Facilitate Everything: Halloween Edition!

Facilitation is an art form that we often use in professional and organizational settings, but we can facilitate anything and everything. Perhaps my favorite group to facilitate is my neighborhood, and my favorite facilitation space is my backyard.

Let me tell you the story of how I used facilitation to bring Halloween back to my neighborhood….

For our first two years in our neighborhood, my spouse and I would stand on our porch waiting for trick or treaters to stop by for candy, and much to our disappointment, no one would ever arrive. We were in one of those neighborhoods where all the kiddos left to trick or treat in other people’s neighborhoods, much for the rumored king-sized candy bars.

Growing up, Halloween was always a favorite night. Sure because of the candy, but mostly because we got to visit with alllll the neighbors. We had a hotdog party, and a parade, and made lots of sweet memories.

Feeling tired of missing out on Halloween, the next year I decided to it was time to lend my facilitation skills to the neighborhood (plus my facilitation mentor, Susie Childers, offered some generous encouragement to give it a try). I hosted a neighborhood Halloween planning meeting in our backyard to see what it would take to bring Halloween back.

I prepared a facilitation agenda! We first went around the circle and shared our favorite halloween memories, and from there started throwing out ideas for what would make people excited to come out to trick or treat in our neighborhood, especially during a pandemic. Using collaborative and consensus-based facilitation approaches (like Thumbs Voting) we created a neighborhood Halloween plan! One of the teens attending had suggested we have Spooky Woods walk, through the woods behind all of our houses that became a sanctuary for so many neighbors during the long solitude of the early pandemic. It sounded a little wild to me, but people were in for it, so we decided to give it a try! We agreed to do a centralized gathering for candy sharing for kids of all ages, and one neighbor offered to do a shadow box puppet show! A few emails out to the listserve later explaining our plan and how people could participate, we had a beautiful little Halloween!

Each year since we’ve hosted the annual Halloween planning meeting — all neighbors welcomed for a potluck. Over the last three years, we’ve added a parade, some live music, and the spooky woods evolved into an enchanted forest this year!

Some how we managed to pull off a group photo of all the folks who came out for Halloween last night, despite the cold, damp weather. 3 years in, we’re now the neighborhood other families want to come to, not for our big candy bars, but because it’s such a magical moment of gathering in community!

My favorite part this year was the older neighbor who asked how she could help, and we said we needed more fairies for the enchanted forest! So with her new middle and high school friends, she was a beautiful purple fairy!!

Happy Halloween everyone!!!! May we facilitate EVERYTHING, especially those things that bring us connection and community!