Creative Facilitation Testimonial – Praxis Institute

Can you tell us about a time you engaged with the Creative Facilitation Unit?

Praxis, the Institute for Participatory Practices, is an organisation based in Delhi in India that aims to provide power and agency for people, particularly those in disadvantaged communities, over the actions and events that shape their lives. As part of a project aimed at creating a network of community evaluators in India, we organised a three-day workshop in February 2023 to give a group of 25 future community evaluators training in the methods used in evaluation research. Mary organised sessions at this workshop on creative facilitation.  

The workshop was attended by 22 participants from 8 states of India, who represent various marginalised communities including Dalit, LGBTQIA+, Adivasi and women. In terms of engagement with the Creative Facilitation Unit, we had a preparatory discussion with Mary around the workshop, which itself was insightful. Mary is a good listener and post listening, comes with ideas and insights which are again further reflected upon. Skill and experience – jointly inform the discussion. The engagement was not one-time, but continuous. Mary was available for a number of meetings, on a regular basis, to help with planning and to reflect upon various techniques of facilitation.

Can you tell us a bit more about how you used creative faciliation in the training workshops?

Creative facilitation was used deliberately to shift learning away from instruction and toward participation, reflection, and shared meaning-making. We began by foregrounding listening as a core evaluative skill, not a soft add-on. A simple but powerful storytelling exercise was used, where one participant spoke uninterrupted while others listened and responded only after the story was complete. This slowed down the room, disrupted habitual interruptions, and made participants conscious of how rarely deep listening is practised in research and evaluation spaces. Group reflections afterwards showed that participants became more attentive to silence, sequencing, and respect – skills they later applied in field interactions with communities. 

We also adapted the body mapping  tool to help participants reflect on leadership and power in evaluation work. Asking participants to visually map the qualities of a “good leader” inside a body outline—and harmful traits outside—allowed abstract ideas like accountability, empathy, and authority to be explored through personal experience rather than theory. Participants owned the process, debated among themselves, and presented diverse interpretations, which helped surface how leadership is understood differently across social locations. Since the training, several participants have reused both listening exercises and body mapping in their own community meetings, trainings, and evaluations, adapting them to local contexts. In this way, creative facilitation became not just a method learned, but a practice made their own and shared forward.

What were the benefits of using creative facilitation?

Creative facilitation made the workshops more inclusive and participatory, enabling engagement from participants with different levels of confidence, education, and institutional authority. It helped transform abstract concepts – such as ethics, leadership, participation, and power – into concrete, discussable experiences. The methods encouraged peer learning and mutual respect, reduced hierarchies within the room, and created trust among participants. Importantly, community evaluators began to recognise their lived experiences as a form of expertise, which strengthened their confidence to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and take ownership of evaluation processes.

Were there any challenges? How did you resolve them? 

There were challenges. Some participants were initially uncomfortable with non-traditional methods such as drawing, embodied reflection, or personal storytelling, particularly those accustomed to technical or academic formats. Time constraints is always a challenge in any participatory exercises. These challenges were addressed by mostly explaining the purpose of each exercise. Most people like the process as it embarks.

What role, if any, do you see for creative facilitation in your future work?

Creative facilitation will continue to play a central role in Praxis’s future work in community-based evaluation, PAR, and worker-centred research. It is an additional process for us to make a shift away from extractive knowledge practices toward co-learning and co-analysis, and aligns closely with our commitment to ethical, people-led processes. For us, creative facilitation is not a technique or add-on, it is a political and ethical choice about how knowledge is produced, whose voices are valued, and how power is negotiated within research and learning spaces. 

Do you have any other thoughts about creative facilitation that you would like to share with us?

The best thing about Mary is her ability to localise the facilitation methods. One may have to theorise how mainstream facilitation methods can be decolonised.