The Greatest Lessons in Trust and Generosity from Online Communities

A conversation with Sophie Bujold, Facilitator and Community Strategist at Cliqueworthy

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Sophie Bujold of Cliqueworthy. Sophie shares how her early experiences in MIRC chat rooms shaped her approach to building human-centered, connected communities. They discuss the importance of trust, generosity, and adaptability in online spaces, as well as Sophie’s journey from digital explorer to expert facilitator. Sophie reflects on lessons learned, balancing structure with emergent conversations, and her impact on social causes, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The episode highlights the enduring power of technology and facilitation to foster authentic connection and belonging.

Show Highlights

[00:02:53] The Nature of Early Online Communities
[00:07:41] Learning and Generosity in Online Communities
[00:14:10] Trust and Curiosity in Facilitation Style
[00:18:32] Realizing the Role of Facilitator
[00:27:12] Riding the Wave: Managing Growth and Avoiding Burnout
[00:35:30] Favorite Sectors and Desired Impact

Links | Resources

Sophie on LinkedIn

About the Guest

Sophie Bujold is a facilitator and community strategist who helps membership-based organizations design communities that feel more human, connected, and sustainable. Through her company, Cliqueworthy, she works with associations, professional networks, and social impact organizations to rethink how members engage and how teams collaborate behind the scenes.

With more than 20 years of experience in community design and facilitation, Sophie helps turn scattered efforts into clear, meaningful action so organizations can build communities where participation and belonging come naturally.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:
Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast, where I speak with Voltage Control Certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. And if you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com.
Today, I’m with Sophie Bujold from Cliqueworthy, where she helps membership-based organizations design communities that feel more human, connected, and sustainable. She works with associations, professional networks, and social impact organizations to bring clarity, connection, and momentum to their member experience. Welcome to the show, Sophie.

Sophie Bujold:
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:
It’s so great to have you. Looking forward to chatting.

Sophie Bujold:
Me too.

Douglas Ferguson:
So to get started, I’d love you to take us back to those late nights on mIRC in a small New Brunswick town.

Sophie Bujold:
So I discovered mIRC when my parents signed up for the internet. It came on a floppy disc back then with our internet provider service. And little did I know that that piece of software would actually open up a whole new world for me.
I quickly started meeting people from around the globe in cities and countries that I hadn’t even dreamed of being able to access at that point and made some really lifelong friends. I still have friends from those days that are in my world. My partner and I met on those chat rooms and started, I think, one of the first online relationships really, it was just not heard of during those days. And it was really one of those moments where I don’t think we realized it at the time, how transformational it would be, but looking back on my career, I realize how much of an influence being able to have those first experiences connecting with other humans in an online world just really influenced how I do my work today.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. I recall you were talking about this idea of slow but meaningful online conversations and it really shaped a sense of place and relationship.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. I mean to give you some context back then, for those of you who know mIRC, you know that it’s a pretty boring platform. It’s text on a screen. Multiple people could join in a channel. For a little while, you couldn’t even have private conversations on the side with people. And we had to literally mail each other photographs. That’s going to make me sound very ancient, but we couldn’t send files through the software.
So it had a little bit of innocence to the interactions in that there wasn’t a huge amount of people on there. Most folks were from universities, so a lot of scholars, a lot of professors, and a lot of students, and everyone was kind of helping one another with all kinds of things. I got help with my homework back then. I got help even just learning about other parts of the world that I had not been into. And there was a wholesomeness to it that I think the internet has lost a little bit today, but that was really powerful in helping me see, at least, the power of using technology to connect with other human beings.

Douglas Ferguson:
Turns out you didn’t need subreddits in the beginning of the internet.

Sophie Bujold:
Exactly. It was just one of those places where if you were mildly technical, you could find your way to it, but it wasn’t wildly accessible to everyone. So the networks were actually fairly small, even though there were multiple of them. So there were actually a lot of people on those networks, but you had to find your way to little corners and then kind of just stay there because you were like, “I don’t know what else is out there,” and you don’t know if you can come back and find your people from there.
So I felt very adventurous, I think, in the process and also really curious about the folks that I was meeting. I just thought that was the coolest thing that I could have friends in far off places and not have to do it by pen pals or whatever else.

Douglas Ferguson:
It felt a lot like traveling. You find a spot where you really connect with people and you kind of want to stay there and come back because it took a lot of effort to find.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah, that’s a really great point. It was a little bit like traveling without leaving the comfort of my home at that point, which I couldn’t really do. I was a teenager, so I was at the mercy of my parents back then, but this was a way for me to start exploring things beyond my backyard in a way that was still relatively safe and harmless.

Douglas Ferguson:
You also reminded me, you couldn’t send images, there was no DM at that point, right? And also, I think it’s just helpful context for folks to think about, there was no cell phones then and in a lot of ways, it was like the messaging that we have now on our cell phones, but you had to do it with a computer. You couldn’t send images yet.

Sophie Bujold:
Exactly. That sounds tedious to every teenager on earth right now.

Douglas Ferguson:
You had to know someone’s phone number where this group of folks were. It’s like a group chat on your phone that you had to know the phone number for, or at least become aware of it somehow. And it’s text only and you’re tethered to a computer and it’s over a phone line, so when your mom needs to make a call, you had to get off.

Sophie Bujold:
You’ve been there. You’ve been there.

Douglas Ferguson:
I just wanted to make sure that the folks that weren’t as old as us or weren’t keyed into this stuff at the time had some point of reference because some folks got the internet much later.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah, absolutely. And it definitely was a bit of a wild world. And we ended up in channels that were very random. Our favorite channel, ironically, for those who don’t know me, I have zero farming background, yet I hung out in a channel for many years called Dairy Farming because that’s where all our friends were. So it was just a weird and wacky place to visit. And it was almost like one of those curio cabinets where you could open a door and be like, “What is behind this and what can I find here and who is in that room?” And if you didn’t like it, you just closed the door and moved on. So it was a very, for me anyways as a curious teenager, it was a really fun and exciting environment to be in.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, that’s so fun. It definitely felt like a bazaar, like, so many curious things and really I think it just tapped into my love of eccentricity, just random things. And it was such a fun way to discover new stuff, whether it was music or art or just new ideas.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah, absolutely. And also tapping into the number of people that I met that were world experts in whatever, or at least claimed to be and I believed them, was really unreal. I remember a time where I had a physics assignment that I couldn’t figure out and instead of going to a web browser and searching it, which was limited back then too, I just hopped on to a chat room and found someone who had that expertise and he walked me through my homework. That’s just something that’s a little bit hard to emulate today unless you have an app for tutoring or whatever else. Back then, it was just a lot of goodwill and a lot of people just connecting with one another.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. And I’m curious, how did the early internet spirit influence how you gather people today?

Sophie Bujold:
I think for me, there were two big pivotal points. So one is, I come from a very small community of people on the east coast of Canada and I think the first piece for me… And let’s note that I did not realize that until I was much older, but I think I realized now that that community experience really shaped my perception of belonging and how I want to welcome people in a space. There was a warmth to the culture that I come from that I crave on a regular basis and really try to emulate in the work that I do.
The internet came in and chat rooms and things like that really shaped the second part because I was a very early adopter of that technology. And when I started my career, what I heard from people was, “It’s really cool that you’re doing that, but there’s no way a computer can create real human connection.” And I was like, “I think it can.” And I don’t think that I consciously set out to really take that on as a challenge in the work that I do, but I did do it, at least at a subconscious level, to the point where I started playing with, how do we create spaces that welcome people in and how can we create experiences that they come back to over and over again? And how can I do that with limited technology? So really, I started marrying the two and I think one of my key tenets for the work I do now is how would this interaction look if it was in person and how close can we get to it with the technology that we have today?

Douglas Ferguson:
Okay. So you mentioned that you had a professor help you with a physics problem, but also I believe that you had a plane ticket that led to some deeper relationships later on. So what was that like?

Sophie Bujold:
That was wild. So I mentioned earlier that my partner and I met in those chat rooms that I was in very early on. We were nowhere near one another. I was on the east coast of Canada, he was on the west coast of the United States. And as a teenager, the prospects of traveling to one another sounded pretty impossible. And what we had is one of those strangers in the room that saw us chatting day in and day out approach me and say, “I would love to give you a plane ticket so you can spend your first Christmas together.” Total stranger. I have never met this person. I don’t even know their real name. Somehow, I trusted that a plane ticket would show up at my door, because back then they were paper tickets that had to be mailed, and gave this stranger all of my personal information and got a ticket and my identity is totally safe.
So that person showed up at that right moment, gave us an opportunity to spend some time together. Many, many years later, we’re still together. So they kind of were the catalyst for that relationship really taking off and working, which was unheard of in those days. My family was going, “What the heck are you doing?” And I said, “I think it’s good. We’ve been talking for two years. I know more about this person than anyone else.” Maybe that was a bit naive on my part, but it worked out. And to me, that’s a moment that was really magical.
And that person came in, did that good deed, and then we haven’t seen them since then. So they really just showed up and it just showed the generosity that was happening back then. There were a lot of people helping each other out in different ways. It emulates some of the things I see on social media now, to be honest, whether it’s a crowdfunding campaign and things like that. But in those early days where all of that stuff was not set up or accessible yet, it was a pretty magical thing to have someone land right in the middle of another relationship that was building and just say, “Let me help it along.”

Douglas Ferguson:
And what did those acts of generosity teach you about trust in an online community?

Sophie Bujold:
That’s a very good question. I think it has taught me less about generosity in the online community very specifically. For me, the biggest lesson I took from that is to always assume the best out of people first. And I do that, whether it’s in an online setting or a lot of the communities I built also have an offline component. Just with interacting with humans in particular, assuming the best before you assume the worst until someone proves you wrong is really a philosophy that I’ve carried forward since then because it has served me so well across the spectrum of my life to just trust that people have good intentions in most cases.
Has it worked out 100% of the time? No, but I’d rather assume that it will than assume that everyone has bad intent and not have the opportunity to experience those moments of generosity. Because really at the end of the day, had I said no to the offer, we wouldn’t have had that opportunity to spend time together and build that relationship and that trust and that carries forward with any other moment where I’ve trusted that someone was coming to do good in my life.

Douglas Ferguson:
And how do you think this notion of trust and assuming positive intent has shown up in your facilitation style?

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. So I think in facilitation in particular, that same philosophy can be applied, right? So I don’t assume that my participants are there to cause trouble or that even their reactions are to harm the experience for everyone else. I think it helps me get curious when something happens in the room that’s unexpected that maybe the first instinct is to go, “Oh my God, why are they doing this?” Or whatever that is, to get curious about where that reaction comes from. And I think that helps create an environment where people really aren’t afraid of showing up as they are and they know that the room is being held for them to have the reaction that they have and that we can have a conversation in most cases around that, when we have the time obviously, but it has really helped me not see reactions that are unexpected as a bad thing and see it as part of this process that I’m bringing people through.
So whether that’s thinking through strategy or looking at the vision for a new community structure, people will have feelings about it and I see it as an opening really to exploring why that person had that reaction, what they meant by it, and what it can mean to how we shape whatever we’re shaping in that space.

Douglas Ferguson:
I love that because a lot of facilitators really struggle with some of those pieces, especially when it comes to what’s emerging in the space can really knock some folks off their feet. They’ve come ungrounded and they lose their sense of flow. So it sounds like you’ve really tapped into some of these early lessons to help ground you.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. And I would say part of my superpower is really relationships, right? And a lot of those personality assessments or strengths assessments, that always comes out loud and clear for me that empathy and relationship building are my top skills. So those hard moments or those moments that someone might say, “Oh, they don’t have a good intention,” for me are an area of opportunity to bring that person in rather than push them out. In most cases. There’s always exceptions, but in most cases, it creates this beautiful opportunity to either deepen the conversation or have them realize what’s going on with them too. There’s been times where they didn’t even realize the impact of their reaction in the room and just not necessarily putting them in the spotlight or on the spot, but just bringing attention to the fact that that was coming up helped them analyze where their feelings were, which really helped them feel connected to the group really at the end of the day.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. I’m also thinking about your early career. I was thinking, digital explorer kind of came to mind as you were moving across these different roles and doing these things and you were kind of in a season of figure it out. And I’m curious if that helped you with this notion of being comfortable with ambiguity and just iteration as a core part of your practice.

Sophie Bujold:
Absolutely. And I would say that even today I’m still in a season of figure it out with a little bit more knowledge to make it a bit easier, but that’s just par for the course in a lot of this stuff. And I think if I was building community without being comfortable with human emotion and human being, I don’t know how effective I would be at the work that I do because at the end of the day, you can plan a community experience on paper all you want, but once you put humans in it, it might react differently and you need to be comfortable with that and you need to be comfortable with the feedback that comes from that in order to move forward in building an experience that makes people feel like they belong and they’re welcome in the space.

Douglas Ferguson:
And before you had the language of facilitation, you were already shaping conditions and softening the hard edges of tech. And can you recall a moment when you realized, even without the label I’m facilitating here, that you were doing that and what were you noticing in the group?

Sophie Bujold:
Well, it’s funny because I don’t think I realized it until I was in the cert program and we started walking through what it means to be a facilitator and then also being asked to bring forward some examples of our work in which we have facilitated. So for me, it wasn’t a moment in the room with a client. It was more the moment of me taking a moment, wanting to deepen my skills in an area where I felt like I wanted to explore and develop, and then realizing all along that, “Oh, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing here is facilitating these rooms and then pulling out all the examples of my work.” That was a pretty significant moment for me because I think before that, I realized the depth of the work that I was doing, but I don’t think I realized how deep that depth was, if that makes sense.
I knew it was important work, but I didn’t realize how much impact it had until I started sitting down, looking at the work that I had actually done, and thinking about, well, what did that mean for the customers I helped? And then I started realizing things like, I have impacted directly 11 out of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. I have been able to build communities that support people in areas that I feel pretty proud of, helping folks grieve very real-life situations, helping advocate for mental health across Canada, being able to help entrepreneurs secure funding for their ideas in the impact world. All of those things really… I don’t think I’ve ever done the work just to stroke my ego, but in that moment I stood a little bit taller and the impact that that has had on the world. And I think especially right now, where things are so tumultuous, I hang onto that and I say, I’m not the only one doing work that has impact. There’s still a lot of good that’s really happening out there.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yes, I love that. And I wanted to come back to something that you said in your alumni story that really struck me as this kind of comparing, trying new methods to picking up a fresh set of paintbrushes. And there might be a few rough strokes at first when getting used to the feel and how they presented on the paper or the canvas. And so I’m curious, because we embrace and embody practice so much at Voltage Control and Facilitation Lab, it’s such a critical part of the journey, and so I wanted to come back to these first rough strokes and curious if you could share an experiment that didn’t quite go as planned and what you learned from it?

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. I think that analogy, first and foremost, came from the fact that I am an artist, I paint, I do photography, I create a lot. And over the last several years in particular, I’ve been focused on intuitive creation as opposed to very formal realistic paintings and things like that. So for me, once I started realizing that facilitation was a thing I was doing, I’ll say I was very comfortable with experimenting, but that doesn’t come with areas of discomfort.
So the first few engagements that I did after certification were definitely an area of opportunity for me to be putting the skills I just learned to use. And in those moments, yeah, the engagement went very well from the client perspective, but I could start seeing, “Oh, I forgot to…” The first one that comes top to mind is I totally forgot to ask how many people would be in the room on my first workshop. I assumed that it would be a small group and then I ended up with a slightly bigger one that I didn’t quite know what to do with. And then I was like, “Okay, moving forward, that’s going on my intake sheet.”
So these little blind spots that you don’t think about in the moment, you’re just like, “Hey, I’m going to do this workshop. I’m going to knock it out of the park.” And just having that experience of having to operate on the fly and go, “Okay, there’s twice as many people as I expected here. How do I handle that right now because everyone’s in the room?” Figuring it out, working through it. Again, the engagement was fine from the client perspective. They had a good time. They really got what they needed out of the session, but in the background, I was definitely peddling a little bit faster.
And I think from engagement to engagement, that was the first one, the second one, it was just finding the balance between… I love a good conversation, I really do, but keeping time and having a good conversation sometimes goes against one another. So finding the balance between letting that conversation emerge and keeping on schedule so that everyone can get what they need out of the session was definitely another balancing act. So it was more on the technical side of things of me just kind of finding the right fit for the style of who I am and how I like to dig into things. I really love the kind of emerging stage where we’re thinking of new ideas, we’re putting things on the table, we’re having those conversations, and I’m learning that I need to get better at the convergence at the end.
So I’m okay with that, and I know that that’s what it is, and I’m putting practices in place in how I run my workshops to get better and better at it. Is it perfect now? Absolutely not, but I’m okay with that and that’s the part that I practice from time to time.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. I mean that is what practice is about. We do things and we learn from them. If we’re not learning from our behaviors and our actions, that’s where I think practice ceases, both our ability to run a practice, to put in practices, and just the broader definition of like, are we learning? Are we growing from the things we’re doing? And I love that you’re like, “I’m going to put this in my intake form.” It shows that we observed a lesson and we learned it, we applied it, and then we’re going to try to avoid it in the future.
Also, it’s interesting you talk about the timing stuff, loving the conversation, not omitting or assuming the number of people. And so I’m sensing a love of the art, of the passion in the conversation, the beautiful stuff that can happen when people are in communion together, but the logistics maybe are the thing that you’re personally working on.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. And it’s definitely finding the balance because a lot of what I do comes in those emergent moments and I don’t want to lose that as part of my facilitation. And I’m also known to just modify the agenda on the fly if I feel like the thing that we need is about to emerge and we’re just going to adjust the rest of what we’re doing. I’m comfortable doing that and I think that’s part of the figure-it-out training that I’ve had over my career is like, “Nope, we’re just going to adjust. Here’s what we’re going to cut out because this is where the nugget is.”
But I lean a lot more on our common humanity and what can come out if we just talk to one another. And that’s something that, at least in community building, is super important. It’s like, how do we get people to not just be shooting mechanical questions back and forth and then answering below, but how do we create that feeling of, “I want to be in this room because amazing things happen? I’m getting conversations that are very productive and stimulating for me and I want to be there?”

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. It’s so important that we’re creating a sense of flow for folks.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. And a sense of, I’ll come back to it over and over, just feeling like they belong in that room, like they found their people and they just can’t get enough of wanting to be in there.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. Love that. And it’s reminding me too of, I think near the end of certification for you and also about the time we were chatting about our community and about the alumni story, you were talking about just the right work was landing and multiple clients and a large member-based organization was coming in and just generating lots of deal flow. And I’m curious, what did you do structurally and personally to ride that wave without burning out? I think listeners could probably be interested and benefit from hearing what worked and didn’t work as you were kind of getting a lot of interest and trying to navigate a busy time, but also a time that was busy with things you were passionate about.

Sophie Bujold:
I think one of the most important things I did was really leaning on the community that I had created within our program. I met some amazing folks, some incredible people that I’m still in touch with now on a regular basis, and really leaning on some of their expertise in areas where I just had less experience.
The other piece of it too is I wasn’t using this to kind of shape the whole thing, but I used AI as a thinking partner a lot to just kind of challenge how I was structuring things or suggest activities that I might not be aware of that I might want to consider. It didn’t build my whole agenda, but it was definitely a thinking partner in the process of it.
And then third, leveraged a lot of the office hours that were happening at that moment to really kind of bring my work to the table and be like, “Here’s where I’m heading with it. What am I missing?” type thing.
So I think part of that. And then also, I’ll be very candid and say, part of it was also the, I’ll figure it out as I go thing that I’m really good at. But I relied a lot on the relationships that I had, whether it was with the client to start figuring out, “This workshop didn’t quite hit what we were looking for, what if we did a second one to just tie it up and here’s where we would focus?” So I left a lot of room for fluidity even in the engagement because I knew that these were new ways for me to work and that I might not hit the mark exactly on the spot that first time.
So for the client, that actually ended up adding a lot of value because they got a little bit of extra time to think through things, but it also gave me a playground to be able to really start structuring how I move in my Miro boards and what exactly I’m trying to extract from this group in order for us to continue doing the consulting piece of the work afterwards, right? Because my work has those two parts in balance all the time. It’s like, yes, I facilitate, but it’s also with the goal of getting information that I can then use to be the consultant to say, “Okay, based on the decisions you made, here’s the direction we can take with the experience you’re trying to create.”

Douglas Ferguson:
Another thing I was thinking about was just the importance of clarity and focus for organizations, especially I think professional services organizations benefit greatly when there’s a really sharp focus and you know who you’re serving. And you’ve done a great job, over the past few years, really starting to clarify that member organizations are your lane, co-designing roadmaps, facilitating discovery, and aligning teams. And I’m curious, if we walk through a typical engagement with you, what does that look like and how’s facilitation making a pivotal difference for you?

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. I think every engagement is a little bit unique just based on the need that comes through my door, but people typically come to me in two-ish buckets. So one, they’re either coming to me where they have an idea for a community experience, whether it’s online, hybrid, or offline, they just want to think through what exactly are we offering people? How do we structure it? And how do we start building a team that can support it? The other piece is, we have something and it’s broken. It’s not working the way we want it to. We don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know how to fix it. So that could be low engagement, high churn, just something’s just not jiving and it’s not meeting the needs of the organization that it’s supporting.
So in both those cases, I think the journey starts very similarly. I have a pretty robust intake form that everyone goes through on my website. That is purposefully done to get information ahead of the conversation that I want to have with clients, to get them reflecting about exactly what they want. So to your point about focus, that’s one of my ways to help them focus is to get them to stop for a minute and think about some of the key aspects of their community before we even have a conversation.
For a lot of people, I get to the call and they thank me for those questions because it really helped clarify in their head what exactly they’re asking for. So it leads to a much better discovery call where we can really dig into, what are their specific needs? And then craft an engagement that makes sense for that.
For a lot of the folks who are in that bucket of, we have something new, I have a whole community mapping process that is usually, 90% of the time, the process that we’ll go through where we really start digging into the values and mission that’s driving the community and why it needs to exist in the world. We take a look at what is already out there and how it might not be fitting the need of their client or where is the opportunity to find a difference that we can fill in the market. And then from there, we start looking at each piece of the community, right? Events, any kind of interactions they want to be having, whether it’s forum groups or whatever it is, whatever components, we always match it back to the needs of the community and the needs of the members that are in it.
I think one of the key pieces of what I do is really this empathy map of who is your member and what journey do we know they go through as they move from the first few moments of being in the community all the way to feeling like they’ve got what they need and exiting that community? What is that journey and what is the core need they need at every step? And we use that to then go into the experience and go, “Okay, now we know what they need. How do we help them scratch that itch? How do we help them fulfill that need so that they can move through the journey and be transformed?”
So many people don’t realize that community experiences also have a member journey and can be transformative. They just think like, “Oh, people come in and they hang out and they leave when they’re ready.” But if you tie the experience that you create to those member needs, one, it creates an experience that people participate at much higher rates in. Two, they stick around a lot longer, sometimes by years, which is usually good if it’s a membership-based fee at the front. It means more lifetime value for that customer. And yeah, so tying it all together from there.
And then once we have that really good picture of what the community needs, then we put in place the launch plan and the team plan and all of those things to move forward. And then on the side of, how do I fix my community? That usually starts with an audit of sorts and then moves from there based on the needs that we find in there.

Douglas Ferguson:
Looking ahead, what kinds of member-driven challenges or sectors are you most excited to tackle next? And how do you hope the ripple effects of your work will show up in communities those organizations serve?

Sophie Bujold:
So there’s three key areas that I actually love serving. It doesn’t mean that I don’t go outside of that, but it’s where I feel like my impact is the greatest. One is really in kind of social services area. We’re talking about things like communities that are helping people with their mental health, communities that are advocating in those spaces, and kind of adjacent communities in that space. I never set an actual wishlist for who I want to work with.
The other space is really the space of creativity, but I tend to work with clients who, again, are in that space of we want to have an impact in the world. So they’re doing creativity for the purpose of wellbeing, mental health, and having a positive impact on the people that are learning. It’s never just a learning community, there’s always that goal of, we want to help through art, through music, through all kinds of things. I’ve worked with painting communities and cello communities and all kinds of things in between, but all of them had that social impact kind of woven in, that they weren’t just doing it for teaching purposes, it was really to help people feel better, find something that they’re passionate about, and wanting to move forward.
So for me, those spaces are really important, especially, again, right now. There’s so much happening in this world and I think people need those anchors that are not work related, that are not politically related, where they can actually just sit in a room with other folks who have an interest similar to theirs. And I would even say that I consider those spaces really transformational, especially when two people with maybe opposing views can find some common ground. And I’m seeing that more and more with all kinds of initiatives in those spaces that I just named. Like, you have the Gaia Collective in New York City that’s based on music and singing and a whole bunch of other communities where, at first, it feels like, “Oh, it’s just for hobbies,” but really there’s a really connective fabric at the bottom of it.
So that’s what I look for in projects, is spaces where there’s some thought that’s been put into, how do we bring people together, especially people with differences?

Douglas Ferguson:
Ooh, love that. And I would imagine the ripple effects when we’re bringing together folks with differences are that we might have a bit more understanding about each other and a bit more harmony maybe, which I would argue that the world could benefit from. And anyway, we’re coming to our end, unfortunately. I know we could keep going and going. So I want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Sophie Bujold:
So my final thought for today is really in the fact that there’s a lot of opportunity right now to create connection between people to help people feel like they belong and they’ve found a supportive community and that, sure, it can take the form of working with someone like me on building something a little bit more formal, but I would also say there’s a lot of opportunity to look within our neighborhoods and our communities right now and being like, how can I gather people to either hold a potluck between neighbors or where can I create that opportunity of connection right now? You don’t need a formal business setting to be able to do those things. That’s what I experienced when I was online in those first few years and I think that’s something that folks have been slowly coming back to in a lot of cases right now and is needed more than ever.

Douglas Ferguson:
Wow. Yeah. I would echo that and thank you for sharing. It’s been such a lovely conversation and hope to chat with you again sometime soon.

Sophie Bujold:
Well, thanks for having me. It’s been great.

Douglas Ferguson:
Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics, and collaboration; voltagecontrol.com.