In this episode Helene talks to Cath about her role as Senior Engagement Advisor and internal facilitator with the Environment Agency (EA) Cath tells Helene a bit about the EA and the type of work they do. She explains how her role as Engagement Advisor includes facilitation and also how she works an an independent internal facilitator for other projects withing the EA. Cath gives some examples of what she really enjoys about her role as a faciliator including working with the public on a climate adaptation project and working alongside external independent facilitators that the EA also use. She explains that external faciliatators are often used when more complex conversations need to be had, or where there has been a breakdown of trust and someone independent is needed. She shares some insights as to how the internal facilitators network of aroudn 200 facilitators was set up and how she balances her work as Senior Engagement Advisor and facilitator. She tells Helene about a role play technique that really made a difference and about how asking good questions are crucial to her work as a faciliator. Cath also talks about how she keeps her faciliation skills up including attending the IAF England and Wales conferences, and local IAF meetups and EA facilitator learning days. She also shares some advice for other internal facilitators. A full transcript is below. Today's Guest Environment Agency - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) facilitationnetworkmailbox@environment-agency.gov.uk To find out more about Facilitation Stories and the IAF and the England and Wales Chapter Facilitation Stories website: https://facilitationstories.libsyn.com/ And to email us: podcast@iaf-englandwales.org IAF England and Wales: https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/england-wales The Facilitation Stories Team Helene Jewell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenejewell/ Nikki Wilson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolawilson2/ Transcript H.J Hello and welcome to Facilitation Stories, the community podcast of the England and Wales chapter of the International Association of Facilitators, also known as IAF. My name is Helen Jewell, and my guest today is Cath Brooks, senior engagement advisor with the Environment Agency. Welcome, Cath C.B Hi, yeah. Hi. How are you doing? Alright? H.J I'm good. How are you? C.B Yeah, good. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. I'm Looking forward to it. H.J It's really good to have you on the podcast. Okay, so I have a whole load of questions to ask you, starting with the Environment Agency. I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about what the Environment Agency does and what your role is? C.B Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I hope that it'll inspire people. I've worked at the Environment Agency for almost 20 years, and I still absolutely love it. It's a great organisation. So we're a public sector organisation, and we aim, quite simply, to protect and improve the environment. We employ about 12,000 people, and some people work nationally across England, and then some people work in area offices. We've got 14 different area offices across England, so you either work on national issues or you work on local issues in one of our area offices. And I guess to create places for people and wildlife, we work on quite a lot of topics that people are deeply concerned about, and finding ways forward can be difficult on some of the issues, people have strong opinions about the environment and how we should be managing the environment quite rightly. So Facilitation skills are really important in that context, with some of the really difficult issues that we're managing. So some of those topics are things like managing major industry, making sure they're not polluting the environment, and waste, dealing with contaminated land, making sure water quality of our rivers and we've got enough water so water resources as well, working on fisheries, conservation and ecology, and my area that I work on is management of flood risk. So those sorts of issues are really interesting, and people have strong opinions about how we should be managing those issues. So there can be quite a lot of conflict, I guess, which is why facilitation is so important. H.J And so then, obviously that's quite a broad even under the umbrella of the environment, that's quite a broad range of different areas, and in your particular area then, in your role as senior engagement advisor, what does that actually involve? Sort of before, obviously, I guess facilitation is part of that, but I know you also do it sort of separately as well. What does your main role? What does your main role involve? C.B Yeah, so we've got engagement advisors. Obviously, the organisation's quite technical organisation, quite science and engineering led, but we also have engagement and communications experts within the Environment Agency, and I'm one of those. So I work alongside quite technical teams, and at the ...
