Facilitation

Facilitation is any activity that makes an action or a process easy or easier. For example:

• Facilitation is used in business and organizational settings to ensure the designing and running of successful meetings and workshops.
• Neural facilitation in neuroscience, is the increase in postsynaptic potential evoked by a 2nd impulse.
• Ecological facilitation describes how an organism profits from the presence of another. Examples are nurse plants, which provide shade for new seedlings or saplings (e.g. using an orange tree to provide shade for a newly planted coffee plant), or plants providing shelter from wind chill in arctic environments.

Facilitators

A person who takes on such a role is called a facilitator. Kaner defines facilitator as follows: "A facilitator is an individual who enables groups and organizations to work more effectively; to collaborate and achieve synergy. She or he is a “content-neutral” party who by not taking sides or expressing or advocating a point of view during the meeting, can advocate for fair, open, and inclusive procedures to accomplish the group’s work. A facilitator can also be learning or a dialogue guide to assist a group in thinking deeply about its assumptions, beliefs, and values and about its systemic processes and context"(Kaner: 2007: xv)

Gary Rush, an International Association of Facilitators Certified™ Professional Facilitator, defines Facilitator as follows: "A Facilitator is a content-neutral task leader who forms a group of people into a collaborative team supporting consensus and uses a range of processes to enable the group to accomplish their task. The Facilitator is responsible for the context." (G Rush: 2013)

• The term facilitator is used in psychotherapy where the role is more to help group members become aware of the feelings they hold for one another (see Group psychotherapy)
• The term facilitator is used in education to refer to a specifically trained adult who sits in class with a disabled, or otherwise needy, student to help them follow the lesson that the teacher is giving (see Disability)
• The term facilitator is used to describe people engaged in the illegal trafficking of human beings across international borders (see Human trafficking)
• The term facilitator is used to describe those individuals who arrange adoptions by attempting to match available children with prospective adopters
• The term facilitator is used to describe someone who assists people with communication disorders to use communication aids with their hands. See Facilitated communication

See also

• Enabling

References

External links

Look up facilitation or facilitator in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Articles on FoCuSeD™ Group Facilitation Training by Gary Rush, IAF CPF now MGRconsulting