Participatory Design & Facilitation
Root Change designs and facilitates labs, convenings, retreats, workshops, and strategy processes that help diverse groups make sense of complex challenges and move toward shared action.
Guiding groups to collaborate, learn, and act together
We support organizations, coalitions, and communities in co-creating solutions, facilitating dialogue, and applying locally-generated insights to real-world challenges. Strong participatory processes foster creativity, inclusivity, and reflection, creating space to test ideas, align strategies, and take coordinated action toward equity-driven outcomes.
Our approach to participatory design and facilitation includes:
- Collaborative design processes, including Social Labs, human-centered design, and rapid prototyping to generate locally-owned and collective solutions
- Learning and strategy summits, which facilitate structured dialogue, reflection, and decision-making across diverse participants
- Facilitated workshops and experiences, fostering inclusive discussion, knowledge sharing, skill-building, and action planning
- Participatory decision-making, turning co-developed theories of change, constituent feedback, and locally generated data into actionable solutions
Stories & Insights
What WiLEAD’s First Year Taught Us About Environmental Action as Democratic Practice
The Future of Facilitation: Combining Human Connection with Smart Technology
Telling the Stories Behind Social Change
From Classrooms to Communities: Inside Wisconsin’s Labs for Environment & Democracy (WiLEAD)
Participatory Design & Facilitation in Practice
ERC Annual Retreat: Root Change co-facilitated the 2025 Economic Recovery Corps Annual Retreat, guiding 58 fellows, 30 host representatives, and 14 national partners through co-created agendas, reflective exercises, and Open Space sessions. Participants collaborated, shared insights, and generated actionable strategies, strengthening peer-to-peer learning, collective problem-solving, and coordinated action across the ERC network.
Cohort-Based Learning & Peer Exchange: Through the Community Power Learning Initiative, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we helped grassroots leaders and community power organizations connect across geographies, reflect on lived experience, document practical strategies, tell their stories, and explore how community-led movements can advance health equity, civic participation, and systems change.
Global innovation processes: Root Change partnered with Children International to design and facilitate a global innovation process across 10 countries that helped staff identify challenges, prototype solutions, and test new ideas through structured experimentation. Through the initiative, Root Change supported more than 800 staff globally.
Malawi Social Labs: Root Change designed and facilitated social accountability labs in two districts in Malawi, creating structured spaces for civil society, local government, traditional authorities, and citizens to work together on locally defined challenges. Supported through USAID Local Works, the labs combined dialogue, rapid experimentation, and learning cycles to strengthen mutual accountability, generate practical solutions, and build local ownership for more responsive local governance.