The term facilitation is broadly used to describe any activity which makes easy the tasks of others. For example:

• Facilitation is used in business and organisational 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.

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 therapy)
• 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 Trafficking in human beings).
• The term facilitator is used to describe those individuals who arrange adoptions by attempting to match available children with prospective adopters.