Offerings

For Organisations & Teams

Consultation for engaging and impactful gatherings
Is your team planning a conference, training, workshop, dialogue, meeting that is both effective (achieves its goals) and also engaging (offers a great experience to the participants)? Are you looking for innovative formats? I am happy to work with your team to think this through - from the basic foundation of such a gathering to a robust design that brings it's purpose to life. This is billed on a hourly basis.

Connections & Learning reflections for individual journeys/ fellowships
We go through experience after experience and rarely take a pause to stop and ask ourselves what is that we wanted to do, what happened, how is this a meaningful part of our life story, what does this tell about ourselves and our relationship with self and others, and what we want to take from this experience in the future. I have experience working with fellowships and educational programmes, where I design reflective spaces at the beginning (orientation/ induction), during (midpoint) and end (closing).

Participatory visioning and/or strategy
When I ask people how much time you should be spending on thinking of what you are doing versus actually doing it, the answers I get are between 10-30%. If you convert that to number of days in a year that means out of about 250 working days, we should be spending 25-75 days on THINKING about what we are doing. Yet many struggle to take out time to ask - what are we doing? how is it supporting our purpose and achieving the impact we intended to create? is the work meaningful and fulfilling? how is it a manifestation of our values? what can we do to better live our purpose and values? Periodic conscious collective reflection renergises all and brings to awareness where the focus needs to be. The goal is not to produce a strategy document but to become a purpose driven organisation. The process can take 10-12 days spread over a few months where the organisation then follows it up regularly internally.

Facilitation Lab for teams
Organisations and teams gather all the time - internally and externally - from the dreaded Monday Morning Meeting to a larger stakeholder consultation....Very often, there is limited thought given as a team on why they gather people - towards what purpose, and with which values? What is the organisation/ team's facilitation philosophy/ world view? I love working with whole teams to repurpose and systemise their approach to all their events. We meet and actually do the work in a multiseries Facilitation Lab (in person and offline). The idea is to reflect, co-design, deliver, receive feedback and evolve. The team also leaves with its own Gathering Guidebook.

Meeting facilitation for dialogue, learning exchange, planning or review
Bringing different stakeholders into the room is the first step. How do you design for understanding, co-creation & collaboration? I help organisations design mindful stakeholder consultations, roundtables and conferences to create an engaging and effective experience for everyone. Organisations (for example consortiums or networks) specifically reach out with a request to design and facilitate meetings that have a clear agenda and expected outcomes, are participatory and engaging and foster genuine contact.

Team connections
Teams feel the need to pause and reconnect with each other to celebrate, appreciate or talk about issues and challenges that are blocking them from working together joyfully and meaningfully. I organise one time team offsites as well as ongoing team connection rituals to sustain a sense of belonging and connection in the day to day of the organisation.

For Facilitators....

I love engaging with fellow facilitators - whether you are someone who loved being in a space and now want to learn how to create space for others or you are a seasoned facilitator looking for a chance to connect & grow with a like hearted community. Join my facilitators' community - the Facilitators' Learning Spiral!

For Individuals... (if you are in a role that requires facilitation like team leads, community engagement, board management, strategy, department leads, consultants, event managers...or you are someone who wants to add more magic to their personal/ community gatherings)

You can add more magic to every event/ gathering/ meeting you hold, let's talk. I host Gathering Genie Circles and Labs to come together and collectively notice what is happening in our gatherings and how we can intentionally design for creating the experience we want.

 

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"Mana was super meticulous in fact finding on the facilitation needs of our organisation and designed a tailored program that was extremely useful for the team. Her team created an open and safe learning safe where everyone was at ease and willing to do activities outside their comfort zone. The sessions were well structured with opening, substance, reflection and follow up. The team grew tremendously during the course of the sessions. Pushed the team to rethink their approaches to online sessions, panels, courses and meetings."

Jhalak Kakkar, Executive Director, Centre for Communication Governance, NLIU Delhi (sharing her team's experience of the Facilitation Lab)

“You know what before those sessions I could have never thought that a training, a session can be so powerful, I mean it can actually make you think, reflect, look inside, face yourself, question yourself and the way those sessions helped me to connect with my own self.”
Participant of induction training at a fellowship program

“Manali has been associated with Dhriiti for some years now and has taken the organisation through a very critical transformation process. The Strategy Exercise that Manali led with the Dhriiti team in 2013 was an important milestone in the organisational journey. Manali, not only designed the exercise in a participative way but also conducted it in a way that was synergetic with the overall organisational culture and values. Being an excellent facilitator, Manali took the team through challenging discussions and raised questions that were necessary for moving forward. Unlike most other consultants, Manali left us with a concrete follow up plan and built capacities of the team to live the Strategy Plan that got developed under her guidance. We thank Manali for her participatory approach that strengthened the organisation forever.”
Nidhi Arora on longer term impact of the strategy process with Dhriiti (2013)

“Manali Shah brought her immense energy and enthusiasm into our strategic planning exercise in 2014 and the result was a strategic plan and roadmap that is standing us in good stead. With Manali’s help, we developed a three-year strategic plan, extendable to five years and this plan has helped us prioritise our activities, make crucial staffing decisions and record our work in a manner that helps us evaluate our progress more meaningfully. The strategic planning process was comprehensive and the final document that emerged from it has been valuable in inducting new team members as well as in keeping us focused on our goals and activities.”
Prabha Nagaraja on longer term impact of the strategy process with TARSHI (2014). I have engaged with TARSHI in 2018 and in 2024 for strategy co-creation.