Lead Facilitators 2025
FODW 2025 – Celebrating Humanity – wrangling with complexity
Igor A Tomic
Igor Tomic is a facilitator, trainer and justice sector leader specialising in system reform, collaboration and inclusive processes toward sustainable change. Igor is passionate about creating spaces for honest dialogue, learning, and innovation—and brings a grounded, reflective approach to every facilitation.
Session: The MI Facilitator
Imagine being able to walk into any facilitation scenario with a clear roadmap for success. This session will introduce Motivational Interviewing (MI), an evidence-based practice that helps facilitators guide challenging group conversations with clarity and purpose. Participants will learn to deepen reflective listening, evoke motivation, and support sustainable change in both individual and group settings.
Zoe Fitzgerald
This session will be facilitated by Zoe Fitzgerald, co-founder of Alkimia Learning – Kaospilot’s exclusive training partner in Australia – and a facilitator with more than 20 years of experience.
Session: Guiding Hands: Facilitators Shaping the Future
What is a topic that is calling for your attention as you wrangle with complexity? This session is an invitation to slow down and think with your hands to discover new insights. It’s an opportunity to look at what’s happening, and what could be, from four distinct perspectives. It’s a chance to look and listen deeply in new ways. We will support one another as we experiment with creativity and imperfection. And we’ll see what wisdom emerges at a collective level that can guide each of us: personally, professionally and practically. WARNING: This session is for the curious. Not suitable for passivity.
Catalina Gonzalez
Catalina is a passionate facilitator, mentor, and the founder of Vivacious, a social enterprise committed to creating more inclusive people, workplaces, and communities. With a background in intercultural communication, human connection, and purposeful leadership, Catalina brings warmth, fun, curiosity, and lived expertise to every experience she leads.
Session: Diversity Intelligence – A Human Approach to Navigating Difference
This interactive session will introduce the concept of Diversity Intelligence: the awareness, mindset, and skills to engage meaningfully, safely and with a sense of curiosity with people who are different from us in any way: background, values, identity, profession, ability, personality, or lived experience.
Eva Vani Kaufman
Eva Vani Kaufman loves playful, creative spaces to foster groundedness, mindfulness, play and healing and facilitates workshops throughout Melbourne & NSW. She is an experienced Sensorimotor Art Therapist, Accredited Mental Health Social Worker, Medicare Provider, Supervisor and Director of Evani Creative Therapies in outer east Melbourne. You can find her at evanitherapies.com.au.
Session: Mapping Your Extraordinary Facilitation Journey
An interactive, playful and creative session that invites participants to visually express their facilitation journey through creating a ‘map’ using art materials and playful objects provided by facilitator. Participants will have the opportunity to map their obstacles, successes, plateaus and even the “Treasure”/future goals waiting for them at the end. You will leave feeling refreshed from mindful and playful creating in a supported environment and in connection with others, with a renewed sense of inspiration.
Stephen Thorpe
Dr Stephen Thorpe is a Senior Lecturer at the Auckland University of Technology, a Director at Zenergy, and a former board member of the International Association of Facilitators. He specialises in enhancing teamwork in IT and agile projects, with research interests in digital government, data science, and collective intelligence.
Session: Presence, Purpose, Process – The Future of Facilitation in a World of AI
In a world with AI, what remains uniquely human about facilitation? This experiential session invites us to explore presence, purpose, and collective meaning-making. Through dialogue and shared inquiry, we’ll reflect on our evolving role, exchange practical approaches, and celebrate our irreplaceable human value.
Kate Crawshaw & Simon Fieldhouse
Kate Crawshaw (Serious Woo) is a facilitator and experience designer specialising in courageous conversations, team dynamics and psychological safety. Through Serious Woo, she helps organisations surface difficult truths, experiment with new ways of working, and strengthen the human glue that holds teams together.
Simon Fieldhouse (Mush Consulting) is a dynamic facilitator and coach with deep experience in leadership, change and culture. Simon leverages his lived experience as a change agent and culture practitioner to help leaders see the world differently.
Session: Moving from the Harvest to the Meadow – A Warm Data Lab Experience
This session invites participants into a Warm Data Lab – a lightly held, deeply relational space for exploring complexity without reducing it. Developed by Nora Bateson and the International Bateson Institute, the Warm Data Lab offers a different kind of inquiry – one that invites us to move from the habit of harvesting fixed outcomes, into the ecology of the meadow. Rather than aiming for clarity or closure, this session holds space for complexity, contradiction, and context.
Diana Barnett & Skye Bennett
Skye Bennett and Diana Barnett are experienced Street Wisdom facilitators who guide people to slow down, tune into their surroundings, and uncover fresh insights through simple yet powerful questions and a connection to Place. Skye is also a speaker and project professional passionate about inclusive, purpose-led work. Diana brings a background in reflective walking and coaching outdoors with a focus on using Nature as a Co-Facilitator.
Session: Street Wisdom: Finding Clarity in Complexity
The session will support participants to reflect on a personal or professional question and leave with a renewed sense of clarity, creative thinking and connection to place. Using the Street Wisdom method, attendees will be guided through a series of short, simple activities designed to tune their attention, tap into their surroundings and uncover new insights.
What to bring: This event will be held outdoors. Please bring good walking shoes and clothes for all weather. A question you’d like answered: not too big (‘What is the meaning of life?’), not too small (‘What shall I have for lunch?’) but somewhere in the middle – a burning issue to which you’d like fresh answers.
Nancy Nuñez and Steve Ray
Nancy’s facilitation approach is grounded in humanity kindness and generosity of spirit with the belief that the best work happens when people bring their whole selves to the the table. Nancy’s background is a rich one in both community and international and has worked across multiple sectors, including community, First Nations, government and corporate world.
Steve’s love of groups goes back to 2008 when he completed the Year-long Facilitation Diploma offered by Groupwork. His driving motivation is to help groups discover their own greatness by helping people to learn how to challenge themselves, take risks and be inspired. He is a long-time FODW participant and misses retiring for drinks at the end of these days in the great bar on the roof top that is no more.
Session: Untangling the Wrangling and Rediscovering our Humanity
In this session, Nancy Nuñez and Steve Ray from Groupwork Centre will go digging for gold to discover the wisdom that lies in the room when it comes to navigating complex environments. We’ll build connection, re-inspire each other and explore ways to get in touch with that part of us that is wise enough to steer clear of the immediate impulse to “fix” what seems to be broken.