Facilitation

The term facilitation is broadly used to describe any activity which makes tasks for others easy, or tasks that are assisted. For example:

• Facilitation (business) is used in business and organizational settings to ensure the designing and running of successful meetings
• Neural facilitation in neuroscience, is the increase in postsynaptic potential evoked by a 2nd impulse
• Ecological facilitation describes how an organism profits from the presence of another. Examples are nurse plants, which provide shade for new seedlings or saplings (e.g. using an orange tree to provide shade for a newly planted coffee plant), or plants providing shelter from wind chill in arctic environments.

A person who takes on such a role is called a facilitator. Specifically:

• A facilitator is used in a variety of group settings, including business and other organisations to describe someone whose role it is to work with group processes to ensure meetings run well and achieve a high degree of consensus
• The term facilitator is used in psychotherapy where the role is more to help group members become aware of the feelings they hold for one another (see Group psychotherapy)
• The term facilitator is used in education to refer to a specifically trained adult who sits in class with a disabled, or otherwise needy, student to help them follow the lesson that the teacher is giving (see Disability)
• The term facilitator is used to describe people engaged in the illegal trafficking of human beings across international borders (see Human trafficking)
• The term facilitator is used to describe those individuals who arrange adoptions by attempting to match available children with prospective adopters
• The term facilitator is used to describe someone who assists people with communication disorders to use communication aids with their hands. See Facilitated communication