Pagan Leadership: Community Building, Facilitation, and Personal Growth

Do you want healthier Pagan communities? Explore tools, techniques, and ideas for Pagan leadership and community building, facilitation skills for meetings, rituals, and workshops, and the personal and spiritual work that underlies all of this and that is crucial if we want to build stronger, healthier, more sustainable groups.

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Shauna Aura Knight

Shauna Aura Knight

An artist, author, ritualist, presenter, and spiritual seeker, Shauna travels nationally offering intensive education in the transformative arts of ritual, community leadership, and personal growth. She is the author of The Leader Within, Ritual Facilitation, and Dreamwork for the Initiate’s Path. She’s a columnist on ritual techniques for Circle Magazine, and her writing also appears in several anthologies. She’s also the author of several fantasy and paranormal romance novels. Her mythic artwork and designs are used for magazine covers, book covers, and illustrations, as well as decorating many walls, shrines, and other spaces. Shauna is passionate about creating rituals, experiences, spaces, stories, and artwork to awaken mythic imagination.  

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Safety and Anti-Harassment Policies

As it becomes clear that the Pagan community is not at all immune to harassing, abusive, and bigoted behavior, we need to respond by crafting safety (or anti-harassment) policies for our groups and our events. And, learn how to properly enforce these. This post is not meant to be all-inclusive, but rather, a start to the conversation. I hear from folks all the time that are overwhelmed at the prospect of adopting a safety policy.

TL;DR-- At the end, I'm going to post links to a few examples of safety/anti-harassment policies. I'm also going to dig around for some inclusivity policies. Sometimes those are separate, sometimes they are together. These are useful to pull from as a template so that you aren't starting with a blank page.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Virginia Carper
    Virginia Carper says #
    May be people need to be specific in what they are discussing such as what bigotry and abuse was done by a victim. I have attended
  • Greybeard
    Greybeard says #
    EDITORIAL WARNING: The original comment has been removed. Victim blaming will not be tolerated on this site. This is your one war
  • Virginia Carper
    Virginia Carper says #
    I agree. One step is enforcement of policies. How is that to be done? I think that people don't like to "upset" others with their
  • Mark Green
    Mark Green says #
    Here are the policies I use for my Atheopagan events: Conduct standards: It is the intent of the producers that this event will b

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Addressing Things Publicly

Here's something that came up in my leadership/community building class at Pantheacon. When someone engages in poor behavior in a public setting, it must also be dealt with publicly. While there may be a private component to the process (mediation meeting, taking the person aside to offer them feedback, etc.) the behavior must still be dealt with in as public a fashion as it originally happened. 

Why? Because otherwise the other people who experienced the harm/observed the behavior have no idea what's going on. This becomes especially important as more organizations adopt safety/anti-harassment policies. If people in the group/at the event observe the safety policy being violated, then they must see how the safety policy is being upheld.

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Sexual Initiation, Discrimination, Consent, and Rape

 

I have heard from many people who felt pressured to undergo a sexual initiation with a teacher, coven leader, or other person in a leadership position. If someone's been pressured into sex, that's manipulation and abuse. And in circumstances where there wasn’t actually consent, by definition, it’s rape.

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  • Francesca De Grandis
    Francesca De Grandis says #
    Shauna, thank you for writing an important, detailed article with ideas that are carefully thought out. I saved the link so I can
  • Thesseli
    Thesseli says #
    This is an excellent article.
Becoming Pariahs and When Mentors Fail: Abusive Dynamics

 

Part 3 in a series. Read Part 1 here.

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Becoming Pariahs and When Mentors Fail: Cults and Consequences

 

This post is part two of the Becoming Pariahs and When Mentors Fail series. Start with Part One here.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Cedar
    Cedar says #
    Thank you so much for writing this, Shauna. Maybe someday I'll write out my own DG story...about the sexual harassing mentor who g
  • Sarah Avery
    Sarah Avery says #
    It may not be a coincidence that you're thinking about these issues the same week we get word that Kenny Klein was convicted on al
  • Rick
    Rick says #
    To be certain, some people are worse human beings than others. Neither Gerald Gardner nor Roberyt Cochrane were admirable people,
  • Diane Emerald
    Diane Emerald says #
    I greatly admire your courage in telling your story and addressing this issue. It goes way deeper than discovering that our leade
  • Rick
    Rick says #
    It is always tough when we discover our mentors are human. - Woods
Becoming Pariahs and When Mentors Fail Part 1

 

I have been trying to write about my experiences at the Diana's Grove Mystery School for years--my experience of codependency, of enabling, of abusive behavior. Of a group of people that did brilliant work and taught leadership and yet fell prey to human nature all the same. I have fought fistfights in my head--to speak the truth about the inner dynamics of the Mystery School, or to protect the many people I love who would be hurt if I spoke up. But I hear about so many unhealthy dynamics in Pagan groups that mirror what I went through, and how many people have been damaged by a charismatic yet abusive leader, I feel that to not address the dynamics of the place where I did my own leadership training would be unethical.

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Recent comment in this post - Show all comments
  • Thesseli
    Thesseli says #
    It's really a shame that this happened to you. (And if it happened to you, you know it must have happened to alot of other people
Sacrificing Perfection for Excellence

 

Some of us are haunted by the idea of perfection. It holds us back from our creative work; from any of our important work, for that matter. We fear we won't be able to do justice to the idea in our head. We've tried writing or painting or dancing, and somehow the brilliance of what we envision becomes corrupted as soon as we try to make it manifest. And there's that nagging voice in the back of our heads telling us what we have always known...that we're not good enough. That we will never have the skill to create what we dream of. That if it's not perfect, they'll deride us, they'll tease us. They'll reject us. Nobody will like us.

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