Facilitating the Tough Stuff
An IAP2 Australasia specialised course, in partnership with Articulous.

Building on entry-level facilitation knowledge, this program will stretch participants by immersing them in practicing a range of facilitation tactics. This program unpacks the facilitation skills necessary to successfully facilitate for effective engagement with challenging groups, dynamics and increasing levels of complexity. Through self-reflection and understanding your own natural facilitation style, you will explore ways to respond to challenging emotions such as, anger, trauma and fear while determining ways to move groups to solutions finding.
*Please note, this course does not contribute towards the Certificate of Engagement.
This is an 8 hour course, delivered online.
Explore what’s needed to be an effective facilitator.
- Review theoretical facilitation models and explore these in practice.
- Set facilitation outcomes and apply facilitation skills, behaviours, tactics and tools to meet the outcomes.
- Identify facilitation tactics to reach solutions and address the negotiables and non-negotiables.
- Creating facilitated environments for empathy and listening.
- Explore participants own facilitation style.
- Explore participants own challenges for facilitation, body language and tone.
- Identify how to respond to challenging emotions such as, anger, trauma and fear.
- Apply out of the box thinking for managing the moment using improvisation tools and skills in facilitation.
- Identify and understand participants own areas for further development.
Who is this Course for?
This course is aimed at engagers looking to refine and enhance their facilitation knowledge, to develop or sharpen their skills in Facilitation.
Upcoming Dates
This is an 8 hour course, delivered online.
Cost
- $895 AUD Members including GST
- $1,245 AUD Non-members including GST
What Participants have said About this Course
“I enjoyed observing people implementing their new skills through the scenario situations, and hear the feedback provided by the trainer. As someone who is more of a “watch and learn” participant, rather than a “practice and do” I found this the most valuable.”
Facilitating the Tough Stuff, Participant, April 2024
“I loved this training and the interactions with the other attendees. The trainer was also fantastic and knowledgeable and so charismatic.”
Facilitating the Tough Stuff, Participant, June 2024
“I found the interactive examples really useful and even though online, this still worked well. The examples were also diverse and relevant so that everyone could relate to them. I also really enjoyed the variety of participants.”
Facilitating the Tough Stuff, Participant, August 2024
About the Trainer
Alice Sherring | Lead trainer
Alice is a dynamic facilitator and innovative stakeholder engagement specialist, with more than a decade of experience managing complex engagement processes in Australia and the USA.
Alice has practiced public engagement in multiple contexts having designed delivered stakeholder engagement processes in the USA and Australia. She brings first-hand knowledge of community engagement and training in multiple national and cultural contexts. Alice always navigates tension with ease, grounding groups in shared output-driven objectives. Alice employs a constructive and outcome-focused approach that builds rapport, relationships and capacity, using her IAP2 expertise to enhance the engagement experience.
Alice brings a cultural competency and equity focus to her projects, striving for the inclusion of diverse audiences. She has led engagement across a diverse range of complex engagement settings, grappling with complex societal problems including crime prevention, affordable housing and houselessness, earthquake and disaster preparedness, transportation equity for disadvantaged groups, reconciliation, cross-racial tensions and environmental restoration.


Amanda Newbery | Co-trainer
Amanda is Managing Director of Articulous and has been an energetic and passionate IAP2 trainer since 2006. Over the years, she been the co-developer of 6 IAP2 Australasian courses. She specialises in complex, controversial or high-profile projects including major infrastructure, master planning and regional planning, organisational transformation, economic development, ICT, community services and health. In practice she has developed industry-leading online engagement projects through to deliberative democracy projects and data analysis.
In the areas of Councils, infrastructure and planning, she has won multiple awards including the 2019 International Project of the Year Award from IAP2, 2019 Australasian IAP2 Project of the Year, and the 2019 IAP2 Community Development Project of the year.
She led Australia’s largest community engagement project – Plan Your Brisbane which received more than 114,000 contributions. Amanda has run on-the-ground projects in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, Christchurch and South Australia. She is a former journalist and a current ABC radio panellist.


Secure Your Spot
There are only 20 spots available for this course. Register now to secure your spot.
Find out more information on the IAP2A Certificate of Engagement, In-House Training and our Licensed Trainers.
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Have a question?
Email us at training@iap2.org.au and our friendly team will be very happy to help answer your questions.