Who is this Manual meant for?

For Co-Counsellors who want to organise Co-Counselling workshops and create the opportunities for other Co-Counsellors to facilitate or teach Co-Counselling workshops.
This Manual is about all the practical aspects involved in organising these workshops. It is about choosing venues, renting them, publicity, decisions about having children and money matters, and much more. The workshops can be of a variety of natures: one day ones to residential ones of a week or more.
Obviously, running workshops is meant to be an enjoyable job. Unfortunately, it can become easily a pain in the neck when the burden of work becomes too great or problems arise with the people involved. The bigger the workshops, the greater the chance of this to be happen. Workshops are run by enthusiasts, but even enthusiasts have their limits.

Who is this Manual not meant for?

For people who want to know more about facilitating or teaching Co-Counselling workshops. However, this manual can give you an idea what is involved in organising workshops and can clarify how heavy the combined job of organising and facilitating a Co-Counselling workshop can be for the in-experienced Co-Counsellor.

Why this Manual?

The necessity of well organised Workshops

Although Co-Counselling seems to be about one-to-one sessions, Workshops are a necessity for the majority of Co-Counsellors to keep going with Co-Counselling. Workshops offer the opportunities to meet potential partners for sessions and by doing so support the networking among co-counsellors. Workshops support people to develop their skills and often workshops inspire people into new areas of life and of Co-Counselling.

Especially the residential workshops create contacts and bonds between Co-Counsellors and this develops and maintains the social fabric of the Co-Counselling Network.

Workshops need to be well organised, 'well' in the meaning that Co-Counsellors experience these workshops as worthwhile to spend their time, money and energy on. So worthwhile that in the longer run, they feel it is a good job to organise one themselves. It doesn't make sense to expect Co-Counsellors to organise workshops, if they themselves and other people don't have good experiences with workshops.

Support for Workshop Organisers

Organising workshops 'well' is a quite complicated task. This manual can be a support to Workshop Organisers, especially inexperienced ones. Having visited a lot of workshops is not automatically a sufficient base, though very welcome experience.