"EL MOMENTO MÁGICO"

Dr. Gilbert Brenson-Lazan, President
Global Facilitator Service Corps

It was truly a magical moment. As I was preparing to welcome the attendees at the Third Latin American Facilitators Conference in Bariloche, Argentina, I looked around the ballroom and realized that twenty years of facilitation history in Latin America was sitting in the room.

• After a tragic landslide killed 26,000 people in Armero, Colombia in 1985, the Colombian government requested that a team of facilitators work in the process of aiding the survivors in the rebuilding of their communities. The leader of that team, Martha Aycardi Fonseca, was sitting to my left.

• In Ecuador, an NGO dedicated to strengthening family and marital relationships in poor neighborhoods has used participative workshops for years. Two of their volunteer facilitators, Mariana Falconi and Laura Salvador were sitting on the other side of the room.

• Chile has a long history of environmental education programs based on facilitated workshops in the poor communities. Several of the new generation of facilitators dedicated to those programs were sitting at a front table.

• When the Shining Path guerrillas began to brutally assassinate community and NGO leaders in Perú during the decade of the eighties, tens of thousands of peasant families fled for their lives. They formed refugee communities that were helped by facilitators from World Vision International with programs of self-development of health, micro-enterprise and educational programs. One of their consultants from Costa Rica, Arturo Menesses, was sitting at a back table.

• After Hurricane Mitch devastated Nicaragua and Honduras several years ago, thirty local professional were trained by a team of IAF-sponsored volunteers in techniques of facilitation in disaster intervention. During the next year those thirty multiplied their newly acquired competences to more than 11,000 medical, education, social work and psychology professionals throughout the country. Some of them were also present in the Conference.

• When a landslide buried thousands on the northern coast of Venezuela a few years ago, a local university brought in volunteer facilitators from other countries to train local professionals in disaster intervention techniques. One of those Facilitators, María Begoña Rodas, was sitting on the right, not to far from the two organizers of the program, Gladys Yamelicse Quintero and Carolina Azuay.

• En Medellin, Colombia, Carmenza Henao and Francisco Fernandez have frequently facilitated programs of youth leadership development and refugee community development for the Catholic Social Pastorate in communities that have suffered massacres in the on-going narco-guerrilla warfare. Both were sitting at my table.

• A massive, five-year national health program in the Dominican Republic, sponsored by the USAID and Family Health Institute, is now in its second successful year using community-based facilitators around the country. Three of the key facilitator trainers were present: Remedios Ruíz, Armando Matiz and Parcia Sansary.

• Conference host Argentina and the Bariloche Facilitators Network, were publicly praised by city officials at the opening of the Conference, for the volunteer facilitation given by the Network in the local processes of consensus-building and citizen participation. More than twenty local facilitators from the network were present.

• A transnational restaurant chain whose home office is in Pereira, Colombia, not only has based its OD efforts and employee and family welfare programs on professionally facilitated processes, but has also sponsored and supported the training of facilitators and educators in the founding and maintenance of a school that has served thousands of poor children and their families throughout the years. The company´s President, Liliana Restrepo, and several of her team were present at this event.

Unlike most regions in the world, facilitation became a defined set of competencies and an accepted profession in Latin America through community development and disaster and crisis intervention. Perhaps for that reason more than 50 Conference attendees also attended the organizational session of GFSC in Latin America and made firm commitments to develop local networks of volunteers in a half a dozen countries. Also present were six GFSC Board members (Lenny, BJ, Larry, Bego, Francisco and myself) as well as several GFSC Local Coordinators (Ximena, Parcia, Laura and Gladys) to meet people in the GFSC Booth and to assist interested volunteers in designing a suitable strategy for network and volunteer candidates.

As GFSC continues to fulfill its mission around the world by linking people, processes and resources, unleashing the collaborative potential of communities to create solutions to their challenges, Latin America is rapidly becoming a world leader in the process.