Information on our 2026 offers
We’re excited to share the details of our opening session and the six facilitation sessions as part of 2026 One Day Wonder ‘Facilitating Connections In Challenging Times
Yarning Circle – Opening Session
Carole Vale and Michelle Howard
Carol Vale (right) is a Dunghutti woman and sociologist with extensive experience in public policy, having served as an executive in the NSW and Queensland governments across a three-decade career. She is an entrepreneur, businesswoman and visionary leader, and co-founder of Murawin. As an Aboriginal-owned and led company, Murawin works nationally on research, policy and place-based initiatives that break cycles of disadvantage for First Nations people.
Michelle Howard (left) is an internationally accredited facilitator and strategic planner with a background in cultural, urban and social planning across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. She has 30 years’ experience in community needs analysis, community infrastructure planning and complex stakeholder management. As Managing Director of Collaborations, Michelle is renowned for her inclusive and practical approach to working with groups and interdisciplinary teams. She is a founding member of the Planning Institute of Australia’s Planning with Country Knowledge Circle and was co-convenor of the Victorian Facilitators Network for many years.
Session overview: Opening and Yarning Circle led by Carol Vale from Murawin. Something special, inter-cultural and community building.
1a: It’s Not Rocket Science but it is Neuroscience
Ann Van Leedram
Ann Van Leerdam grew up in a small country town in Victoria’s South West and was desperate to move to the city — but from the moment she arrived in Melbourne, she’s been trying to recreate that small town ever since. That pursuit has taken her down the path of counselling, education, organisational dynamics, asset-based community development, facilitation, social prescribing, neuroscience and coaching. Fascinated by people, Ann has chosen to work in fields where people come together to create new things, for the common good.
Session Overview: We will be looking at how much our nervous systems effect how we learn and some great tips about what you can do in workshops to prime people for learning and engaging with problem solving. It will be a group learning experience. Participants will learn how to create a learning environment that supports learning through including nervous system supports.
1b: Healthy Relationships Magic
Simone Maus
For over two decades, Simone Maus has worked with leaders, teams and couples to navigate the complex terrain of human relationships. Her work is built on a simple premise: misalignment is expensive — emotionally, financially and relationally. Simone is the founder of the Healthy Relationships Hub, working with organisations to build healthy relationships at work, and with couples in the personal space of relating. She is also a Director with Zenergy Global, a leading company in the Art of Facilitation and Co-operacy in groups, where she has led Facilitation Skills Trainings from beginner to mastery level for the past decade.
Session overview: Healthy relating isn’t something we’re taught at school, and the gaps in our knowledge and understanding show up most clearly in challenging times. Conflicts arise, and people separate. If we want to walk together, we need to learn to build healthy relationships — especially with people we don’t agree with. How can we do that, respecting our differences in a healthy and productive way?
Purpose of the session: to gain clarity and practical tools on the key ingredients of healthy relating. Participants will learn the Mandala of Healthy Relationships, a wheel of 12 criteria that can be learned, practised and applied to any group or relationship. They’ll have the opportunity to complete a self-assessment diagnostic on a group or relationship they feel stuck with or challenged by, and as a group we’ll brainstorm interventions to help move that group or relationship forward, toward alignment and walking together.
1c: Trust-Up! Building Trust and Internal Team
Aidy Halimanjaya
Aidy Halimanjaya is a facilitator and researcher specialising in organisational capacity building and sustainability issues. As founder of Just Transition Indonesia, she draws on deep expertise in socio-environmental finance, transition planning and investment to turn groundbreaking ideas into reality. Driven by a passion for creating value and making a positive impact, Aidy excels at building networks and developing innovative solutions to pressing social and environmental needs. While her professional life is highly analytical, her core drive lies in developing systemic, locally-led solutions — she believes meaningful change begins with courageous conversations and genuine collaboration. Aidy holds a PhD in International Development.
Session overview: This interactive session explores how trust, active listening and constructive conflict can strengthen communication and collaboration. Using the Super Mario Bros game as a design device, the session moves beyond “superficial” team-communication building to address the core foundations: psychological safety, active listening and constructive conflict. Participants will come away with practical tools to help teams stay connected during uncertainty, navigate difficult conversations, work through conflict constructively, and maintain trust when pressures and competing priorities arise.
Participants will work through a series of Mario-inspired collaborative challenges requiring active listening, information-sharing, collective problem-solving and trust-building. Through structured reflection, they’ll identify communication patterns and barriers to collaboration, and leave with practical strategies to apply in their own teams. The final part of the session reflects on how the methods and tools can be adapted to participants’ own work and sector.
2a: Tilling the Soil: Consciously Crafting the Conditions for Collaboration and Collective Thriving
Lucy Mayes
Lucy Mayes has over 30 years’ experience as a facilitator spanning community, team, organisational and leadership engagement and development. She is anchored and driven by her vision for a world built on love, connection, deep listening, shared power and collective thriving for people, planet and future generations. A dynamic and engaging facilitator, Lucy specialises in process design and delivery to support conscious culture-crafting, effective collaboration, strategy, governance and partnerships, and loves playing with new facilitation methodologies, including co-facilitating with nature, with horses, and with playful, imaginary futures. Drawing on her training and experience as a lawyer, social worker and company director, Lucy has worked across diverse contexts including healthcare, corporate, education, the arts, government, not-for-profit, charity and welfare.
Session Overview: This session invites facilitators into the ProSocial World methodology, an evidence-based framework built around a simple question: what conditions need to be present for groups to genuinely cooperate and collectively thrive? Grounded in Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning research and evolutionary and behavioural science, it identifies eight Core Design Principles that appear consistently when cooperation is sustained, and are absent when it breaks down. ProSocial facilitation means consciously cultivating those conditions through intentional design, not just good vibes.
Participants will explore the framework as both a diagnostic lens and a practical facilitation toolkit, one that has supported cooperation and collective action across business, healthcare, community, education, government and not-for-profit contexts worldwide. They’ll experience it from the inside, moving through the session as both participants and practitioners, and leave with language, tools and at least one concrete intention for their own practice.
2b: Running a People’s Assembly
Jim Buckell
Jim Buckell is a facilitator and writer based in central Victoria. He likes swimming, growing things, slow walks and hanging out with his kelpie and chooks.
Wendy Hopkins
Wendy Hopkins is a facilitator, support worker and community engager based in Mount Alexander Shire. She enjoys dancing, volunteering as a sustainability advocate, and life in a bush village where everyone pulls together, mostly in the same direction.
Session overview: Peoples’ Assemblies are sometimes used by local and state governments facing contentious issues that tend to polarise people. This version takes a grassroots approach, led by Castlemaine community group Really Local. Done well, working together to find a solution that meets everyone’s needs strengthens communities, building the skills and capacity to tackle complex issues; this session develops approaches to facilitating large groups through tricky questions, communication across difference, pop-up conflict and collaborative decision-making. Scenario: a representative group of 40 people (a Peoples’ Assembly) has been brought together to answer a difficult question facing their community. Participants, as facilitators of the assembly, will receive a brief and work in small groups to plan a session outline; each of the three briefs poses a different challenge, and groups will report back at the end.
2c: Facilitating Connection Through Decolonising Ways
Pru Gell
Pru Gell is a settler with German, Danish and English ancestry living on Wadawurrung Country with her partner and two children. Pru is a highly sought-after facilitator and conflict transformation practitioner with over 20 years’ experience, working with leaders and teams across for-purpose spaces from diverse walks of life.
Pru founded her organisation, Coming To Life, as a way to elevate First Peoples’ perspectives and Indigenous ways of being, perceiving and doing. She loves creating spaces that embed this wisdom and draw on the intelligence of the natural world, believing it holds vital keys to how we respond to the predicaments of our present and our futures.
Amy Huon
Amy Huon is a settler with French, English, Irish and Scottish ancestry living on Wurundjeri Country. Amy is a Feldenkrais practitioner, Focusing Practitioner, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and long-time somatic meditator. Her trauma-informed work meets the challenges of our times by tapping the resilience and wisdom of our embodied selves — as parents, partners, friends and citizens. For two decades, Amy has supported people to feel, heal and reconnect with what matters most to them, and brings her nervous-system-regulating, somatic and embodiment work to Coming To Life’s sessions.
Session overview: So much of our lives, in challenging times, are spent feeling separate, busy and in motion. At Coming To Life, we find it takes real intention as a facilitator to support genuine connection — the kind you can only find once you get beneath the busy, choppy surface of the times we’re in.
This session contributes to the theme “Walking Together: Facilitating Connections in Challenging Times” by inviting participants to consider and practise other-wise, or decolonial, ways of being — ways that help us remember we are, of course, interdependent and connected. From that place, walking together starts to feel more possible.
Participants will be invited to slow down, regulate their nervous systems, and learn nine decolonial ways and patterns — practices that are core to Coming To Life’s facilitation work. They’ll explore and discuss how patterns of colonising and decolonising shape, or could shape, their own facilitation practice, and the effects of that — extending, where time allows, to how these patterns shape “facilitating connections” in challenging times.