Finding a Fresh Perspective in Facilitation

Rooted in Rollins College’s academic mission of educating students for global citizenship and responsible leadership, Rollins Immersion: Citizens Take Action is intended to expose and engage students, faculty, and staff in critical cultural, social, political and structural issues in the community through weekend and weeklong experiences of community engagement.

When the Immersion program began in 2007, it was entirely faculty and staff led. Not only did this present challenges for growth and scalability, but it also created alternative break experiences that were planned from beginning to end without any student input. In 2012, the Center for Leadership & Community Engagement began to ask how can we create more student empowerment? How can we better utilize a peer education model? How can we grow our program around pressing and relevant social issues in our communities? In 2013, the Immersion program was restructured to be almost entirely student-led. Instead of having faculty and staff lead the planning process, we moved the planning process into the hand of facilitators.

Each Immersion experience is lead by a team of three facilitators; two student facilitators and one faculty or staff facilitator. After capturing interest, availability, and preferences from the Rollins community through an open application and interview process, the Immersion Planning Team (the student-led executive board) carefully considers an individual’s strengths, availability, class year, areas of study, preferences for impact-areas, and other qualities to build the best possible facilitator teams.

Once facilitator teams have been formed, the Immersion Planning Team turns over the planning process to facilitators. With guidance from the Immersion Planning Team, facilitators are responsible for creating their own unique alternative break experience. The needs, interests, and passions of our campus and local community are constantly changing. In allowing facilitators to create their own alternative break experiences, we, as educators, gain an opportunity to advise, empower, challenge, and support members of our community. In return, our facilitators receive a sense of autonomy, empowerment, get to share their unique voice, and authentically represent the voice of our community.

Facilitators work together to select an impact area and relevant community partners that will offer opportunities for strong direct service, education, and reflection, housing, and cultural activities. Our facilitators also craft their own marketing materials to recruit participants and select applicants that will be participating on their alternative break. Facilitators receive blinded applications and fill slots for their experience based on a variety of factors such as a participant’s class year, area of study, previous alternative break experience, and overall strength of the written responses on the application. In being intentional about who participates on alternative break experiences, our facilitators can create a space that offers diverse backgrounds, lived experiences, skills, expertise, dialogue, and perspectives to advance the group’s collective learning.

Our facilitators are the life of our organization. They model the way for participants and epitomize lifelong learning and peer education. Facilitators often work to tie in current events into the alternative break experiences that they lead. For example, a recent Immersion to Detroit, Michigan focused on social justice, diversity, and inclusion. This Immersion had the opportunity to spend a day in Flint, Michigan and learn about the ongoing water crisis and relate that experience back to their work in greater Detroit. Another Immersion, explored access to education and changes in educational policies in New York City during the transition of power from Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Mayor Bill DeBlasio.

All in all, facilitators within the Rollins Immersion: Citizens Take Action program are more than just leaders; they are educators and powerful voices within our community. In providing them with the tools, skills, and resources necessary to plan their own experiences, rather than planning it for them, we provide them the opportunity to gain real-world skills and experience in navigating public and private sectors. They reinforce ideas and values of leadership, responsibility, diversity, inclusion, and collaboration married with a liberal education.

Each year, more than 300 students, faculty, and staff members participate in approximately twenty Immersion experiences. As a result, Rollins has been ranked No. 1 for the highest percentage of alternative breakers relative to campus size for the past three years by Break Away, a national nonprofit organization that promotes quality alternative breaks. In retrospect, none of our program’s recent accomplishments would have been possible without the incredible work and leadership that emerges from our facilitator teams who are empowered to ask tough questions, take on big challenges, and make large impacts.