This hands-on, interactive three-part learning series introduces participatory approaches that help mental health teams and community partners move beyond transactional engagement toward collaboration, shared understanding, and co-creation.  Participants will experience practical tools for facilitating inclusive conversations, strengthening collaboration, and supporting shared sensemaking, decision-making, and action in complex environments.  Designed for people working in mental health systems and community partnerships, the series offers methods that can be applied immediately to meetings, planning efforts, and collaborative initiatives. 

Each session builds on the last while also offering standalone tools participants can use right away. 

Session 1:
Facilitating for Partnership: Foundations of Participatory Approaches
Participants will explore practical methods for inviting meaningful participation, promoting quality interactions among people working together, and building on the knowledge and experience of everyone touched by a challenge. 

Session 2:
Working Better Together: Strengthening Team Effectiveness
This session focuses on participatory approaches that help teams build shared understanding, work through challenges together, and collaborate more meaningfully. 

Session 3:
Taking Strategic Action Together: Participatory Approaches for Direction and Action
Participants will explore ways participatory methods can support strategic analysis, shared decision-making, and coordinated action in complex initiatives. 

Facilitators:

Anna Jackson, MSSW
Anna is a consultant who specializes in strategy development, program design and evaluation, implementation, complex systems change, capacity building, and designing and facilitating collaborative learning experiences. She has consulted in many domains and contexts, including healthcare, the nonprofit sector, philanthropy, the private sector, higher ed, and research. Her primary facilitation modality is Liberating Structures, which is based on complexity theory and aimed at promoting quality conversations, deep participation, and co-development within groups. She has been working in behavioral health systems change since 2009 and has particular experience with recovery-oriented and person-centered behavioral health approaches and facilitative capacity building. Her engagement and co-creation experience is extensive, including facilitating advisory boards, workgroups, curriculum development, program evaluation and development, and user-centered design processes to help partners make sense of challenges and design what comes next. 

Amanda Bowman, LCSW, PSS
Using participatory facilitation methods as the foundation of her work, Amanda enjoys supporting human systems to more easily identify and realize their potential. She provides training, consulting, and other facilitative experiences as the owner of Sidecar Consulting. Amanda’s work has focused on systems change in behavioral health and the recovery movement in Texas for the last fifteen years. Amanda is recognized as an expert in human-centered service planning, the implementation of peer support services, learning collaborative program design, and implementation in human service agencies. As a WRAPⓇ facilitator, Certified Peer Specialist Supervisor, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, and person in recovery who brings her own lived experience with mental health challenges to her work, Amanda envisions a more recovery-oriented culture in behavioral health service delivery and promotes a community-based system of wellness support that equally values both clinical and non-clinical options and honors true choice for those it aims to help.