THE ART OF FACILITATION Transforming Lives Through Self Help Groups

Library Seminar Room 7

THE ART OF FACILITATION

Transforming Lives Through Self Help Groups

Date: 10 October 2018

Time: 12.30 - 2pm (with lunch from 12pm)

Speaker: Varun Vidyarthi

Abstract

The self help movement, that has officially touched the lives of more than eighty million families in rural India, is based on a process of facilitation which centres around raising of individual and collective consciousness of people. The process leads to collective capacity for self management among people’s organisations that brings sustainable social transformation in their lives.

The key to success lies in integrated capacity building of facilitators combining information and skills with values and attitudes. The speaker who has pioneered the process of self help and has also engaged in capacity building of a large number of development facilitators feels that the art of facilitation needs greater understanding and application for meaningful transformation of people’s lives.

The lessons learned apply not only to development institutions working in low income regions of the world. They apply to all of us who wish to become facilitators of meaningful and sustainable social change in communities North or South, privileged or oppressed. The roadmap begins inside each of us.

Reference reading : DEVELOPMENT FROM WITHIN by Varun Vidyarthi and Patricia Wilson, 2008. (available at amazon.com )

Bio

Varun Vidyarthi has a formal background in Engineering and Management from premier institutes in India. During the early eighties, his analysis of linkages between social structure and resource management issues in rural India led him to work as Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, U.K., and at the East West Center, Honolulu, U.S.A.

As a specialist in participatory methods, Varun has served as a Consultant with several international organizations like FAO, UNICEF and is the Founder Director of Manavodaya, an institution recognized as a center of excellence in people-based, self help approaches to development. Varun has lectured extensively on the above subjects at various institutions and universities across the world.