This day is about you. And me. And us. And them.

People. We are all so diverse and yet there is a deep human desire to connect, to belong, and to be together. We are social beings. We seek out attachments. We meet in groups. We look for community.

• Have you ever been in a group where you have felt invisible to the facilitator, to your peers, or even to yourself?
• Have you facilitated a group and worried that you have inadvertently excluded someone, or been concerned that your own social and cultural background limited your capacity to connect with others?
• Have you ever been in a group where you’ve felt more influenced by group dynamics and peer pressure and facilitator expectations than your own inner knowing and needs?
• Have you ever facilitated a group and in hindsight wondered about how consensual or ethical your practice was?

This day is for you.

We will start by discussing the underlying problem of how to effectively hold space for everyone within a group, which means diving into some issues connected to power, patriarchy and social injustice. We will not, however, spend too long marinading in the problem as we want to focus our attention on exploring some radical and transformative ways of positively disrupting the status quo. For this, we will turn our attention to the natural world.

Human beings are part of the natural world. Can we assume, therefore, that the way that we organise ourselves is also ‘natural’. Can we assume that the patriarchal, hierarchical, and competitive cultures that we have created are somehow mirroring the wild? We cannot.

These assumptions are biased and inaccurate. They are – in themselves – framed by the very people who cannot see the world in any other way. Penguins, seahorses, clown fish, scarab beetles, spider monkeys, deer, bats … these creatures all exhibit queer and gender non-conforming behaviour. In fact, there is evidence of same-sex behaviour, including co-parenting, in over 1000 species. Similarly, there is evidence of dozens of ways of leading and organising social and survival dynamics within the wild which are not hierarchical or male dominated. As queer facilitators, this is interesting to us and inspires us to find non-normative examples as ways of understanding the world differently.

What then, for you? What does this mean for who you are and how you see the world?

Gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, age, social class and background, health status, family constellation, identity … areas of life where we might feel alienated at one time or another. It does not have to be that way, and in our work in the wild we can influence this.

By using the wild world as a backdrop, we will explore some liberatory and inclusive ways of leading and facilitating groups. We will talk about consent-based practice as a way of overcoming patriarchal power dynamics and advancing social justice. We will ‘queer our work’ by looking to new networks of elders, teachers, and guides. We will find ways to counter our own fears and prejudices and to work from a place of pride in all that we are and all that we bring. We will invite you to bring your experiences from your own lives and work to these discussions.