Seed Facilitative Leadership Program

THE CORE OF THE TRAINING:  LEARNING TO DEAL WITH COMMUNITY AND POWER

Southern Africa is going through a time of radical transformation. Since the first countries in our region became independent some 40 years ago, our communities lived in the dynamics of a transition from colonial powers to liberation powers. Currently we are  moving into the post liberation or democratisation era. No community could hide from the impact of these transformations. We have all been “pushed through the pain”, and we know that radical transformation will be part of our experience in Southern Africa for time to come.

The Seed Training Trust, formerly know as CFN, has build local leaders capacity to facilitate these changes over the past decade. From working with people, groups and organisations throughout Southern Africa but also in the rest of our continent, Seed trainers have learned that two sets of dynamics or polarities are always at work in human systems:

• The first set of polarities relates to the relational nature of living and working together.  Africans often refer to this reality as Ubuntu.
• The second set of polarities relates to the ways in which people perceive of and deal with power.

There are two poles in the Relational polarity that we want to highlight in this course:

• The importance for leaders and facilitators to be self-defined and
• The capacity of leaders and facilitators to participate in community.

The  two poles fo the Power polarity to which we need to pay attention:

• The ability of leaders and facilitators to understand and guide people in the imagining of their future and values that guides them. For Southern Africans the Southern Cross symbolise our compass in life.
• The ability of leaders and facilitators to understand and manage concrete agreements and contracts within themselves as well as amongst others.  In Southern Africa we are use to Indaba-negotiating and debate before we come to a agreement.

Relations and Power hang intrinsically together, and in the interplay between these two polarities is the space where change takes place. This space is not linear but systemic of nature. Facilitative leaders have the capacity to give people perspective on where they are on pace and how they can discover a next step on their journey.

Our approach right through the training is:

• To discover theoretically and experientially the significance of the role that community(relations)  and power play in human systems and
• To provide perspectives and tools that will enable a leader or facilitator to identify and work with the dynamics related to community and power.

To get us started we’ll draw examples of these dynamics from our timeline and case studies.

If you are interested to attend a program, contact Divine at dr@sun.ac.za 021-8083265 or have a look at our Dagboek