coaching and mentoring – Martin Gilbraith

Could you use some support to address a facilitation question or challenge you are facing, to design or prepare an upcoming workshop or process, or to reflect and learn from some recent experience?

Are you up to 35 years old and using facilitation in your work for climate justice, gender equity or anti-racism, or otherwise in response to systemic injustice and oppression or toward achieving a just and sustainable world for all?

If so, read on and feel free to request a first free facilitation coaching session via my online scheduling calendar below.

If you are over 35, working on something else or able to pay, if you are interested in coaching for others or in longer-term support for your professional development as a facilitator, please contact me to ask about my availability and rates for paid facilitation coaching and mentoring – including discounted rates for voluntary organisations & independent professionals.

Free facilitation coaching

I am happy to offer, free of charge:

up to three online sessions of up to 45 minutes each, over up to six weeks
support for you only, or for you plus one or two others sharing the same question or challenge
to review any material that you share in confidence with me in advance of each session
to listen actively with curiosity, care and respect
to ask questions, to support you to reflect and learn from your experience and come to your own conclusions or solutions
to offer feedback and ideas from my experience, and refer you to any relevant resources and sources of support that I can.

In return, I hope that I may be inspired by your work and that I may learn from your experience. If you find the coaching helpful, I shall be grateful for a short recommendation outlining how it helped.

Rosa Brandon, Programme Quality Officer at Oxfam Ireland, wrote Feb 22, 2021:

“Martin provided invaluable support to Oxfam Ireland in the build-up to a series of multi-stakeholder online workshops. He provided tailored ‘coaching sessions’ to our team, which helped us to prepare and deliver several engaging virtual sessions. These sessions directly catered to our needs, building our ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ virtual facilitation skills and knowledge. Thanks, Martin!”

Request a first free session

Please scroll down in my scheduling calendar to request a first free session from 2-10 days ahead:

I may cancel your session if your request or eligibility is unclear or if my availability changes. Please give at least 24 hours notice if you need to cancel or reschedule your appointment for any reason, and I shall do the same for you.

If you do not find a suitable session time available, please try again after a few days or more. Please contact me with any queries.

See also about me, how I work, who I work with and recommendations & case studies, and please contact me about how we might work together.

This article was written for ICAI Winds and Waves, December 2014 issue.

Welcome to this latest issue of Winds & Waves, the online magazine of ICA International.

Mentoring and coaching, as well as facilitation, training and demonstration projects, are among the many ways that ICA works worldwide to change images, or worldviews, and thus to bring about positive personal, organisational and societal change. I have been both a mentor and a mentee this year, supporting a Ukrainian colleague to prepare for her Certified ToP Facilitator assessment as I have prepared for my own.

Larry Philbrook of ICA Taiwan refers to the ‘image theory’ that underlines this approach (page 9) and how he has applied it to coaching and mentoring. Jen Schanen and Beverly Scow’s story from the USA (page 13) illustrates the approach in action. This issue also includes stories of personal coaching and mentoring from Aruba, Canada, Chile, Nepal, Taiwan, Ukraine, UK & Africa and the USA, among others. Common themes include partnership and intentionality, as well as the application of ICA’s Technology of Participation (ToP) methodology and in particular the ToP Focused Conversation method and ‘ORID’ framework (page 11).

ICA International’s ‘peer-to-peer’ approach to mutual support and collaboration among its member ICAs reflects the same values and principles of partnership and intentionality, applied to shared learning and development within and among organisations. How this approach unfolds at a global level is illustrated by stories in this issue from Svetlana Salamatova of ICA Ukraine (page 17) and from Steve Harrington in Costa Rica (page 19).

It is a key role of ICA International to facilitate and support such intentional partnership working, learning and development among members. As we approach the ICAI General Assembly on December 12, we are approaching the culmination of the work of two ICAI global working groups that have been tasked this year with helping to further develop the conditions for such collaboration to flourish – the global ToP Policy working group and the Global Conferencing working group. We are also approaching the election of four new members to the ICAI Board, and the retirement of four – Krishna Shrestha of ICA Australia, Isabel de la Maza of ICA Chile, Shankar Jadhav of ICA India and Gerald Gomani of ICA Zimbabwe. I am grateful to all of them, and to all those who have volunteered their time and energy to support our global mission this year – including as members of the Board, of our global working groups, and of course of the tireless editorial team of this Winds and Waves magazine and our monthly bulletin the Global Buzz.

Please ask for details to join the General Assembly on December 12 if you have not received them directly, and watch this space for the outcome in the next issue. In the meantime, season’s greetings and a Happy New Year to all our readers, and enjoy this issue!