What You'll Learn
This course is designed to help coalitions and organizations navigate complex choices with greater clarity, equity, and shared ownership. As communities face increasingly interconnected challenges—from housing and health to justice and safety—this course offers tools for making decisions that are more inclusive, intentional, and aligned with collective values.
You will explore how power shows up in decision-making, how to determine who decides, and when to involve others in the process. Through real-world examples and facilitation tools, the course introduces multiple decision-making methods—from independent decisions to consent and consensus—alongside a clear process for moving groups from open discussion through the “groan zone” and toward thoughtful action. The result is a stronger ability to make decisions with others, even when the work is messy or uncertain.
How to recognize and navigate power in decision-making
Identify who holds decision-making power, understand how decisions impact different groups, and shift from “power over” to “power with” approaches that center equity.
How to choose the right decision-making method
Discover how to match decisions with the appropriate method—independent, advice-based, majority, consent, or consensus—based on urgency, complexity, and who is affected.
How to guide groups through complex decisions
Learn to move groups through open, narrow, and closed stages of discussion, navigate the “groan zone,” build agreement, clarify roles, and avoid common pitfalls like decision fatigue and false urgency.
What's Included in the Course
This course allows you to access the material at your own pace, online. Each module will provide you with an instructional video and tell you how long that module will take you to complete. Some modules include tasks or toolkits that encourage you to pause and apply your learning to a scenario you are currently working on. At the end of the modules, you’ll get access to the slides from the course. Then, we’ll ask you to submit your feedback on the course.
Workshop Modules
Meet Your Instructor
Morgan Schmehl
Collaboration Manager
Morgan balances head, heart, and hands in their work to create inclusive, engaging spaces for collaboration. They plan gatherings, organize logistics, and support projects. They do this by thinking strategically, learning from communities, telling stories, and authentically showing up as their true self. Grounded in emergent principles of anti-racism, trauma-informed practice, and consent, their work at the Civic Canopy seeks to honor difference and foster opportunities for people to come together to build a more nourishing reality. They bring experience in education, nonprofit operations, food justice, activism, and place-based engagement. Morgan’s contribution today reflects a long lineage of change-makers of the past, and their visions reach generations into the future.
