Events – Fall 2026 Portland Series

Group Skills Workshops
Kavana Tree Bressen & Jenny Leis

A few Wednesdays at 4-8pm (including short-ish BYO dinner break with optional table topics), plus one Saturday longer session.  Location Portland east side, TBA. 

All workshops will be participatory in nature, and designed for people with a range of processing styles/neurotypes — for example, there may be quiet time for reflection, pairs or small group discussion, visual thinking tools and other formats for learning. We may send pre-reading handouts and prompts for reflection to help you prepare and make the most of the session.

Attend any or all! Advance registration required, click here to register. 

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Session #1: Wed Oct 14 at 4-8pm – Core Practices for Groups to Thrive: Improving dynamics for forming and established organizations.

  • Principles that work well over time
  • Creating “user manuals” to help communication
  • Structures for addressing accountability and feedback
  • Receive ideas and support for current dilemmas

[Note, the Oct 28 workshop on Facilitation Basics has been cancelled.]

Session #2: Wed Nov 11 at 4-8pm – Handling Group Conflicts, Tension & Polarization

  • Concern mapping to center the problems not personalities
  • Moving from Me to We: integrating different communication and learning styles
  • Hands-on tools like reflective listening, interest/position, ladder of inference, polarity management
  • Staying centered when addressing upsets in meetings

Session #3:  Sat Nov 14 all day, 10:30am-4pm – Make Your Meetings Vibrant:  Immersive day for exploring new formats, techniques, and “liberating structures” for making group sessions lively and connective!

This will be a highly participatory immersion into dynamic structures that can be used to approach many of the typical aspects of group process: collaboration, decision-making, working through differences, aligning on vision, etc. Let’s explore alternatives to meetings where people feel stuck listening to one person talk! 

    • Integrating visual thinking to engage different ways of seeing/knowing
    • Playful formats for effective ideation
    • Advanced “spectrum mapping” and sticky-noting for assessing group direction
    • Energy curve of meetings and how to plan for natural highs and lows
    • What format to use when, how to think about group structures for different situations

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Participants are welcome to attend one, some, or all of these sessions (no prerequisites).  Advance registration required, click here to register. 

Workshop fees

  • Wednesday sessions: sliding scale $45-150 per session
  • Saturday immersive: sliding scale $85-425

We want these skills to be accessible. Suggestions for deciding how much to pay:

  • If you have wage employment, you could base the amount on your hourly wage: 3 hrs for Wednesday sessions, 6 hrs for Saturday immersive.
  • If your employer is covering the fee, pay on the higher end.
  • If you have a salaried job with benefits (or are comfortably retired), paying in the upper half of the scale is appreciated.
  • Struggling to get by? Give what you can afford.
  • If you are bringing back your learnings to a group, consider asking others to chip in; this is also a nice way to ensure the group makes space for you to share what you’ve learned afterwards.

Presenters

Kavana Tree Bressen (she/they) has been blessed with a calling to help groups function well. In the past few decades she’s served a wide variety of 200+ organizations, including nonprofits, activists, small businesses, worker co-ops, educational institutions, government agencies, faith congregations, and many intentional communities at all stages of development. She is also the founder of the nonprofit collective that produced the deck Group Works: A Pattern Language for Bringing Life to Meetings and Other Gatherings which has been used by thousands of people in dozens of countries around the world.

Jenny Leis (she/her) is a spark of enthusiasm for vibrant group processes. She designs and facilitates meetings, retreats, peer learning cohorts, group conflict resolution and organizational redesigns. With 25 years of experience in democratically-structured nonprofits and collaboration-based groups, her work is grounded in lived experience and deep compassion. Jenny specializes in inclusive, neurodiversity-friendly design, using visual thinking, somatic practice and creative tools to engage participants. She is an energizer of the connective tissue between people, groups, vision and action, supporting people to discover what they can build together.

 

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