We are excited to offer this opportunity to support your work of bridge building. Be the Bridge (BTB) is offering an experiential training workshop designed for BTB group leaders and members, called Foundations for Bridge Builders. The work of racial bridge building often involves having difficult and emotionally charged conversations that are inherently loaded with cultural, ethnic, religious, personal assumptions and bias. To be an effective bridge builder, we need to enhance and develop key skills and practices related to managing assumptions & conversations and building a space for honesty & trust with those different from us. The purpose of this training is to explore, practice and notice how you are BEING a bridge builder with others. This training is designed to allow you to discover the automatic assumptions that influence your interactions with other. Through building awareness of your thinking about yourself and others, new possibilities for bridge building conversations and relationships can be produced. It is one thing to know about the issues, history and theology related to justice, reconciliation and unity. It is quite another thing to BE the kind of person that consistently creates life giving connections with others regardless of backgrounds and personal circumstances.

The topics covered in this training include:
-Discovering automatic assumptions
-Learning to listen with generosity
-Interrupting cordial hypocrisy
-Engaging break downs
-Giving and receiving feedback
-Managing your impact
-Understanding and building trust

BtB1

About our trainer, Jean Marie Jobs: Jean-Marie is a master trainer, having delivered over 10,000 hours of training time. Her experience ranges from corporate marketing to inter-cultural work. Jean founded Yellow Marker with the vision of bringing character and values to the foreground in the commercial sector. Prior to founding Yellow Marker, Jean was CEO of Culture ROI. She developed and co-authored training materials and resources for CultureROI, their corporate clients as well as several non-profit and humanitarian organizations. In 1999, Jean became a Law Enforcement Chaplain, serving nine different law enforcement agencies in Sonoma. She graduated from Jack Hayford’s School of Pastoral Nurture in 2006 and Dallas Willard’s Spiritual Formation for Pastors in 2009.

Who can participate in the Foundations of Bridge Building training?

This training is being offered to BTB group leaders who are currently leading a BTB group in their community and special guest. Due to the highly interactive nature of this training, we can only take a limited number of participants. In order to best support our BTB community, we want to be sure this training will be relevant and immediately applicable for those who are presently leading groups. We encourage all BTB leaders to consider applying and not be limited by finances to come to the training. To secure a spot in this training, group leaders need to complete the training application form by Monday Nov. 14th.

As in our BTB groups, we will aim to have a diversity of participants. Acceptance to the training will be based on these goals in addition to your application, order of submissions and your commitment to attend. We invite your prayerful consideration about your application to participate in this training.

If you are not able to attend but would like to donate to the ministry of BTB, you may do so at: https://bethebridge.com/give/.

If you are committed to attend the training weekend, please continue on with this application form. If you have any questions, please email [email protected].