A Model for Healing: Internal Family Systems and Your Nonprofit

Description

Everything that happens in your nonprofit happens in the context of communities: the communities you serve directly, the communities who have a stake in your work, and the community of staff and volunteers and donors who make up your nonprofit. Your success depends on harmonious communication among all those communities — and the more diverse your communities are, the trickier it can be to keep everyone talking kindly together. That's where the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model can help.

IFS is a simple and powerful way to understand how human systems work. Originally developed by mental health clinicians, IFS helps individual human beings heal from trauma by understanding the many perspectives within their own minds. But IFS principles can also bring deeper understanding, more compassionate communication, and greater harmony to bigger human systems — like your nonprofit and the communities you serve.

In this quick, accessible introduction from a trained IFS practitioner, you'll learn practical ways the principles of IFS can help your nonprofit communicate more skillfully in communities at every scale — out in the world, inside your organization, and within yourself.

Learning objectives:

• Learn how IFS developed out of family therapy and systems theory 
• Recognize common structures of human communities at three scales: social systems, organizations, and individuals 
• Describe common protective roles for community members, and explain how they work together (and come into conflict) at all three scales 
• Learn and practice simple IFS techniques for responding compassionately to challenging moments in nonprofit work — also at all three scales

Offered by our partner, Minnesota Council of Nonprofits

About the Presenter: As a consultant and coach, Neil Ashvin Chudgar helps people communicate more skillfully in their communities — out in the world, in groups and teams, and within themselves. Before founding Chudgar Consulting in 2014, Ash spent over a decade helping students think about language and meaning at the University of Chicago and Macalester College, where he taught poetry, fiction, and philosophy. His coaching and consulting practice draws on the tools and techniques of fiction and poetry, the relational ecology of Internal Family Systems theory, and the wisdom of liberation movements. Learn more about his work at chudgar.com.