practice, we have moved beyond the back-to-the-land ethos, where land relationships were grounded in individualism and western science, to working for land relationships in the service of social justice and community wellbeing. Knoll Farm has done this work progressively by consistently calling for the reexamination of white culture and its concept of nature, and making refuge by opening Knoll Farm to the experiences and self-determination of many.
“Conservationists have for generations told people what responsibility they have for the planet, but it’s much harder to express what responsibility conservationists have to humanity.” -Peter Forbes
Learn more about Peter’s work at peterforbes.org.