“Your facilitation was a big hit and the Fellows really enjoyed it. We appreciate the time and work you've put in to bring this event together and provide an enjoyable experience for our Fellows. Successful events like this allow us to continue the mission of providing quality professional development to our program participants, and your involvement here was indispensable!”
“After the Facilitation Bootcamp, I’m taking away the idea that facilitation involves curiosity and observation, and building awareness of your internal and external environments. I’m leaving behind the idea that a meeting has to be the way you originally imagined it, that an agenda is rigid and immobile: The agenda needs to serve the community, the agenda is a prototype, the agenda can be adaptive and responsive”
“We had an excellent experience working with Nathan, Gloria, and Andres from UFacilitate. Our facilitators for our professional development sessions took a lot of time and care to thoughtfully understand our team’s culture, our specific challenges, and what would be most effective for the way we work. The result was a series of trainings where the team was able to learn, practice, and immediately take tactics forward to improve the way we facilitate our meetings internally and externally and to give us all a shared language to talk through our practices as we continue to grow. The UFacilitate leaders felt like an extension of our own team, and we highly recommend them to other organizations, especially nonprofits, as they can immediately add value, build new practices, and strengthen the skillsets of your team.”
“The events were incredibly productive, and they would not have been as successful without the tools and tips we learned from UFacilitate. The UFacilitate coaches presented the background and the theories behind everything we learned and that helped to provide a fuller picture for why meeting design matters. By providing this context for why meetings should be done a certain way, it helped root the learnings in some background in a way that was very thoughtful and different from other consulting programs. I’m really grateful for the opportunity to participate in this process, because in my previous experience organizing a workshop for my staff, I realized I didn't know how to facilitate complex discussions to reach the goals we were trying to achieve. The UFacilitate program opened my eyes to the facilitation skills I didn't know existed -- there's a whole world of facilitation tools that I had never heard of, and the program gave me a little taste of the skills needed to structure and design discussions in a way that's a more effective use of everyone's time and leads to more productive meetings.”
“After the Facilitation Bootcamp, I’m leaving behind anxiety of making the perfect agenda and taking with me the perspective of seeing facilitation as a dance. Seeing facilitation as a dance makes me feel more relaxed: it feels like something that I am versus something I am trying to be.”
“For anyone that needs an organizational culture strengthener, or is looking to help their team connect with their stakeholders, this facilitation training served as a great starting point. It has helped me reimagine what I think it’s possible for meetings! As a leader, I can already see how our team is using the tools and techniques, how it clarified my own vision for what I think is possible, and how it will make our onboarding more effective..”
“The UFacilitate team took a lot of time and care to thoughtfully understand our team’s culture, our specific challenges, and what would be most effective for the way we work. The result was a series of trainings where the team was able to learn, practice, and immediately take tactics forward to improve the way we facilitate our meetings internally and externally and to give us all a shared language to talk through our practices as we continue to grow. The UFacilitate leaders felt like an extension of our own team, and we highly recommend them to other organizations, as they can immediately add value, build new practices, and strengthen the skillsets of your team.”
We are expert facilitators from around the world united by our passion for making collaboration work when “messy human stuff”—egos, cultural differences, miscommunication—create silos that put your mission at risk.
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Alexandra (Alex) Gaspar Martins Teixeira (she/her) is a collective intelligence enthusiast, master facilitator and technical strategist with over 25 years of experience designing and facilitating participatory meetings and convenings for high-performing teams and organizational collaboratives including FHI 360, Ipas, MSI Reproductive Choices, the Urgent Action Fund, the World Health Organization and UNFPA among others.
Prior to consulting, Alex spent 11 years advancing access to safe abortion at Ipas where she partnered with global teams and led organization-wide initiatives as a Senior Advisor for Technical Innovation and Excellence, the Associate Director for Community
Engagement and Policy Advocacy and as the Senior Advisor for Organizational Learning. Alex has also served as the Philanthropic Partnerships Officer for the Astraea Foundation, as a Global Research & Policy Advisor for the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (now OutRight Action International) and as a Program Fellow with the Global Fund for Women. She has served on the board of directors of the Safe Abortion Action Fund (UK), The Stone House (NC), the Third Wave Foundation (NY) and Resource Generation (NY).
Alex has designed and led over 70 high-stakes participatory workshops, retreats and convenings for over 2000 stakeholders across Africa, Asia and North America. She is among the most seasoned facilitators, globally, of Abortion Values Clarification for Action & Transformation (VCAT) Workshops where she has led community members, activists, health care providers, ministry officials, multilateral donors and embassies—all with wide ranging positions on abortion—through a process that shifts their orientation from one of contentious debate to an opportunity for empathy and principled collaboration to advance bodily autonomy. She has trained and mentored over 150 emerging facilitators
and team leaders globally on designing and facilitating inclusive, liberatory and participatory meetings.
With two decades of experience advancing equity and justice through philanthropy and global health programming, Alex approaches facilitation as a strategic opportunity to practice high-impact, equity-based collaboration skills that live on beyond our convenings. Alex brings skillful attention to transforming personal, interpersonal and systemic barriers to meaningful participation. She is passionate about helping groups connect, navigate principled disagreement, prioritize, focus, and align towards powerful actions that advance justice, joy and wellbeing in the world.
Alex is a recipient of the Wildacres Leadership Initiative William C. Friday Fellowship (2014-2016), holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and French Literature from Connecticut College and a master’s degree in International Affairs with a focus on gender, sexuality and international human rights from Columbia University. As the first member of her family to attend university, she is humbled to stand on the shoulders of self-taught entrepreneurs, savvy dissidents, survivors of Portuguese dictatorship and lovers of learning. She currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, in the Southeastern United States, in a beloved cross-class, multi-racial intentional community of gorgeously imperfect humans trying to build deep interdependence.
DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION, CHANGE MANAGEMENT, CULTURE CHANGE TEAMBUILDING
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Systems change, Change management, Culture change
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; Change management; Culture change; Strategy; Teambuilding
DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION, STRATEGY SYSTEMS CHANGE, PRODUCT OR SERVICE DESIGN
Ángel Zambrano Cobo is Communications Specialist at UFacilitate. As a communicator and cultural manager based in Caracas, Venezuela, he collaborates with groups and organizations that seek to build community and generate change through projects of social innovation, cultural action and human rights.
He is also a founding member of Ciudad Laboratorio (@ciudlab), a civil association that seeks to influence urban experience and transformation through observation, art and pedagogy. In 2017 he was part of the founding team of Labo Ciudadano, a social innovation lab focused on human rights, social fabric and nonviolent mobilization. Until mid-2022 he was co-general coordinator of this organization, and today he is part of its advisory board.
Leigh has an extensive experience in business process management. She has worked with BP and KPO business that caters to international professionals through identifying methods to discover, mode, analyze, measure, improve, and optimize business processes.
She started as a customer care representative while studying in college and after earning a bachelor’s degree in business management from Central Philippine University, Leigh worked as a virtual assistant to US professionals. By this time, she already assisted top-tier management with company materials, workflows, training and finance. Working her way up to the management level, Leigh handled different teams in fields like real estate, medical, construction and cleaning.
Leigh also has experience working with sales and marketing as a sales executive closing service deals and also had experience working as an events support generalist to a KPO company that provides shared services across the globe.
Aparna is Chief Facilitator Builder at UFacilitate, helping to select and onboard high-quality facilitators to the UFacilitate family. For the last 7 years, she has been working with early growth stage impact startups across India, South Africa, and Latin America, helping them identify the business models and value propositions, create a growth strategy, raise funds and measure their impact. During her time working with education nonprofits in India, she learned about the critical role that good facilitation plays in ensuring meaningful engagements and also got trained by the Facilitators Network Singapore. While working with an accelerator in Latin America, she created a facilitator’s handbook for online and offline engagements, equipping the reader with the basic tools and thinking steps.
Aparna’s aim through UFacilitate is to take the simple handbook many steps ahead and help leaders in the impact space innovate effectively, make decisions, and build projects that involve multiple stakeholders and have large-scale impact.
