Shift Circle - community workshop
Are you working on co-production, participation, involvement, community engagement (or any other names for approaches that shift power towards communities and centre lived experience)?
Working hard, perhaps almost single-handedly, to shift decision-making in your organisation towards more distributed, community-led, participatory, democratic, sociocratic or decolonial ways of doing things?
Would you be interested in connecting with other people doing this work to share challenges, learn together and build community power?
If the answer is yes - welcome to the Shift Circle learning community.
What is Shift Circle?
Shift Circle is a peer learning community for people shifting power, not ticking boxes. It involves community workshops like these, and an 8-month programme.
In the full programme, each Shift Circle of 6 people meets together over 8 months to work through challenges members are facing in their organisations to centre lived experience in decision-making.
The Circles are facilitated, blending a mix of peer learning methods that build collective knowledge through exploratory questioning and reflective practice, leading members to take action and make decisions rooted in lived experience, collective wisdom and values, and an understanding of power dynamics.
Recruitment for the next round of the Shift Circle programme, starting in early 2027, will be opening shortly - find out more here: www.shift-circle.com
What is this workshop about?
This workshop is a shorter, open access version of a Shift Circle session. You'll experience some of the learning methods that we use during the programme, connect with other practitioners, and work through a hot topic together.
In this workshop, you will be paired up with another practitioner for intros and Thinking Pairs (space to think about what challenges you're experiencing in your participatory work at the moment).
You'll then use these insights into your own and each other's challenges to vote on a 'wicked question' that's been prepared - and we'll then open up that question using a Lewis Deep Democracy Debate (a tool that helps us get out of binary thinking about a sticky issue).
You'll then have space to reflect on anything you want to take forward from the debate into your own work, before opening up for some more informal chat.
If any of that plan doesn't feel accessible for you, please tell me when you register and I'll gladly make any changes to the workshop so that it best suits everyone coming.
A note on lived experience
If you have lived experience of oppression and/or marginalisation, you are particularly welcome - this is for you.
If you are working to centre lived experience and you have not experienced oppression and/or marginalisation, but you do have a committed anti-oppressive practice, you are also welcome.
Still not sure?
If you have any questions or want to set up a conversation to talk it through, please don't hesitate to get in touch with Theo on ttccadbury@gmail.com
To register your interest in the full Shift Circle programme, please get in touch here: https://www.shift-circle.com/contact
Who's running this?
These workshops, and the whole Shift Circle programme, are facilitated by Theodora Cadbury, an experienced peer learning facilitator and participation consultant who has worked with grassroots local, regional, national and international organisations on participatory decision-making processes and learning programmes to enable all of us to be involved in the decisions that affect our lives.
Theo draws on learning from approaches and methods including Action Learning, Thinking Environment, Lewis Deep Democracy, sociocracy, as well as her own experiences growing up in youth-led faith and interfaith spaces, a mixed heritage family, and as a queer person.