Thea is a skilled facilitator, convening and co-creating conversations that matter.
Thea designs and facilitates meetings, retreats, organizational development processes, educational events, gatherings, and conversations with groups of all sizes, in-person and online.
As a facilitator, Thea incorporates and draws inspiration from diverse modalities and social technologies, tailored to the needs and purpose of each group.
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Art of Hosting
The Art of Hosting is a highly effective way of harnessing the collective wisdom and self-organizing capacity of groups of any size. Based on the assumption that people give their energy and lend their resources to what matters most to them – in work as in life – the Art of Hosting blends a suite of powerful conversational processes to invite people to step in and take charge of the challenges facing them.
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Embodied Social Justice
Embodied Social Justice explores how we embody unjust social conditions, how oppression affects our relationship with our body, and how we can harness the body’s wisdom in making our social justice work more grounded, responsive, and sustainable.
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Theory U
Theory U is a process and framework for individuals, teams, organizations and large systems to build the essential leadership capacities needed to address the root causes of today’s social, environmental, and spiritual challenges.
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World Café
The World Café is a powerful social technology for engaging people in conversations that matter, offering an effective antidote to the fast-paced fragmentation and lack of connection in today’s world. Based on the understanding that conversation is the core process that drives personal, business, and organizational life, the World Café is more than a method, a process, or technique – it’s a way of thinking and being together sourced in a philosophy of conversational leadership.
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Emergent Strategy
Emergent strategy is a humble philosophy and a way to acknowledge the real power of change. It speaks to practices, responses, visions and plans that embrace complexity interdependence and transformation. This strategy has been observed from the natural world and is both ancient and constant.
The principles of emergent strategy include fractal, adaptation, interdependence and decentralization, nonlinear and iterative change, transformative justice and resilience, and creating more possibilities
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Convergent Facilitation
Convergent Facilitation is a process that makes it possible for communities, organizations, and even former enemies to reach collaborative decisions that everyone can wholeheartedly embrace.
Convergent Facilitation is designed to build trust from the very beginning, even across power differences; surface concerns and address them; and turn conflicts into dilemmas that the group feels energized to solve together.
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Open Space Technology
In Open Space meetings, events and organizations, participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme of strategic importance, such as: What is the strategy, group, organization or community that all stakeholders can support and work together to create?
With groups of 5 to 2000+ people — working in one-day workshops, three-day conferences, or the regular weekly staff meeting — the common result is a powerful, effective connecting and strengthening of what’s already happening in the organization: planning and action, learning and doing, passion and responsibility, participation and performance.
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Liberating Structures
Liberating Structures are easy-to-learn microstructures that enhance relational coordination and trust. They quickly foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone. Liberating Structures are a disruptive innovation that can replace more controlling or constraining approaches.
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Consensus + Decision-Making by Consent
Consensus Decision-Making is a process for groups to generate widespread agreement in a way that respects the contributions of all participants. Consensus decision making is an alternative to commonly practiced non-collaborative decision making processes, including majority voting and top-down hierarchical decision-making.
Decision-Making by Consent is similar to consensus, but rather than seeking unanimous agreement, focuses on finding a decision that is within a range of tolerance for all members of the group.
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Liberating Organizations
Liberating Organizations is a model for building anti-oppressive organizations and supporting our whole selves at work, developed by Sandra Kim.
Liberating Organizations offers insights into re-humanizing ourselves and others, community care within organizations, collaborative self-governance, and collective healing.
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Nonviolent Global Liberation
Nonviolent Global Liberation is a set of approaches, applications, principles, and practices and a learning community with a purpose to integrate nonviolence into the fabric of human life through ongoing live experiments with truth focused on individual and collective liberation.
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Reinventing Organizations
Reinventing Organizations is an evolutionary and soulful organizational management model in which each organization is viewed as a living system.
Three core elements of Reinventing Organizations are self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose.
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Sociocracy
Sociocracy is a whole systems approach to designing and leading organizations. It is based on principles, methods, and a structure that create a resilient and coherent system. It relies on transparency, inclusiveness, and accountability to increase harmony, effectiveness, and productivity in groups.
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Holacracy
Holacracy is a way of structuring and running organizations that replaces conventional management. Power is distributed throughout a concrete organizational structure – giving individuals and teams freedom while staying aligned to the organization’s purpose.
Selected Facilitation Projects
Agrarian Trust (2021-present)
Thea works with Agrarian Trust as co-facilitator, leader, and developer of the Commons Alliance, building a network of community-centered and land-based organizations, land stewards, service providers, and community members dedicated to creating solutions to the most pressing land questions of our time—how farmland is owned, how access and tenure are conveyed, and how reparative land justice is prioritized.
The Commons Alliance will be a member-based, open-source learning network that shares innovative resources and practices rooted in the Agrarian Commons model among those who are developing or working toward developing community-centered land commons.
To advance our collective mission of healing land and communities through equitable tenure and ownership, reparative justice, and regenerative agriculture, we will provide stories, models, resources, and tactics for innovative land access, tenure, and ownership, including co-learning with the Agrarian Commons and aligned initiatives.
Celebrating Womxn's Leadership in Food (2016-present)
Thea has been a collaborator and co-creator of Celebrating Womxn’s Leadership in Food since 2016, bringing together leaders who are women-identified, trans, queer, Black, Indigenous and People of Color to build trust and create community to shift paradigms of power and meaningfully address ecological crises and social inequity.
Thea has moderated panels and facilitated interactive conversations at four in-person symposia in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, and a virtual symposium in 2020 (with more to come!)
Many participants shared that the World Cafe conversations Thea has designed and facilitated at CWLF symposia have been deeply meaningful and generated relationships and connections that have continued beyond the one-day events.
Slow Food East Bay Leadership Team (2021)
Slow Food East Bay engaged Thea as a facilitator and consultant to support them in developing a new collaborative leadership team, transitioning from a single volunteer leader to a diverse group of twelve. Thea designed and facilitated a series of four two-hour meetings to:
Build relationships and trust among new leadership team members
Illuminate the skills, strengths and interests of each leader
Develop working agreements and a collaborative decision making process
Define and create core working groups and elect co-leads for each group
Start envisioning short and long-term goals for the chapter
Strengthen capacity for ongoing facilitation and collaborative work among the group
This collaboration was supported by Slow Food USA, with the aim to share the process and tools developed in this project with other Slow Food chapters seeking to build collaborative leadership teams.
International Biodynamic Conference (2020)
Thea proposed and co-facilitated a three-day bilingual interactive workshop with Alex Tuchman and Steffen Schneider on Spiritual Agriculture and Social Justice, incorporating World Cafe, dialogue walks, Open Space, drawing, journaling, and collective harvest.
Through this facilitated workshop, participants from many countries around the world explored how to bring both justice and spirit more deeply into their farming, from the ways they organize their work, to the people they serve, to their relationships with their communities.
Pfeiffer Center Midwinter Intensive (2018 + 2020)
At the January 2018 and 2020 Midwinter Agriculture Intensives at the Pfeiffer Center, Thea designed and facilitated small-group conversations to help participants engage with the theme of each intensive and the content they were learning. In 2018, Thea planned and facilitated conversations in groups of 3 at the midpoint of the course, giving participants an opportunity to share insights they had gained with each other and questions that had arisen in them. In 2020, after an unexpected emergency came up for the planned opening speaker with an audience of 60 assembling, Thea jumped in at the last minute to create an interactive experience in place of the opening talk, exploring the four elements (the theme of the intensive that year). She divided the audience into four groups, assigning each one element (earth, water, air, or fire), and invited them to reflect on their relationship to that element using the 1-2-4-all Liberating Structure. Participants were engaged and enlivened by the activity, expressing enthusiastic appreciation for the opportunity to start the weekend connecting to and sharing their own experiences.
Council of Biodynamic Organizations (2019-2020)
As Executive Director of the Biodynamic Association, Thea initiated and facilitated conversations among leaders of all of the other major biodynamic organizations in the US and several other aligned organizations to envision a future of deeper collaboration and shared work. Thea was primary convener and facilitator of the group's regular meetings, and engaged Katy Mamen of Waterbear Collaborative to design and facilitate two retreats for the group, leading to a new imagination of the constellation of organizations and the unification of the two most central organizations into one.
Visioning the Future of Biodynamics (2018)
In 2018, Thea co-led a participatory visioning project in partnership with Ag Innovations involving 800 members of the biodynamic community to vision the future of the biodynamic movement. The process encompassed virtual focus groups, an online survey, an in-person retreat, synthesis, and a presentation and discussion at the 2018 Biodynamic Conference. As Executive Director of the Biodynamic Association, Thea was a lead contributor to process design, participant identification and selection, logistics for in-person components, synthesis of results, and presentation and facilitation of the final report and discussion at the annual conference.
Cover photo by Trav Willams/Broken Banjo Photography, courtesy Biodynamic Association