I live about 60 meters above the sea, facing southeast on the side of a mountain that is covered in Douglas-fir trees. My mornings at this time of year begin with light in my windows by 5am and the air full of birdsong. Up here, we are perched in the canopy of the forest and if I look out towards the sea, I am looking through to tops of tree that are 40 or 50 meters tall. As I have grown older, my eyes are not as good as they once were and while I can spot movement in the …
Im just coming back from a meeting this weekend on Vancouver Island where Kelly Poirier and I were working with some specialized health care workers who were meeting with Indigenous families around creating a care model for their children. We had three families with us including six children, two of which were babies, a five month old and a seven month old. It has been a long time since I facilitated meetings with babies taking an active role in the proceedings. The children were included in this meeting as participants and they had as much to offer both the content …
“Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. The air is loaded with miasmas there. Other books breathe a livelier air; the …
Over on LInkedIn, Bryan Stallings pointed to a 2017 post at the International Association of Facilitators site that contains a set of definitions of facilitation. I don’t remember contributing to that article, but I quite like what I said at the time: “While facilitation traditionally means ‘to make things easy’ I think we need a new definition that means ‘to host the struggle together.’ Good facilitators help create a container for people to work with difference and diversity to make good things happen.” That’s pretty good, I think. It describes what I do and it describes a shift in my practice over …
It was in this day In 1992 that I started my first real job in an office, beginning work as a policy analyst at the National Association of Friendship Centres in Ottawa. I can remember that day vividly. It was a lovely warm morning in Ottawa and I even remember wearing a light purple collared shirt (it was the early 1990s) and carrying my lunch in a newly purchased MEC fabric briefcase that served me for many years. The NAFC was small at that time, just an Executive Director, Jerome Berthelette, a financial guy, Brian Stinson, our office manager Mel …