How to Become a Community Drumming Facilitator

Community drumming creates beautiful, spontaneous music that empowers the participants to facilitate society, foster spirit, and encourage well-being. They offer recreation, emotional relief, and spiritual manifestation through social interaction.  These events are typically held in places, like music stores, churches, parks, community centers, and attended by people from all walks of life -- young and old, beginners to advanced drum players.

This music-making experience is made simpler by a community drumming facilitator. She creates the freedom of the participants to express their music and emotions. A facilitator should understand the responsibility of service and the non-performance part of the drum circle.

An effective facilitator helps the members to focus on the objective and develop the quality and outcome of the drum jam. She should guide and encourage the participants to produce exciting in-the-moment music. She should also support the group in producing an improvised song and help each individual to achieve a better personal potential, shared happiness, and mutually dependent group dynamics.

A combination of excellent musical sense and rhythmical playing skills on a variety of instruments, competent group-building ability, and well-developed personality are also a valuable attributes of a facilitator. Successful facilitators develop these skills to achieve the purpose of a community drumming event which is to develop both the music and the sense of community.

Nowadays, it is not surprising that people from different backgrounds, such as business, social work, music, emerge to facilitate drum circles. There is also an increasing group of facilitators operating in different places, such as hospitals, prisons, and hospices. They use drumming as a tool for therapy.

Trained professional facilitators understand the necessity for empowering each person while the awareness of the whole group progress into a musical masterpiece. In most cases, a certain level of training is required to successfully facilitate a drum circle or community rhythm event. Those working in healthcare professions required in-depth education and certifications. Those interested in community jams, youth development or team building events can attend specialized intensive retreats to learn the skills and practice under a master facilitator.

The X8 Interactive Drumming Facilitator Training Program utilizes the Rhythm Play!™ process developed by Kenya Masala that gives you unique, proven, rhythm-based facilitation skills that deliver learning and ignite community drumming events.