Why IAF conferences are in my blood - IAFIndia2025

From the Woven Garden Session conducted by Kala Diwanji, Varsha Chitnis and myself

 It's the experience.

This "experience" is made up of:

• Fun
• Learning
• Building new Relationships
• Nurturing old relationships

I've been attending them since 2015, barring a couple of years where other things in life asserted (and inserted) themselves to take precedence over the conference.  I've also volunteered for some of the conferences, on specific teams like the Proposal Team or the Registration Team.  I have also had the good fortune to be able to present a Facilitation Process (jointly) at two IAF India conferences (2019 & 2025) and the IAF Asia Conference in 2023.  All these have added to my experience in such a manner that I always feel "Yeh Dil Mange More".  So I had taken up the role of Co-lead for Mumbai hub from 2018 to 2020.

Here are memories of past conferences with some of my co-facilitators with whom I had a blast both designing the session and running it.

With Kala Diwanji and Varsha Chitnis at IAF India Conference Pune 2025

With Hideyuki Yoshioka and Varsha Chitnis at IAF Asia Conference in Hyderabad 2023

As a volunteer for IAF, you can add the term "community bonding" to the list mentioned above.  For me this is critical because volunteering creates the "belonging"  feeling that leads to us all bonding as a community.

In the #IAF2025 conference too, the challenge is which sessions to attend.  Unlike other non-IAF conferences where we wait for gyan from speakers, here at IAF conferences, we create the gyan ourselves thanks to the superb facilitation processes run by the Facilitators whose sessions are diligently managed by the Proposal Team, and evaluated by CPFs.

We rekindle old friendships and make some new ones.

We add to our basket of facilitation tools, not just during the conference, but even later where we can call those facilitators to clarify and gain more insights into their processes.

I enjoyed all the sessions I attended at IAFIndia2025, but the ones that stood out for me are:

Ravi Bhaviskar - Re-live Impact Story of Empowering Barefoot and Brilliant Girls

Ravi Bhaviskar's Facilitation Impact story showcasing how he used facilitation to enable the #barefoot and brilliant girls to dream big.   He even ran the process he used with the girls for us to get the experience of what he had done for them.

Zoom to read those stickers

Anand Mehta's wonderfully immersive process on Gratitude and Healing.

Ajit Kamath in Action

Ajit Kamath's masterclass on the IAF Competencies - done through facilitation processes.

Grateful thanks to IAFIndia, the core team, volunteers, session buddies and student volunteers, not forgetting our sponsors for making sure that we have a fabulous experience.  I'm eagerly looking forward to the next conference.