Portland Facilitator
Facilitated planning, leadership and team sessions for Portland and Willamette Valley organizations.
We create sessions that are greater than the sum of their parts, guided by award-winning facilitators.
- 110,000+people facilitated globally
- Award-winningfacilitators
- Portland metroin person, virtual or hybrid
We design sessions that leave teams with shared clarity, specific commitments, and the momentum to follow through.
Trusted by teams across the public, private and non-profit sectors
Portland & the Willamette Valley
Facilitation for Portland teams
Positive Impact facilitates strategic planning, leadership development, team retreats, and change management for Portland and Willamette Valley organizations. Portland holds an unusual concentration of mission-driven companies, certified benefit corporations and non-profits, and those organizations bring a specific set of strengths and a specific problem to a facilitated room.
We should say where we stand, since it tends to matter here. Positive Impact is a 1% for the Planet member and we are pursuing B Corp certification. We are not certified yet, and we would rather tell you that than let the wording imply otherwise. If your footprint reaches further, our Oregon page covers the wider state and our Seattle page covers Puget Sound.
What we do
The areas we're called in for most
Every engagement starts with your context. If your challenge isn't listed here, ask us anyway.
Strategic Planning
Values-led organizations often have more agreement about the mission than about what to do on Tuesday. We facilitate the process that turns shared purpose into a short list with owners and dates, which is the harder half and the one that gets deferred.
Learn moreCommunication Training & COMS
Our own communication styles framework, giving teams a common language for how they each work. It gives people a way to name friction as a difference in style rather than as a difference in commitment to the mission, which is how it often gets read here.
Learn moreTeam Development & Team Building
Retreats, offsites and tailored sessions that build the trust and psychological safety strong teams depend on. The Gorge and the coast are both close enough that a genuine offsite costs little beyond the venue.
Culture & Engagement
From vision and values work to culture shifts, we help turn stated values into observable commitments. If the output could be printed on a tote bag, the session isn't finished.
Leadership Development & Executive Coaching
Hands-on coaching and development for managers and executives, often people who joined for the mission and now find that most of the job is making unpopular calls about resources.
Corporate Training
Participant-led training designed around your people, with tools that stay useful long after the session ends. Delivered in Portland, down the valley, or virtually when a full day is more than the question needs.
Every engagement we run is shaped around your team. Share what you're working on and we'll build the right session around it.
Share what you're working onHow We Facilitate
Sessions that turn conversation into a plan your team can actually run with
There's no prepared script. We guide the process, your team brings the expertise, and together we build toward a plan your people helped shape and will actually use.
Here that often means making it safe to disagree in a group whose culture treats disagreement as a bit impolite. Facilitator-guided, participant-led, and structured so a dissenting view can enter the room without anyone having to be the person who broke the mood.
Get in Touch
Why work with us
Three ways teams here engage a facilitator
Every engagement is customizable, but most start in one of these shapes.
Quarterly or monthly
Ongoing Partnership
A facilitator who gets to know your team over time, so trust deepens and development compounds instead of starting fresh each session. Mostly virtual, anchored by one or two in-person days a year.
Best for: making development a habit rather than a one-off.
Ask about a partnershipMulti-day, immersive
Multi-Day Offsite
Extended session for strategic planning, leadership development or a culture shift. When we're flying east anyway, two days costs far less per day than one.
Best for: bigger decisions that need room to breathe.
Talk about an offsiteHalf-day to full-day
Single Workshop
A focused session built around one goal, whether that's a decision, a kickoff, or a skill like communications or building trust and psychological safety.
Best for: teams that know exactly what they need to work through.
Ask about a workshop
How we facilitate
A clear path from first call to follow-through
Each engagement follows a similar path, and includes the same care, from your first call to the work that carries on after we fly home.
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Discovery
A call to understand your context, your goals, and how decisions actually get made in your organization rather than how the handbook says they do.
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Design
Customized session design, built around your team, not a template.
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Facilitation
An experienced facilitator in the room or online, and in the room the day before.
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Materials
Materials and tools your team can keep using afterward.
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Follow-up
A summary with commitments and clear next steps.
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Support
Optional support to help momentum carry past the session.
Why facilitation?
How a team works together shapes everything it creates.
$100 Million
is the yearly cost for big companies for staff being in pointless meetings.
65%
of senior managers say that meetings keep them from completing their own work.
58%
of Americans would rather go to a doctor's appointment than attend a work meeting.
75%
of decision-makers feel that collaboration needs to be improved in their companies.
Forrester Research, 2021
Outcomes
What your team walks away with
Better decisions, made together
Decisions the whole room actually gets behind, instead of quiet disagreement that surfaces later in the parking lot.
Real buy-in
Because people helped shape the outcome, they leave genuinely invested in it, not just told what was decided.
Stronger team connection
The kind of trust and psychological safety that lets a values-driven group disagree about method without anyone's commitment being questioned.
Action that sticks
Clear commitments and ownership that carry into Monday morning, not just good intentions on the day.
Fresh thinking and better ideas
Space for your team's best thinking to surface, including ideas that might never have come up otherwise.
A record everyone can point at
A written summary of what was decided, who owns it, and by when. Useful when half the group has to brief a site that wasn't in the room.
Client stories
Real teams, real outcomes
Most of our work is Canadian, and we won't pretend otherwise. The craft travels; these are the kinds of sessions we run. They're the kinds of sessions we run and the outcomes teams point to afterward.
What our clients say
It was a pleasure to work with Will and Positive Impact. I was both inspired and empowered to co-deliver a meaningful offsite. Their positive incite into leadership performance and emotional resilience gave me clear direction and tactical tools I could apply to my workplace right away. I thoroughly look forward to working with Will again.
- Haley Daniels
Olympian and Motivational Speaker
Thanks for your incredible support, kindness, professionalism, and realness.
It was my sincere pleasure and privilege to work with you on our event.
You are a unique and special human, and I’m grateful that our paths crossed on this project, and look forward to the next time.
- Shauna Grinke, MBA, CPHR
Vice President - People and CultureThe workshop was an incredibly valuable experience for our team — the facilitator created an open, engaging environment that encouraged honest discussion and collaboration. The content was thoughtfully tailored to our team’s specific goals, making the session both relevant and actionable. We’re excited to continue partnering with Positive Impact to build on the great momentum sparked in this session.
- Shannon Charbonneau
Account Director
Treetop Marketing and Promotion Inc.
I’m leaving our session with a sense of optimism that I haven’t had in a while. It was time extremely well spent! I am sure that we all feel much closer and more connected.
- Participant
MDA Geointelligence Engineering Leadership SummitThe environment that was created made me feel comfortable to participate and collaborate with my colleagues. It was very well organized. I liked the outcome of the brainstorm sessions and warmup activities.
- ParticipantThe level of engagement and pace of the training was excellent. Like the fact that this workshop was trainer-guided, but participants lead!
- ParticipantFantastic facilitating most importantly Will understood when to let us talk and when to corral us back on track. Excellent value this afternoon.
- Engagement Workshop Participant
100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
We stand behind the quality of our work with complete confidence. If you're not fully satisfied with the results, we'll make it right.
Your trust matters more to us, and our guarantee acknowledges our belief that you deserve to feel confident in every investment you make with us. That's a standard we hold ourselves to, every time.
Ready to talk about your team?
Get in TouchAround the region
Where sessions happen, and what usually fits
Portland is compact and easy to move around, so where you meet is a smaller question than in most markets. How the group makes decisions is the larger one.
| Region | Organizations based there | Format that usually fits |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown and the Pearl | Professional services, technology, non-profits and foundations, benefit corporations, creative and design firms | In person. Walkable for most of the people you would want in the room, and the deepest pool of meeting space in the region. |
| The east side and inner neighborhoods | Apparel and outdoor brands, food and beverage, manufacturing and maker businesses, community organizations | In person. Easier parking than downtown and closer for a lot of teams that never go across the river. |
| Beaverton, Hillsboro and the westside corridor | Semiconductors and hardware, technology, health systems, corporate campuses | In person, and the sensible choice when most of your group already works out there rather than downtown. |
| Salem, Eugene and the valley | State agencies, higher education, agriculture and food processing, health systems, municipal teams | In person, an hour or two south. Worth its own day, and comfortably paired with a Portland session on the same trip. |
| The Gorge and the coast | Retreat venues within about ninety minutes of the city | Multi-day. Close enough that a genuine offsite is practical rather than aspirational, and considerably cheaper than the equivalent further north. |
A local detail that matters
When a strong culture makes disagreement feel like disloyalty
Portland organizations are unusually good at inclusive process. People genuinely want everyone's view, meetings are run with care, and the values on the wall are ones the staff actually chose. That is a real asset and most weeks it makes these organizations better places to work than their peers elsewhere.
It creates one specific problem, and it is the reason we usually get called. In a group with a strong shared mission, disagreeing about method can start to feel like disagreeing about the mission. So people soften the objection, or hold it, or raise it privately afterwards. The room reaches something that looks like consensus, everybody leaves, and the decision quietly does not hold because a third of the group never actually agreed to it. Inclusive process without a decision point is not inclusion, it is a deferral with good manners.
The fix is structural rather than cultural, and it does not require anyone to become more blunt. We separate the values conversation from the method conversation explicitly, so people can argue hard about the second without it reading as a challenge to the first. We name a decision point in the agenda and say what happens if the group does not reach it, because an undefined endpoint is what lets a discussion run until everyone is too tired to object. And we use written and anonymous input for the objections nobody wants to be the first to voice, which in our experience are usually already shared by several people in the room.
Featured Workshops
Each of these runs in person, virtually, or as a hybrid, and Portland is compact enough that in person is usually straightforward.
COMS Communication Styles
COMS is our own communication styles assessment, grounded in research and facilitated by our team. It gives your people a shared way to talk about how they each work, so different styles become an advantage instead of a source of friction.
It gives people a way to name friction as a difference in style rather than as a difference in commitment to the mission, which is how it tends to get read in values-driven organizations and is almost never what is actually going on.
Eight questions, one simple grid, and a reference the whole team can point at months later.
Learn more
Strategic Planning
This is where your team gets a real say in shaping and carrying out the organization's direction, landing on initiatives that actually move forward.
Values-led organizations usually have more agreement about the mission than about what to do on Tuesday. We facilitate the process that turns shared purpose into a short list with owners and dates, which is the harder half and the one that keeps getting deferred to the next planning cycle.
A strategic plan is a living, breathing document. We stay involved as it plays out over the following months and years.
Learn more
5 Dysfunctions of a Team
This session takes a good team and helps make it excellent. We draw on Patrick Lencioni's well-known framework, approached through an appreciative inquiry lens that starts with what's already working.
The second behavior, conflict, is the one this market most often needs, because a culture that prizes harmony can mistake the absence of argument for alignment. Productive conflict is a skill rather than a personality trait, and it is learnable. The five behaviors, trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results, are all on the table.
Your people walk away with shared language for how they work together, and a plan for moving forward that they built themselves.
Learn more
Our Core Team
Great content is only made better by great facilitators
Will Chambers
Founder & Facilitator
Award-winning facilitator and Founder of Positive Impact, with sessions delivered to tens of thousands of people. Will focuses on strategy, leadership, team dynamics and communication, turning concepts into clear, committed action.
More about Will
Lindsay Davis
Coach & Strategist
Award-winning coach and entrepreneurial guide, with experience spanning rural entrepreneurs in Africa to multimillion-dollar companies. Helps leaders focus on what matters most and build the resilience to anticipate challenges and move through them.
More about LindsayMichael Lorsch
Facilitator & Learning Consultant
Brings facilitation and learning design from theatre stages to executive boardrooms, including in-house work with lululemon. Blends mindfulness, relationship systems and human-centerd design to keep people at the center of every session.
More about Michael
Jason Maraschiello
Coach & Facilitator
Certified life and corporate coach, mindfulness and meditation teacher. Uses mindfulness and effective communication to help people set manageable goals, find work-life balance and build the support to follow through.
More about Jason
For work in Portland we assign one lead facilitator who travels for the session and stays with you through the follow-up, rather than handing you to a different person each time. Beyond the core team, we draw on a wider network of facilitators and subject-matter experts, matched to the goals, sector, and people of each engagement.
Before you book
Worth reading first
Six pieces that answer the questions most teams have before a first session.
- Wider footprint Facilitation across Oregon Read the guide
- Nearby market Facilitation in Seattle Read the guide
- Honest advice When not to hire a facilitator, and what to do instead Read the guide
- Getting ready How to prepare your team for a facilitated session Read the guide
- Strategic planning Why organize a strategic planning session Read the guide
- Afterwards Keeping momentum after the session ends Read the guide
Frequently Asked Questions
Facilitation in Portland
Are you a B Corp?
Not yet, and we'd rather say so plainly than let careful wording imply otherwise. Positive Impact is a 1% for the Planet member, which is current and verifiable, and we are pursuing B Corp certification. In a market with as many certified benefit corporations as Portland, that distinction is one people check, and we would rather you heard it from us.
Our team agrees on everything and then nothing happens. Can facilitation help?
Yes, and it's the most common reason we get called by mission-driven organizations. In a group with a strong shared purpose, disagreeing about method starts to feel like disagreeing about the mission, so people soften the objection or hold it. The room reaches something that looks like consensus and the decision quietly doesn't hold, because a third of the group never actually agreed. Inclusive process without a decision point is a deferral with good manners.
How do you fix that without making people blunt?
Structurally, not culturally. We separate the values conversation from the method conversation explicitly, so people can argue hard about the second without it reading as a challenge to the first. We name a decision point in the agenda and say what happens if the group doesn't reach it. And we use written and anonymous input for the objections nobody wants to voice first, which are usually already shared by several people in the room.
Are your facilitators based in Portland?
No. Our facilitators travel to Portland for in-person work, and we'd rather say that plainly than imply a local office we don't have. It's a short trip for us, which keeps the travel line modest. It also means we arrive with no history with anyone in the room and no stake in which side wins.
You're a Canadian firm. Does that complicate the contracting?
Less than people expect. We invoice in the currency you prefer, and for a US client the exchange rate has generally worked in your favor. Your finance team will likely ask us for a W-8BEN-E, which is routine and which we complete. We won't give you tax or legal advice about any of it, because that's your finance team's call rather than ours.
What kinds of organizations do you work with here?
Leadership teams, boards, and departments across private, public, and non-profit organizations. In and around Portland that tends to mean non-profits and foundations, benefit corporations, apparel and outdoor brands, food and beverage, technology and semiconductors on the westside, health systems, higher education, state agencies down the valley, and municipal teams. Group size ranges from an executive team of eight to a leadership summit of sixty.
Where should we hold it?
Portland is compact enough that the venue is a smaller question than in most markets, so choose for the effect rather than the logistics. Downtown suits a group already there, the westside corridor makes sense when most of your team works out that way, and for a multi-day the Gorge or the coast are close enough to make a genuine offsite practical rather than aspirational.
What does our team actually walk away with?
A written summary with the decisions made, the commitments people made out loud, and who owns what by when. Most sessions also produce something structural, such as a plan on a page, a set of priorities the group agreed to, or shared language for how the team communicates. If the output could be printed on a tote bag, the session isn't finished.
Let's talk about your team
Tell us what you're working through and how decisions get made in your organization, and we'll tell you honestly whether facilitation is the right tool and what a session in Portland would look like.
Get in Touch
