Strategic Facilitator

Role Overview

The Strategic Facilitator owns the room. Every BIL project includes a Strategic Facilitator as a core team member. The Strategic Facilitator co-designs and co-leads every session alongside the Team Lead, holding the process so the Lead can hold the content, the relationship, and the decisions.

The reason for a dedicated Strategic Facilitator isn't extra capacity. It's neutrality. The Lead has a stake in where the work lands. The Strategic Facilitator doesn't — and that distinction is what allows honest, generative dialogue to happen. When the Lead needs to advocate, decide, or step into a conversation as a participant, the Strategic Facilitator holds the room.

Roles are approximately 20 hours a week. Contractors must live in Middle Tennessee and be willing to come to Belmont University for regular meetings.

What You Own

• Co-design and co-lead discovery sessions, workshops, stakeholder working groups, and task force convenings
• Hold process-neutrality throughout — ensure the room never goes unheld when the Lead has a stake in where it lands
• Create the conditions for honest dialogue: psychological safety, equal voice, and productive tension
• Manage group dynamics in real time — draw out quieter voices, balance dominant ones, and keep the group on task without shutting down what wants to emerge
• Frame questions that open inquiry rather than close it, and shape the arc of each session toward a real outcome
• Synthesize in real time — reflect the group's collective thinking back to itself, name patterns, and help people see what they're building together
• Translate across disciplines and languages in the room, so unlikely collaborators can understand one another
• Hand off session outputs in a form the Project Manager can carry forward
• Stay aligned with the Lead on where the conversation needs to go

Across the Project

The Strategic Facilitator is most active in the Assemble and Discover phases — convening the right people and running the inquiry the whole project depends on. They remain central through Design, where co-creation lives. In Deploy, they show up wherever group buy-in and adoption need to be earned in a room.

Soft Skills

Reads the room. High emotional intelligence — senses energy, hesitation, and unspoken tension and adjusts in the moment.

Non-anxious, neutral presence. Comfortable with silence and disagreement. Doesn't need to be the smartest person in the room and isn't threatened by strong voices, including the Lead's.

Strong questioning and active listening. Asks the question that unlocks the group, then truly listens to the answer.

Synthesis on the fly. Takes in a messy conversation and gives it back as structure the group recognizes.

Adaptability. Can abandon the plan when the room needs something the plan didn't anticipate.

Reads the partnership with the Lead. Knows when to take the room and when to hand it back. Trusts and is trusted by the Lead.

Inquiry. Keeps the room curious longer than it wants to be — and keeps the absent user's story in it.

Warmth and hospitality. Makes people feel safe enough to say the real thing.

Humility. Trusts that the wisdom is in the group; holds the room without owning the answer.

Collaboration. Builds the unlikely friendships across disciplines that make a hard problem solvable.

You Might Be a Fit If

• You've facilitated complex, multi-stakeholder sessions in professional or community settings
• You're comfortable working in environments where the problem and the solution are both being discovered in real time
• You have experience with human-centered design, design thinking, or similar inquiry-based approaches
• You can work alongside a strong Team Lead without needing to own the outcome

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