change – Martin Gilbraith

Happy New Year to IAF England & Wales facilitators & friends in our three regional meetup groups – London & South East England, South West England and the North of England. Welcome in particular to new members to the latter two groups, new since November.

Please do take another look at our growing regular schedules of free facilitation meetups in all three regions for 2016, and RVSP now for those that you plan to attend – just follow the links:

monthly morning coffee meetup, January 6 in London (8.30-9.30am near Kings Cross) and on the first Wednesday of every month, there or around London
Rituals, Rites of Passage and Change, January 14 in Manchester (6.30-8.30pm in Gatley),in partnership with the Northern Change Facilitators meetup group
bi-monthly networking & learning meetup, January 19 in London (2-6pm near Kings Cross, followed by drinks & dinner nearby) and there on the third Tuesday of every second month
quarterly networking & learning meetup, February 4 in Frome (12.30-5.30 at EdventureFrome) and on the first Thursday of every third month, around the region
bi-monthly informal networking & social meetup, February 15 in London (6-8pm on the South Bank) and on the third Monday evening of every second month, there or around London
plus in the pipeline and proposed – regular free facilitation meetups in the North of England (next in Sheffield and Newcastle), an IAF Certified Professional Facilitator assessment and/or an annual conference…?

Please add comments to any of these events to indicate what you could offer or what you would like to gain from the event.

Please contact me if you are interested to help to organise and publicise events in your area, by joining the leadership team of one of the three existing regional groups or of a new group for the English Midlands or for Wales – one or two more for each region would be very welcome!

Please also let me know if you can offer or suggest any organisation to support the groups as sponsors, by promoting them or by hosting events or otherwise. We are grateful to ICA:UK for already agreeing to sponsor the three groups by promoting them to trainers and trainees of its national programme of regular public facilitation training courses.

Please do let me know if you have any questions or other suggestions. I look forward to seeing you at a meetup soon!

For more on my work, and what others have to say about it, please see how I work, who I work with and recommendations & case studies – or view my profile and connect with me on LinkedIn.

You can connect with me also by joining my free facilitation webinars online, and IAF England & Wales’ free facilitation meetups in London and elsewhere.

Celebrate International Facilitation Week 2015 by joining #FacWeekChat on twitter, to share your experience and to connect with and learn from others.

International Facilitation Week, 19-25 October in 2015, is an annual event convened by the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) and intended to showcase the power of facilitation to both new and existing audiences, and to create a sense of community among facilitators and their groups worldwide. The last two years I partnered with Ben Ziegler of IAF in Canada to host twitter chats on the history and future of facilitation and on interactivity and diversity in facilitation.

For 2015, I am excited to be partnering to host a pair of twitter chats with Michael Ambjorn of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and Faith Forster of the Change Management Institute (CMI), all of us located in London.

We hope that partnering together on a topic of mutual interest will not only attract more people to join the chat, but also help to make connections and foster broader collaboration between our associations and between our our professions. Already some reciprocal conference discounts are available to members of the three associations – for example at this year’s IABC Europe MENA conference in London that I reviewed in Power to the People, and the power of facilitation and communications in partnership and the upcoming CMI conference Change in the Age of Disruption (11-12 November in London, Sydney and online).

Please join us on Friday October 23, 10-11am & 4-5pm UK time – join either or both chat, according to which times suit you where you are.

The topic for the two chats this year will be change, and what can be done to help people to align together to make change happen. Each chat will include 6-8 questions for you to respond to, spaced out throughout the hour – and of course you can respond to others’ responses, and add questions of your own, as you might in any chat.

The many tweets of a twitter chat are followed by using a common hashtag, in this case #FacWeekChat as in previous years. We will document the chats on Storify, as we have in previous years.

New to Twitter, or Twitter chats (Tweet chats)? Check out Twitter Chats 101: A Step-by-Step Guide to Hosting or Joining a Twitter Chat.

Please join us on October 23, and tweet to invite all your twitter friends. Got questions that can’t wait? Contact any of us via twitter – @martingilbraith, @michaelambjorn, @faithforster.

What else will you be doing to celebrate? Please let the world know by tweeting #FacWeek or @FacWeek, and so connect and join with facilitators and others worldwide in promoting the power of facilitation!