Kick off the new year by leveling up your meetings!

EMERGE: How to facilitate meaningful interactions, better meetings, and joyful gatherings

Registration closed on 1/22/24 - sign up for our interest list here!

Image of Neetal Parekh and Emily Grantz

We are excited to welcome you to Emerge. In this 6-week cohort-based training, you will learn how to lead meetings that achieve your results while building strong engagement and relationships.

We have over two decades of experience facilitating meetings and events, from retrospectives to hackathons, Lean workshops, large panels and speaker events. We have coached facilitators and helped them grow into confident and thoughtful leaders.

We both know the value of learning in community with folks engaged in similar work. We hope you’ll join us in kicking off 2024 with a resolution to have great meetings…and the training to help you achieve that goal!

Warmly,

Neetal Parekh and Emily Grantz

“This training was great! Loaded with learning, deep content and careful delivery. A gold standard training. One highlight was capstone projects - all participants shared. A bonus was connecting with local, like minded people.”
— Monty Smith, ToBeCurious Life and Leadership Coach

If you leave meetings:

  • Exhausted and frustrated by low participation

  • Confused about whether any decisions were made or if there are next steps

  • With the action to schedule another meeting about the same topic, since the group did not reach its goal…

…you could benefit from joining our facilitation training! Emerge is a 6-week cohort-based training, held in-person in Tacoma, WA. This will be an interactive and hands-on training where you’ll develop and practice skills to facilitate meetings that accomplish your goals.

Course Details

In this training you will learn and practice critical facilitation skills, such as:

  • Core skills: active listening, agenda and stakeholder management, building engagement during meetings, and navigating conflict

  • Developing your empowered facilitation style, including stepping into the role of a facilitator, building cultural awareness into your facilitation, and catalyzing engagement and deeper conversation

  • Navigating virtual and hybrid meetings

  • Rising to the occasion: when everything goes wrong in your meetings

  • Capstone - demonstrating your knowledge through facilitation of an event

“Emerge was a very personalized experience. The smaller class size offered more opportunities to engage with instructors and fellow students. I got more value in the first week than I got in the whole year-long (expensive!) facilitation training I took!”
— Eileen Lambert, Peak Impact PNW

Logistics

Currently no trainings are scheduled. Sign up for our interest list to hear about future offerings!

Note, if you are interested in participating but unable to pay full cost, please contact us at the bottom of this page to hear about scholarship options.

Meet the Instructors

  • Emily (they/them) is a skilled facilitator trained in inclusive facilitation through the Anti Oppressive Resources and Training Alliance, and Gracious Space. They have worked in higher education, the aerospace sector, and most recently in public transit. Their expertise spans project and program management, coaching teams to adopt Agile and Lean methodologies, and supporting teams in leveraging collaboration tools such as Trello, Planner, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Teams.

    Emily also has a background in education - specifically in teaching K-12 and adults. They leverage the principles of adult learning and pedagogy when creating and facilitating trainings, meetings, workshops, and other workplace gatherings.

    Emily has a Masters degree in Library and Information Science, which they leverage when working with teams who struggle to organize and find information.

    Emily also has a background in disability rights activism, and spent several years organizing to improve the experience of disabled employees in the workplace.

    Emily can help you level up your workplace by having better meetings and developing more efficient, collaborative and fun ways of working together.

  • Neetal Parekh (she/her) is a social impact ecosystem builder and licensed attorney, with expertise in digital strategy, storytelling, and communications.

    Neetal is the author of book 51 Questions on Social Entrepreneurship, host of The Impact Podcast by Innov8social, convener of Impactathon®, and a frequent speaker, facilitator, and moderator on topics including social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, and ways entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and consumers can build and strengthen ecosystems for social impact.

    Neetal holds a B.A. in International Political Science from UCLA, where she interned at the U.S. Consulate in Mumbai, India. She pursued her interest in international work through volunteering in rural India and studying public human rights law in Geneva and Strasbourg. Her past experience includes strategy roles at FindLaw, Calvert Foundation, Net Impact, and a handful of early-stage startups. She also served as Chief of Product and Impact at an education company (and public benefit corporation) where she designed and delivered entrepreneurship and business education.

    Neetal has participated as a fellow in StartingBloc, Boem Media Fellowship at Opportunity Collaboration, Hive Global Leaders, and New Leaders Council, where she also served on the Advisory Board. She also engaged with the Executive team of VLAB, the MIT Enterprise Forum Bay Area Chapter at Stanford University, as Outreach Chair, and serves on the Advisory Board for SXSW Pitch Advisory Board.

    A passionate advocate for social entrepreneurship and impact innovation, Neetal believes that this field empowers us to creatively re-imagine how businesses and individuals can create meaningful impact and lasting value.

Questions? Contact us below!