FS 66 Facilitate 2024: Growing Together with Paul Brand Facilitation Stories

In this episode Helene talks to Paul Brand, Director of Risk Solutions and part of the IAF England and Wales Leadership Team, Board member and conference team member.
They talk about 
The IAF England and Wales facilitators and friends Facilitate 2024 Conference (April 26th & 27th 2024) and what it is all about.
Who is on the organising team and what Paul's role has been
What is different from last year's conference
What kinds of sessions we can expect
What he is looking forward to
A bit about the participants some of whom are coming from outsde the UK
How the IAF England and Wales conferences have grown over the years and what makes them successful
"it is a bit like a buffet and having taste of this and a taste of that." "what really makes me happy about the whole thing, and inspired by it, is watching people enter into it and throw themselves into it. Watching them having conversations with people they've never met and would never meet and, and go away taking whatever it is they've taken from the conference".  A full transcript is below.
Links
Today’s guest was Dr Paul Brand
https://www.linkedin.com/in/drpaulbrand/
paul.brand@risksol.co.uk 
https://risksol.co.uk/ 
Today’s subject
The Facilitate 2024 Conference
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/facilitate2024-growingtogether-tickets-733547288687?aff=oddtdtcreator 
To find out more about the IAF and the England and Wales Chapter
https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/england-wales 
The Facilitation Stories Team
Helene Jewell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenejewell/ 
Nikki Wilson:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolawilson2/ 
Transcript
Hello and welcome to facilitation stories brought to you by the England and Wales chapter of the International association of Facilitators, also known as IAF. My name is Helene Jewell and today I'm talking to Paul Brand,a management consultant whose work focuses on public policy.
He often works on long term engagements across entire sectors for multi organisation communities, and uses facilitation extensively in his work.
He's also an IAF England Wales board member, certified professional facilitator and a member of the conference planning team. Welcome, Paul. Good morning.
It is morning. It is morning. Good.
It is morning. It is morning. So my first question is just to ask you, really to tell us a little bit more about you as a facilitator and your involvement in the IAF.
So I came into facilitation like a lot of people, not quite realizing I was doing it, doing a lot of public policy consulting things, and needing somebody who would lead groups of people through discussions. And then that became a better understanding of what facilitation as a profession was all about. And that grew and grew over the years.
I did a long piece of work in the about 2011 2012, working with a very senior IAF board member. We did a lot of events together, and during that time I understood what the IAF was about and realized I needed to actually make my facilitation skills part of my professional development formally. So I did the IAF certified professional facilitator thing in 2012, which was quite a developmental experience in itself, and I keep that up to this day.
And then over the last four or five years, I've become more and more involved in the workings of IAF, in England and Wales particularly, and have also had the privilege of attending a couple of the european conferences in Paris and Milan, finding out how our colleagues across the channel do it. So it's been an arc of development. Yeah, an arc of development slowly, slowly coming further and further in.
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