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Welcome to Facilitation Stories, where we discover how facilitators ended up in the profession, and how facilitation methods, principles and techniques are used more widely. Brought to you by IAF England and Wales. For more information on our chapter, click here.

Oct 7, 2019

Get in touch! We’re @IAFEnglandWales on Twitter.

In this first episode, we introduce the show and the IAF’s England and Wales Chapter.

We also let you know you how you can get involved, because one of the aims of the show is also to help the community come together beyond the MeetUps, and for those of you who can't attend the Meetups, to find out what's going on in them!



We talk about what do we mean by facilitation?
It’s a lot of different things to different people but is essentially helping groups of people to have more effective and productive conversations. Better and more inclusive conversations guided by a facilitator.



The applications of facilitation beyond "facilitating a meeting".
Facilitating a meeting can make you think of sitting around a board room table, but it is so much more. Facilitation could be team away days, strategy sessions, creative thinking sessions, ideas generation, problem solving, stakeholder engagement for example.
Facilitation is such a broad thing where you have facilitative training styles on the one hand, group process facilitation on the other and lots of different applications such as in the agile world, project management, change management.

We hear the story one of our co-hosts. Helene's story, She started off as a Speech and Language Therapist then went overseas to work in Nepal training people in a very participatory style. She heard about facilitation and working in International Development, then for several charities and began to use and hone her facilitation skills more. After her second maternity leave she set up on her own as a freelancer.

IAF England and Wales, how are facilitators connecting.
We hear from a few people attending the Meetups.

There are different types of meet ups all over England and Wales aimed at sharing skills, supporting each other and creating a community of like minded people.

The one hour coffee meet ups are in Cardiff, Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle, North Wales, Oxfordshire, Winchester, Cambridgeshire, Manchester and more evolving all the time. Then there are Learning and networking meet ups that last 4 hours in London, South West and The Midlands. And London has drinks meet ups.
There are also on line meet ups – the 3rd Tuesday of every month.

The up coming conference – 18th and 19th October in Birmingham. Eventbrite link

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/annual-conference-the-power-and-practice-of-facilitation-registration-59384280983

There are a range of different sessions such as laughter yoga, Lego serious play, Pliar’s session on podcasting, an outdoors session with Jenny Archard and Alex Williams, a session on building in house facilitator networks…
There is also a keynote panel, an open space session and a raffle to get stuck into.


Next Bristol coffee meet up 16th October

https://www.meetup.com/IAF-South-West-England-facilitators-and-friends/events/wpsdcryznbmb/


Next on line meet up 15th October

https://www.meetup.com/IAF-South-West-England-facilitators-and-friends/events/gthbzqyznbtb/



Are you a facilitator, have you got a story?


Something to say about an IAF Meetup you've attended.
And, we're looking for more volunteers from the IAF England and Wales chapter to join us to continue producing this podcast. 



Or just tell us you're listening! Twitter: @IAFEnglandWales; use #iafpodcast



Get in touch via email podcast@iaf-englandwales.org



Send us some text, or even an mp3 audio


https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/england-wales



Get in touch with Twitter @PilarOrti @HeleneJewell