Holding Space

At Watershed, we often talk about our role as facilitators and our desire to hold space for diverse groups of people – producers, businesses, artists and more – to come together and explore ideas. While we recognise that our role is often vital, we also know that the best way to learn and support the learning of others in that context, is to give the floor to the people who are passionate, driven, experts in their own work. The expertise, in this sense, is often ‘in the room’ and not held by us.

We took this approach when we designed Creative Producers International. We knew we had convening power and a great deal of experience and practices to be critically explored and developed. But to make it truly collaborative, it was the voice of our Creative Producers that was the most important: not only did we want to support them to learn from us and from each other, we also wanted to rethink, reassess, develop and challenge many of our own assumptions about Creative Producing.

Here, we describe some of the key approaches we used to hold the space for this to happen.  These provide the beginnings of a pathway to working internationally with a diverse group of practitioners. Where appropriate, we have included some of the activities and tools we developed, which are open for you to use in your own facilitation work. Most importantly, the voices of our cohort are also here, too: this toolkit features approaches, techniques, and ideas that they brought to the programme to help us learn, too.

We explore the idea of ‘holding space’ in How to facilitate in a place that isn’t ‘yours’