Building Connections: The Gathering Toolkit
What could your next weekly meeting or special ocassion look like? Explore a number of resources to spark inspiration, feed your curiosity, and nurture your gathering practice.
Find Inspiration:
Explore a Newsletter
Explore the library of archived newsletters for gathering tips, insights, and inspiring stories. Read about how others are experimenting with their gatherings and what you can learn from them.
Learn the Foundations:
Read the Book
At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Priya sets forth a human-centered approach that will help you create meaningful experiences, large and small, for work and for play.
Go Deeper:
Take the Course
Anyone has the ability to gather well with the right set of skills. Learn the concrete lessons to help you design and host intentional gatherings at home, work, and in your communities.
Virtual Meeting Guide:
Work Edition
A free guide to designing an effective and enjoyable virtual meeting. Seven simple ways to inject connection and meaning into virtual workplace meetings.
The New Rules of
Gathering Guide
A free guide to unlock new and creative ways to transform your next event. Learn how to infuse meaning and connection when planning for any occasion.
Listen to a
Podcast Episode
Together Apart is part guide, part reminder of the resiliency of the human spirit to still meaningfully gather, creatively — even when we’re apart.
The Art of Gathering Digital Course
Anyone has the ability to gather well with the right set of skills. In this six-week digital learning experience, you’ll learn the core lessons to help you create and execute a meaningful and connected gathering at home, at work, or in your community. Unlock the artful gatherer within.
An artful gatherer is resourceful. Here are some of Priya’s favorite resources to help you gain inspiration, ideas, and helpful skills to practice gathering meaningfully.
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Dare to Lead: A Meeting Makeover with Brené Brown, an example of Priya’s Gathering Makeover. Priya helps Brené and her team evaluate a core weekly leadership meeting that just isn’t working and goes deep into what’s going on and why.
Freakonomics: How to Make Meetings Less Terrible, an interview with Priya Parker. How can we plan meetings with better agendas, smaller invite lists, and an embrace of healthy conflict?
How Should We Meet? And Who Decides?, a New York Times opinion piece by Priya Parker. Whether your team is in-person, virtual, a combination of both, or still trying to figure it all out, Priya provides essential questions to ask yourself and your teams to evaluate how, why, and where to meet.
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Abandon Your Thanksgiving Script, a New York Times Opinion piece by Priya Parker. Originally written in 2020 the takeaways are still applicable today for anyone looking to reimagine family holidays.
The Two Hour Cocktail Party, a book by Nick Gray on how to build big relationships with small gatherings.
Modern Loss: Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome, a book by Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner A fresh take on guiding, naming, and allowing for grief.
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Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, a book by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo. This is a facilitator’s dream of a book. Full of ideas, practices, protocols, and activities to spark ideas and connection in a group.
The Improv Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Improvising in Comedy, Theatre, and Beyond, a book by Tom Salinsky and Deborah Frances-White. Some of the smartest practices and group-building exercises come from the theater. They are powerful group methodologies that beautifully help a group come together while allowing you to build your own voice.
Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, a book by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen. A step-by-step approach to having those tough conversations with less stress and more success.
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, a book by Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, and Kerry Patterson. It revolutionized the way millions of people communicate when stakes are high.
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Facilitation is a dispursed field with many different methodologies to explore (and different pathways within each methodology). There’s no right or wrong way, but it does require a bit of exploration and experimenting to see what sticks for you.
This is not meant to be prescriptive but rather a reflection of what worked in Priya’s journey.
Step 1: Identify a need or community you care about. Facilitation is a tool, not an ends in and of itself. As you begin your journey to facilitation, keep in mind the kinds of needs or issues or content areas or even communities you want to apply these skills to.
Step 2: Start with a methodology that intrigues you and focus on certifications or trainings in processes. This helps you get a sense of what you like, what you’re good at, connects you with a community, and builds your toolkit. Some examples include:
Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute
Difficult conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation's Resource Center
The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation’s Resource Guide on Public Engagementment
Step 3: Identify what you like and what you’re uniquely good at. Each process may open the door to teach you something new — about methodology and yourself. Keep following the thread and go deeper into the processes and methodologies.
Step 4: Commit to building your practice and being a curious student. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box and pull inspiration from outside sources. Read about what you’re interested in and the problems that fire you up. If you’re not having fun doing it (or at least energized!), you’re pursuing the wrong question. Read more on Priya’s own influences.
Hi, I’m Priya Parker.
I come to you as a facilitator, strategic advisor, author, and educator.
I believe that everyone has the ability to gather well. My mission is to give you the courage, permission and know-how to design meaningful, creative gatherings — in the places we work, live, and play — without all having to be the same.
I’m so happy you’re here.
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