Training courses facilitated by Joel Lazarus

Dr Joel Lazarus lives with his wife and three children in Bristol, UK. Joel combines his work as a facilitator with his work as a university researcher and lecturer at the University of Bath.
As a member of the workers’ co-operative Rhizome, Joel provides facilitation, training, organisational development, consensus-building and conflict resolution services to a wide range of co-operatives, third sector organisations, and activist groups. His practice is informed by a rich variety of participatory and liberatory approaches which he has integrated to develop what he calls a ‘relational needs-based’ approach to facilitation and community organising. This approach emphasises supporting a team or group to establish safety and trust and to identify their individual and collective needs as a platform for then pursuing effective collective action. Joel is the lead author of the Terre des hommes Handbook for Relational Needs-Based Organising (forthcoming) that sets out this approach.
Between 2020 and 2024, Joel served as Project Manager and Qualitative Research Lead for WorkFREE, a major Universal Basic Income pilot and research project in Hyderabad, India. Joel holds Master’s in Development Studies degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of Oxford and a DPhil in Politics and International Relations from the University of Oxford. He is also a qualified secondary school teacher.