The Tamarack Institute is a registered Canadian charity dedicated to ending poverty in all its forms, for good. We support real people and invest in real communities for long-term change.
guide to great meetings
The Guide to Great Meetings is a practical resource aimed at transforming meetings into spaces where collaboration and connection thrive. Designed for facilitators, community leaders, and anyone looking to foster productive gatherings, the guide offers insights and actionable steps for creating meaningful meetings that balance relationship-building with results. With a focus on intentional design, it introduces key principles and techniques to enhance participation, guide discussions, and establish a sense of shared purpose.
In collaboration with the entire Tamarack team during the summer of 2022, we identified seven foundational ways to create spaces and conversations on which achievement of goals at scale depends. We call them invitations because they can’t be mandated, only – well – invited.
- Design for goals with relationships and resources in mind.
- Define roles for self and for the participants.
- Use check-in to establish the group’s ownership of the meeting results.
- Share work with the group.
- Stay present and open with the group, practice inclusion, and give the work back.
- Support the group’s progress by using context statements and effective questions.
- Capture, summarize, and synthesize the group’s decisions and invite action commitments.
This toolkit is for facilitators who create spaces and conversations that enable groups to achieve equitable goals at population scale. It offers practical ideas and accompanying tools in how to operationalize these invitations, when to use them, as well as suggestions for how to integrate them into your existing practice. We invite you to explore, practice, and let us know what resonates, what’s missing, and what you adapt. As with all of our work, the insights and lessons ultimately come from the experience of all of you who lead this work in community.
