The Australasian Facilitators Network (AFN) is a self-organising community of practitioners based in Australia, New Zealand, South-East Asia and the Pacific, who have been meeting as the AFN since 1998 (and informally, with other identities, since 1992).
Our focus is on working, learning and sharing with each other.
We share a passion for facilitation and participatory practice in pursuit of better communication, understanding, collaboration and harmony in workplaces, communities, and the world at large.
As an informal unincorporated association of peers, we pay no AFN membership fees.
As a self-organising community, we choose for ourselves when to connect, communicate, collaborate and contribute with each other through the network.
We take responsibility for developing initiatives and organising AFN activities which contribute to our core purpose, developing and spreading new knowledge and capabilities, and fostering innovation.
Each year a group of AFN volunteers from a particular state or region offer to organise our annual conference. This is undertaken as a gift to the network. All facilitators presenting at the Conference also do so on a gift basis. All volunteers/presenters still pay to attend the conference. This helps ensure we maintain a spirit of collaboration and ‘putting in the middle’. It is a very generous network that inspires us to give of our best.
In return, AFN provides us with a wide range of benefits, including: opportunities to connect with others in a community of interest a safe forum to explore and test our ideas or validate proposed approaches access to diverse experience and expertise to expand our horizons, gain knowledge and seek help in addressing challenges in our work and practice support to be more conscious of, and feel more confident in, our own personal knowledge and practice a greater sense of professional commitment; and enhancement of the standing and reputation of facilitation as a profession or calling. AFN has a high degree of overlap of membership with the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) Oceania Region.
AFN Affiliated Communities of Practice
Australia
- Northern Territory:
- Alice Springs
- NSW
- Sydney
- Central West
- Victoria
- Western Australia
- Queensland
New Zealand