This post was written by Brian Chan—the Youth Development Specialist at Asian Counseling and Referral Service—about his attendance at a two-day Creative Facilitation training with United Way’s Racial Equity Coalition.

As a night owl with a hybrid work schedule, I dreaded hearing the phrase “an eight-hour training on my remote workdays.”

But barely an hour into the first day, I knew this would be the most rewarding and everlasting training I have ever taken. Beyond that, this training would also create a bond not only between our team and other participating organizations but also between us and the youth that we serve to unforeseen depths.

As a part of the QOLOR Team (Queer Opportunities to Lead, Organize, and Reflect) at Asian Counseling and Referral Service, I had been invited to participate in a two-day Creative Facilitation training workshop with United Way’s Racial Equity Coalition. The training was run by FEEST, an organization focused on building youth advocacy and collective power in schools, and the goal was to use our own creativity to learn to empower kids.

As the name of the training suggests, these two days were filled with creativity and learning amidst tremendous fun and connection. From a name-based hide-and-seek game to throwing imaginary balls at each other, every workshop participant was ecstatic to get to know each other in these innovative and refreshing ways.

Ultimately, however, this was not only an occasion for us as social service professionals to enjoy each other’s company. This was also an opportunity to sharpen our facilitation skills and shift our perspectives on leading youth groups. Personally, the most successful component of this workshop was how the facilitators made us adults feel like kids again.

The folks at FEEST may have meticulously designed the activities we participated in, but they engendered a sense of naïveté in me that I had lost long before I joined the workforce. All the activities had an absence of judgment and a presence of childlike blithe. This observation made me realize that leading a youth group and connecting students among themselves is so much more meaningful (and much more fun) than asking an icebreaker question.

As facilitators for middle school students, my team and I possess the power and obligation to let them grow and develop various skills. But we also hold the responsibility to model the kind of person that we would love to see them grow to become. While the goal of creative facilitation remains to lead a group of some sort, the means through which we lead it can change how participants perceive us as facilitators and how they interact with others as they emerge as future leaders of society.

I was delighted to feel like a kid during those two training days. Still, in hindsight, this workshop made me realize what I needed to hear the most as a facilitator: nothing is ever boring if we have even the most minuscule amount of creativity, but being creative (particularly as an adult) also requires certain vulnerability and courage.

Since the workshop, my team and I have incorporated some of the activities we learned at the training into our own groups. We have also created some new activities that contain elements of vulnerability and creativity, which were demonstrated during the training. As a result, many group participants have become more active and engaged during sessions. We do so by being the kids who have always been living inside us in front of these young adults, and in turn, they learn that being an adult is far from scary and boring.

By losing our adulterated pretense in groups, we are also growing more accustomed to a new central philosophy that we have come to terms with as social service professionals: We don’t teach kids to grow into adults; we teach future adults how to stay being kids.

It was all worth losing sleep over.

If you support this work, please consider giving to United Way’s Racial Equity Coalition.