In today's episode, Helene Jewell talks to TWO guests! First to Susannah Raffe and then to Cat Duncan-Rees and the episode focuses on the IAFEW Conference 19 - 23 October 2020. On Twitter, we are @fac_stories and @HeleneJewell https://curatorsofchange.com/ You can register now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/annual-conference-2020-the-power-and-practice-of-facilitation-registration-97307526431 There are concessions available for IAF members, and those Susannah Raffe Susannah is a facilitator, compassion advocate and climate communicator, and co-host of London Meetups. You can find her on LinkedIn and Twitter: https://twitter.com/SusannahRaffe https://www.linkedin.com/in/susannahraffe/ https://susannahraffe.com/ [email protected] And bravely heading the planning of the conference, which of course this year is online. Susannah focuses on helping people have better conversations about climate change. She started doing this back in 2014, and she started using this facilitation started in people's homes. She also coaches change makers, on a one-one basis. She's used the last six months to reflect on what's important to her, as facilitator and human, leading her to call herself a "compassion advocate". The conference is taking place between 19 and 23 October. The conference will have a mix of sessions - for facilitators of all levels, including those who don't call themselves facilitators. The focus is on building community and getting to know each other, with morning coffees and evening networking sessions. You can drop in for five minutes, if you fancy it, or have longer conversations if you feel like it. The signing up this year is different: you buy one ticket through Eventbrite, https://www.eventbrite.com/e/annual-conference-2020-the-power-and-practice-of-facilitation-registration-97307526431 which gives you access to a MeetUp group (as this is where the community already meets online), where you can sign up to the different sessions - some of them have capacity limits. This also gives you access to session leaders and other attendees to the session, both before and after the session. There's a range of sessions, about different topics, exploratory conversations, how to support diversity and inclusion, and even a WhoDunnit mystery game and wine tasting (by previous guest Pinar, check out episode 16). Susannah is looking forward to meeting some of the session leaders from outside the UK, enabled by the fact that the conference is online. This includes session leaders from Africa and India. At the moment there are no overlapping sessions (Helene is worried she won't be able to make all the ones she wants to go to!), but this might change as the programme is evolving. Listeners, check out the programme, which looks amazing! Susannah feels like preparing the schedule has been like baking: getting all the ingredients together, and then put them all together rapidly, at the same time. (Editor notes: she's done great!) It being online, has allowed the process to be more emergent, adapting the format to a host the proposals, so that the community can guide the content. Being online has allowed it to be a week long, rather than two days. The Meetup group will continue to be open for further connections - of course attendees can come from wherever in the world, even though the programme has been curated with the EW chapter in mind. Helene has got her head round the fact that the conference is going to be online, and is much more aware of the benefits, including the diversity of attendees. And Susannah has been crashing other regional meetups, and felt very welcome! 17.01mins Cat Duncan-Rees Our second guest is Cat Duncan-Rees, curator of change, creative disruptor, pirate, wife and mum! https://twitter.com/CatDRees https://www.linkedin.com/in/cat-duncan-rees-3666181a/ https://curatorsofchange.com/ Cat fell into facilitator in the public sector, after seeing someone else do great work, and being mentored by them. She uses many techniques from PinPoint, and mashed it with other practices, "doing what makes sense and hopes for the best" (like most of us!). Cat has recently joined the IAFEW Leadership team and is now standing for the board, she finds herself landing in these situations when they most makes sense. She's been around the IAF for a while, and started going to the Manchester meetups. She was going to run a session at the IAF Global summit, which was cancelled - and after attending a virtual meetup, and having an interesting conversation (which features in our own Facilitation Stories episode 20), she was encouraged to "stay around" and become more involved. Her and John Varney ran a session for IAFEW, and more! She's even become part of our Podcast Team! (You can hear Cat also in episode 20 https://facilitationstories.libsyn.com/fs20-various-voices-climate-hub-creating-space-to-reflect-working-with-interpreters-and-async-facilitation ) She finds she can both learn and pass on plenty of stuff in the facilitator community. Cat is running TWO sessions in the conference: Upping the Facilitation Game in a Time of Crisis, with John Varney, and Be More Pirate (which was the one she'd already planned) Upping the Facilitation Game in a Time of Crisis is a follow up/extension of the conversations they've already been having on the future of facilitation As facilitators, we are privileged to hold the space for others, so there is a responsibility to be aware of how we are shaping the conversations, and our own influence. Is our "neutrality" also preventing us from being part of those conversations?  What does it mean to be human? "Our own humanity is a fundamental part of the shift we're going through." That's how we'll be starting the week! (It wowed Helene!) About her second session, Be More Pirate, what is a "pirate"? The Be More Pirate movement (of social change) https://www.bemorepirate.com/  started with the book of the same name. The session, which she is co-leading with Alex Barker , will look at how to apply the "pirate" principles in organisations operating more like "the navy", and how rules be rewritten, and challenge the status quo.  If we're serious about upping the facilitation game and create a better society, what would it look like if we applied the Pirate principles?   Helene really wants to go to both sessions, to make her brain hurt... join her, listeners!  Links to people:  [email protected] https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/england-wales @fac_stories Our host: @HeleneJewell on Twitter https://twitter.com/SusannahRaffe  https://www.linkedin.com/in/susannahraffe/ https://susannahraffe.com/ [email protected] https://twitter.com/CatDRees https://www.linkedin.com/in/cat-duncan-rees-3666181a/ https://curatorsofchange.com/