Hip Hop and Facilitation: DJing – Curation, Flow, and the Breakbeats of Learning

Posted on March 21, 2026 | Leave a comment

I’ve always thought of myself as an educational DJ. It’s the metaphor that, more than any other, captures what I actually do as a facilitator. Because at the end of the day, a DJ’s job is to create an experience where people are moved, literally, physically, emotionally moved. And a facilitator’s job is to create an experience where people are moved to learn. The skills required to do both of those things well are remarkably, almost uncannily, similar.

Curation Over Content Expertise

A DJ doesn’t need to have written every song they play. They don’t need to be a musician or a composer. What they need is taste, knowledge of their audience, and the skill to blend and sequence what already exists into something that works for the room in front of them.

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Hip Hop and Facilitation: Graffiti Writing and Marking the Territory

Posted on March 20, 2026 | Leave a comment

Graffiti gets misunderstood. People see vandalism. What graffiti writers in hip hop culture see is something entirely different: a visual language, a way of marking territory, of asserting identity, of putting something into public space that speaks, provokes, and belongs to the community that created it. Every graffiti artist develops their own style—their signature, their voice in color and form. And when you understand it through that lens, you start to see it everywhere in good facilitation work.

The Room Is a Canvas

Before participants arrive to a workshop or training, a facilitator has already been at work. The room has been transformed. Flip charts are up on the walls. Names are written in big, colorful letters. Images representing key concepts are posted around the space. Maybe there are contributions participants shared in a pre-workshop survey, already captured and displayed so people walk in and see their own thinking reflected back at them.

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Hip Hop and Facilitation: B-Boying & B-Girling and The Art of Improvisation Within Structure

Posted on March 19, 2026 | Leave a comment

Step into a cypher and watch a b-boy or b-girl work, and you’ll see something that looks like pure spontaneity. They’re spinning, freezing, launching into footwork, responding to the music, to the energy of the crowd, to whatever the last dancer just did. It looks free. It looks improvised.

And it is. But it’s also built on a foundation of deeply practiced, rigorously developed moves.

That tension, between structure and freedom, between the learned and the spontaneous, is at the heart of breakdancing. And it’s at the heart of facilitation too.

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Hip Hop and Facilitation: The MC – Holding the Space

Posted on March 18, 2026 | Leave a comment

When an MC steps up to the mic, their job is clear: get everyone in that room engaged, energized, and connected to what’s happening in this moment. They’re not just performing. They’re creating a container. They’re weaving a narrative. They’re reading the crowd and responding to what they find. And they’re doing all of this while making it look effortless.

KRS One

Sound familiar? It should. Because that’s exactly what a facilitator does.

When participants walk into a workshop or training, they’re looking for someone who’s going to provide structure and guidance, but not in a way that feels rigid or top-down. They want to feel energized. They want to feel like they know what they’re supposed to be doing. They want to feel like they’re part of something collective, not just sitting in a room waiting to be talked at.

That’s the MC’s job. And it’s the facilitator’s job too.

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What the Four Elements of Hip Hop Teach Us About Facilitation

Posted on March 17, 2026 | Leave a comment

There’s a question I get asked a lot in my work as a facilitator: where did you learn to do this? And I usually talk about training programs, mentors, years of practice in rooms with groups of people trying to learn something together. But honestly? Some of my deepest intuitions about facilitation come from a place most people wouldn’t expect: hip hop.

Not hip hop as background music. Not hip hop as a reference point to seem culturally relevant in a workshop. I’m talking about hip hop as a framework – a set of principles, practices, and values that map onto the craft of facilitation in ways that are too precise to ignore.

Hip hop has four core elements:

  • Element 1: MCing (rapping)
  • Element 2: B-boying and B-girling (breakdancing)
  • Element 3: Graffiti writing
  • Element 4: DJing (turntablism)

Each one is a distinct art form with its own technical demands, its own culture, its own vocabulary. And each one, when you look closely, contains lessons about what it means to hold space for a group of people, help them learn, and create an experience that stays with them long after they’ve left the room.

This is the first in a series of four pieces where I’ll explore each element and what it can teach us about facilitation. But before we get there, let me explain why I think this connection matters.

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Peace of Mind Conference – Keynote Activity

Posted on January 27, 2024 | Leave a comment

On Saturday, January 27th I delivered the keynote activity at the annual conference for the organization, Peace of Mind. It was a real joy and privilege to spend a morning with all the attendees – amazing educators bringing peace education, mindfulness, and social justice work into their classrooms.

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Interview for 30 Years of Nonviolence International – Sharing History

Posted on February 8, 2020 | Leave a comment

In this clip I tell the story of my visit to the National Civil Rights Museum with my (then) four year old daughter. I discuss the experience of learning about and reflecting on difficult history with someone so young, and her reaction to it.

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Interview for 30 Years of Nonviolence International – Exploring Abstract Concepts through Storytelling

Posted on February 7, 2020 | Leave a comment

In this clip, I talk about storytelling as a means of approaching teaching and building peace. I argue that using storytelling to teach something that seems abstract and theoretical can make the information more compelling and accessible. I talk about about helping people to tell their stories, and how to explore many different concepts through storytelling and connection.

Click here to watch the full interview.

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Black Leadership in Advancing International Peace and Security

Posted on March 8, 2018 | Leave a comment

The following description is taking from the United States Institute of Peace:

“Black Leadership in Advancing International Peace and Security: How African Americans Have Impacted the Fields of Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding”

The formation of the United Nations. The crafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Responding to the Rwandan genocide. Advancing “cultural diplomacy” to thaw tensions during the Cold War. Defeating apartheid in South Africa. These are just a few of the transformative moments in history where Black voices were critically important.

As we bridge from African American History Month in February to Women’s History Month in March, USIP shines a light on the life and legacy of Black men and women who have advanced international peace and security. For generations African American men and women have been on the front lines of international conflict resolution efforts. While many of these contributions have been acknowledged, too many have been overlooked.

In conversation with Ambassador Edward Perkins and Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield – two of America’s most prominent and accomplished African American foreign policy professionals – we take a look back at the historic contributions of African Americans like Ralph Bunche, Edith Sampson, and Dizzy Gillespie and how the legacy of their work continues to influence the strategies and approaches in diplomacy, foreign policy, and international peacebuilding today.

We also take a look forward to how more African American men and women can pursue and thrive in the field of international conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

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Dialogue and Reconciliation in Nonviolent Action

Posted on January 19, 2018 | Leave a comment

Citizens around the world are using nonviolent action to push for social change. The recent anti-government protests in Iran are just one example, as are movements for peaceful and fair elections in Kenya and Honduras. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others refined and implemented these nonviolent strategies and tactics during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and they can be combined with peacebuilding approaches to transform violent conflict abroad.

To commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the U.S. Institute of Peace is hosting a series of expert panels on Facebook focused on this combination of peacebuilding and nonviolent action.

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