AHED - Arnhem Human Enterprise Development - Image by John Heritage

What does a Human Enterprise Facilitation Team do?

The facilitation team will help individuals and groups do whatever it is that they want to make happen. When a local person comes to one of the facilitators with an idea, the facilitator will help them assess their plan and together the facilitator and the client will decide on the first steps. The facilitator’s job will then be to find the resources and people needed to enable the client to live out their vision.

A key part of the Enterprise Facilitation method is about creating a team of people to support the person with the idea. So for example a client may approach facilitators with an idea to grow and sell bananas and pawpaws. Their passion and expertise is in growing fruits but they may not know how to organise to sell the produce or find customers, and they may not know how to manage the money and paperwork. While they do what they can on the garden, the facilitator’s job will be to find one or two people who can do these other roles. With these other aspects of the business covered the visionary is free to focus on what they love - gardening. The people in the other roles will be drawn from passionate individuals from the local community or from outside the community, either Balanda or Yolŋu who are either skilled or interested in becoming skilled in these areas.

It is not just trade enterprises that this project will be facilitating, but also social and educational endeavours. The facilitation team will help any endeavour local people are passionate about achieving. For example

Someone wants to learn to write, the facilitator will attempt to find a service, or a person who can teach that person, and then access that help. The client will participate by coming and learning.
Someone wants to control their diabetes, the facilitator with the client will asses the limitations stopping the client from improving their condition. They will then bring that person together with people and resources to educate them, support them in good eating and exercise, and treating their illness. In this enterprise the client does the hard work of changing how they eat and live, with the help of a team supporting them.

The client is always the central participant in the process. In these cases the facilitator, as they do with business planning, may provide some education as part of the process, or they will find people who have the knowledge required.

We hope that such enterprises will lead to the growth of personal, educational and social endeavours, as well as growth of business and trade. This will create opportunities for improved health, control and freedom from welfare dependence.

Clients who seek training, once successful, may go on to use that new skill to get a job or start a trading enterprise. The key to this growth is controlled by the choices of the people in the community, the facilitators only act to help them through the barriers and show them the paths.

What the Enterprise facilitators do NOT do?

There are a number of problems that will arise when facilitators enter communities and they become available to help people. The methods we are using have strategies to manage the main problems.

Do NOT encourage dependency thinking.

We know from experience that some people will want to take advantage of the facilitator, thinking the facilitator will be able to get them easy money or hoping the facilitator will create their idea without them having to put in their own sweat and work.

These problems do not just occur in Indigenous communities, this is how Sirolli describes the ways some clients try to use facilitators from his experience in Balanda communities;

Clients may come to you thinking that:

• You have money to give them (welfare agent)

• You will grow their baby [their idea] for them (nurse)

• You will sell their invention (broker)

• You will make them rich without them doing anything (lottery commission)

To avoid this kind of dependency thinking the facilitator must be disciplined to follow these rules:

Never initiate contact with a client
Never seek to motivate a client to action
Work only with a client who is passionate enough to want to work to make their idea happen.
Never allow the client to think that the facilitator has any special power or authority.

The facilitators will wait for local people to request help; they do not go out and find people to help. If they were to go out offering to help this would put all the responsibility on the facilitator and they would become like a parent looking after a child. But the facilitator and client must relate to each other as equals, as adults.

Facilitators will not do everything for the client. Facilitators will not chase up on clients. Clients must keep up contact with the facilitator and not expect the facilitator to always contact them. If clients do not do things to start their idea in their own time and space, then the facilitator can not keep working with that person. This ensures that the client is truly motivated to turn their own dreams into reality.

Do NOT take over.

Often in Arnhem Land Balanda start out working for the people but end up doing everything, with Yolŋu doing very little. To ensure that the local person or group remains foremost in the running of and participation in their enterprise, the facilitator must remember; they are not any kind of saviour for this person, they are equals, and the enterprise must live or die based on the work of the visionary not the facilitator.

To prevent this from occurring, the facilitator must follow these rules:

Never think that you have any special power or authority.
Never become a shareholder, director, manager or any other active part in the daily operation of the enterprise.

Again, the facilitator's main role is to remove the limitations to the client becoming the main active force in achieving their dream. For this reason the facilitator must never become an active part in the daily activity of any endeavour the people create, because if they do they risk taking responsibility and control away from the client and they become less available to help others in the community.

Enterprise Facilitators don’t hold a monopoly on the truth nor have they answers to all of the many problems encountered by their clients. To think that one does have all the answers for the people will lead to attitudes such as paternalism, which will tempt the facilitator to unintentionally position themselves as superior to the client or do too much for the client. The only thing the facilitator offers is a caring, dedicated, listening service and a smart, go-get-it attitude which is at the disposal of their clients. In Arnhem Land a knowledge of the Balanda system is also required of facilitators to help the people, but in this the facilitator is not a source of knowledge but a guide. We will not forget that the people themselves have a system that the facilitator does not understand, and that the facilitators will need the client to guide them through.

In summary

“Facilitators are not instant business experts. Their task is not technical execution of projects, rather they concern themselves with helping clients to conceptualize, express and implement what it is they truly wish to achieve. They then offer coaching and direction by questioning the premises upon which the proposed business will be established. In other words, they lead the clients to the water but leave it to them to decide whether they wish to drink or not. It is the client that must take responsibility for developing and working successfully with partners and team members. [Facilitators] assist. The client does the heavy lifting."

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