Impact Story
More than an event: Creating sustainable leadership through facilitation training and ownership
What began as a need for expert retreat design became a three-year journey of transformation and organizational development.
By partnering with UFacilitate and investing in a 7-hour process once a year for three years, Measures for Justice (MFJ) was able to see a significant shift in culture with respect to retreat design. The organization had recognized the need to strengthen internal connection and achieve clarity of purpose. Their annual staff retreats, once seen as routine gatherings, became an essential annual opportunity to strategically align their team, energize them about the organization’s mission, and navigate the constant change that we are all having to address in the world.
Along the three-year journey, staff across the organization began showing up with more confidence, clarity, and engagement, and leadership skills flourished. While the Organizational Development team developed their retreat design, management, and facilitation skills, the rest of the team enjoyed the learning, connection, and feeling of shared ownership of MFJ’s culture and direction that the retreats engendered. These evolved from external productions to deeply owned internal experiences—including the design and facilitation—fostering stronger connections and alignment.
With each passing year, MFJ reduced its reliance on external retreat consultants while increasing its internal ability to design, lead, and sustain powerful gatherings. And at the center of this growth was UFacilitate’s belief that the best facilitation coaching process doesn’t just solve today’s problem—it strengthens the leadership skills to meet tomorrow’s challenges.
“We loved working with the UFacilitate team and with Brooking (UF facilitator). Once again she proved to be an invaluable resource and helped us plan a day that centered around our theme and our values. It was a tremendous asset as usual, and we look forward to partnering again in the future.”
– MFJ Senior People Operations Generalist
From Facilitation Design to Capacity Building: Years 1 & 2
Coming out of the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenge of reconnecting a growing, remote-friendly workforce and designing meaningful in-person experiences felt overwhelming. That’s when MFJ partnered with UFacilitate, a global consulting firm known for helping mission-driven teams navigate complexity through facilitation, training, and capacity building.
In 2022, UFacilitate helped MFJ design the first post-pandemic retreat with an emphasis on reconnection and shared purpose. UFacilitate worked closely with the MFJ team, not just to design the retreat, but to model an approach that was thoughtful, inclusive, intentional, and replicable. Tools like the Success Spectrum helped define outcomes while every detail—from agenda design to facilitation strategy to debrief and early prep for the next year’s retreat—was documented using repurposable templates, laying the foundations for sustainable organizational learning.
The following year, MFJ was ready to go deeper. With the foundation in place, UFacilitate shifted their role from lead designer to coach and thought partner. Their ability to offer the same facilitator to work with the MFJ team throughout the 3-year process allowed for this evolution. The emphasis was now on supporting MFJ staff in the design and facilitation of their own event, and MFJ staff began taking ownership of the retreat’s content and flow. Two team members stepped into leadership roles, applying what they had learned and contributing their own design insights. UFacilitate guided them through merging their growing internal knowledge with the formal documentation from the previous year. By the end of the second year’s process, MFJ had a repeatable, scalable approach that was beginning to feel like their own.
“I would strongly recommend the facilitation process. I learned a lot about myself, my values, and what I look for in an event and how impactful an event can be. It really deepened my knowledge and I know my colleagues shared similar sentiments. I would strongly recommend the facilitation process. I plan events and have planned events in the past, and this helped me frame things tremendously and gave us more time to focus on our staff. I liked that Brooking helped us clarify new actions that we could take to help us move toward our goals.”
– MFJ Senior People Operations Generalist
Consolidating the Transformation Process: Year 3
By 2024, the transformation was clear. MFJ’s retreat was entirely staff-led. A newly formed internal design committee took charge, drawing confidently from the templates, processes, and practices developed in collaboration with UFacilitate. UFacilitate stepped into the background, offering light-touch guidance and quality control to ensure the event remained aligned with organizational values. The retreat wasn’t just successful—it was a reflection of a team that had grown into its own leadership and facilitation capacity.
“The evolution was remarkable. The first year MFJ depended on external consultants, and by the end of the third year they had their own team members proactively design and lead all the sessions. It was so satisfying to witness their growing confidence and how they felt empowered to design and facilitate their own processes. We intentionally trained them and transferred the knowledge so that they could do it themselves, and the result was beautiful. They went from logistics to leadership. It’s a great success story of a capacity-building model.”
– Brooking Gatewood, UF facilitator
Can UFacilitate Empower Your Organization?
This story is a testament to what’s possible when an organization invests not only in events, but in people. UFacilitate’s approach of coaching, gradually transferring responsibility, and strategic documentation helped MFJ strengthen their internal culture of collaboration, leadership, and staff development for long-term impact.
UFacilitate believes in facilitation as an essential skill for 21st century leadership, and in democratizing facilitation for every organization to be able to catalyze its own transformation. If your organization is ready to move from dependency to autonomy, and from good meetings to transformational moments, UFacilitate is ready to guide you there—step by step, year by year, until it’s yours.
Explore our services in facilitation training, leadership coaching, and organizational development and contact us to build your capacity, together.
