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I once watched Adrienne Maree Brown* facilitate a session at the Allied Media Conference. A participant asked a question—something complex, something important—and instead of answering, Adrienne paused, smiled gently, and said something like: “That’s not my area of expertise. Is there someone else in the room who knows something about that?”
And someone did. Or rather, a few someones did. And Adrienne, with all the grace and clarity of a seasoned gardener, didn’t step back or step aside—she stepped with. She facilitated that conversation. She didn’t need to be the expert. She became the cultivator of what was already rooted in the room.
A colleague once told me about another session with Adrienne, where during the Q&A, the facilitators flipped the script: they asked the questions, and the audience responded. Imagine that—ending a session not by defending knowledge, but by inviting it. Not by summing up a tidy answer, but by expanding what was possible through shared insight.
These moments have stayed with me, because they remind me that facilitation—true facilitation—is less like being a lecturer at a podium and more like being a steward of the soil.
Spring reminds us of a truth that’s easy to forget in the rush of agendas and deliverables: growth can’t be forced—but it can be fostered. In a garden, you don’t yell at the seedlings to rise faster. You prepare the conditions. You make space. You water. You wait. And sometimes, you’re surprised by what blooms.
Facilitation can be the same.
When we shift from “teaching” to “tending,” we start to see:
It takes humility to say, “I don’t know.” It takes trust to believe others might. And it takes skill to hold the emerging conversation without needing to steer it back to yourself.
But when we facilitate like gardeners, we make room for:
This is especially important in equity-centered and anti-oppressive work, where many people have lived experiences that systems have failed to validate. A gardener-facilitator says: I see you. I trust your insight. Let’s grow this together.
Here are a few ways to put this into practice:
Flip the Q&A
Close your next session by asking the group a few key questions and invite responses from multiple perspectives. You become the listener, the connector, the cultivator—not the closer.
Name What You Don’t Know
Modeling your own limits as a facilitator can create more trust. Say: “That’s outside my lane, but I wonder if someone else here can speak to it?”
Create Structures for Sharing
Use small groups, chat boxes, murals, or post-its to collect group wisdom. Then hold space to reflect back what surfaced—not to tie it up in a bow, but to let it breathe.
Facilitation as cultivation means believing that brilliance is already present, just waiting for the right conditions. It means inviting others into co-creation. It means being less of a spotlight and more of a trellis—offering structure that lets others rise.
As Adrienne writes in Emergent Strategy:“Trust the people. If you trust the people, they become trustworthy.”
*Adrienne Maree Brown is a writer, facilitator, and social justice practitioner. Her work focuses on transformative justice, healing, and collective liberation, and she is the author of books like Emergent Strategy and Grievers.
