"Facilitation"
What we mean by "facilitation" here is supporting and encouraging people to generate better processes and results in their learning, problem solving, creating a new vision of the future, and so on by providing effective approaches to relationships between people and relationships between people and situations. A person who holds this role is called a "facilitator." A simple example of this is someone who chairs meetings to facilitate dialogue, participation, and mutual interactions. The Facilitators Association of Japan (FAJ) was founded in 2003 as a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of an autonomous decentralized society through facilitation, where various people collaborate with each other. The FAJ has increased its membership, mainly in the age range of 30s to 40s, and has 15 branches comprising 1800 members in Japan as of May 2015.
One of the most distinctive features of the FAJ is that it doesn't have a full-time staff. All the FAJ's activities are run and managed by facilitator-members who volunteer using their own facilitation skills.
Taro Tokuda assumed the position of chairperson for this unique organization in 2010, one year before the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, for which he later organized and headed the Disaster Recovery Support Section in the FAJ. By then, the FAJ already had more than 1200 members who had been conducting a variety of activities with the spirit of local autonomy. This included an initiative called "Let's get out in the field! " where member facilitators began to use their facilitation skills to solve issues in their local sites.
Yet Tokuda was aware that as an NPO dedicated to the public interest, the FAJ was facing even bigger expectations. He knew that the FAJ needed to go one step further - that in the future, the FAJ would need to tackle social issues as an organization, not merely rely on each member's individual activities.
Two other members of the FAJ, Mariko Suzuki, a vice chairperson and Chie Endo, a director, who later started the Disaster Reconstruction Assistance Section in the FAJ with Tokuda, shared a similar conviction: all three were focused on the relationships between NPOs and society. Each of them, while having their own jobs as facilitator, seminar lecturer and a community development consultant, had participated in various volunteer organizations or been on the board of directors of other NPOs. The title of this section, 'Shifting "My" Power to "Our" power' comes from the foreword of the FAJ's annual plan for 2010, which Tokuda wrote when he assumed the role of chairperson of the FAJ. The foreword closes as follows:
"Let us take a powerful step to connect to OUR power to move society." In the FAJ's board meeting when we were examining the new business plan for 2011 to further accelerate the realization of this kind of relationship to society as an NPO, the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake literally shook all of Japan.
We made this report based on our records to share with you and with society at large about how the FAJ thought about and built our projects and actions as an organization in the aftermath of the unprecedented disaster called the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, and how each member facilitator acted at many different disaster recovery sites.
Although we can only report a fraction of our wide-ranging activities here, we hope this report can shed some light on the organizations that courageously and generously supported and worked with us on the disaster recovery initiatives since the outbreak of the disasters, both for the benefit of other organizations that are preparing to tackle future social issues and for each individual who is striving to learn and practice facilitation skills.
The Disaster Reconstruction Assistance Section in the FAJ has two pillars for its activities: 1. Rebuilding local communities and supporting recovery initiatives by local residents, and 2. Enhancing the network connecting supporter organizations. This report is also organized based on these two pillars.