Facilitation Stories

Get in touch! We’re @IAFEnglandWales or @Fac_stories on Twitter. Helene Jewell talks to Penny Walker Facilitator, Coach, Consultant and trainer in change for sustainable development. She's the author of two books and has contributed to a whole variety of other publications. Connect with Penny on Twitter @penny_walker_sd or through her website https://www.penny-walker.co.uk/ Penny tells Helene about how she started working as a facilitator, through her work with Friends of the Earth, the environmental pressure group, as a campaigner and then moved across to managing the team of people who provide support to local Friends of the Earth support groups across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. These were mostly volunteers and many of them came from a community development background. It was them that first introduced her to facilitation – meetings that were pleasant and got somewhere.  Penny became interested in the grey areas between people and organisations that were taking very positional attitudes towards di

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 facilitat