“The kind of change we are after is cellular as well as institutional, is personal and intimate, is collective as well as cultural. We are making love synonymous with justice.”

Prentis Hemphill

We are living in a time of urgency. Our planet is showing us deep wounds as a result of extraction, pillaging and a greedy economic system with its relentless drive for growth. Our societies are filled with injustices, with the gap growing wider between those ‘who have’ and those ‘who have not’. We are fragmenting ourselves with the ‘other’ being viewed as the cause of our problems. Power over systems and structures continue to be the norm. We are acting from deep traumas that we do not know we have.

Yet, we, at the CitizensLab believe that this time of urgency is an opportunity. It is a time to look together into our differences, traumas and polar views in order to see and then act wisely to move beyond them. It is timely to unlearn and create new forms of relating. We are connecting to cultures of care and kinship because we believe that new beginnings may arise if we come into ‘right relationship’ with each other and the natural world. At the CitizensLab, we are continuously action-researching into this urgency:

• We see the urgency of reclaiming communal and collective ways of relating, as the foundation to imagine new forms of living and organising our society.
• The urgency of reappropriating the capacity of taking collective decisions and responsibilities, to overcome the individualistic logics of reproduction, control, and separation.
• The urgency of expanding our ties, the capacity to trust and build deeper relations where a culture of care, kinship and commoning can give us the courage to overcome our fears, to heal and get stronger in this collective liberation.

Through the practice of the Art of Hosting and Harvesting Meaningful Conversations, we wish to invite a deep learning and reflective space where together we can explore a world view of connectivity as living systems, mental models that enable us to create through complexity and designing processes that invite full participation that lead to harvesting new collective intelligence and wise action.

What is the Art of Hosting and Harvesting Meaningful Conversations?

The Art of Hosting and Harvesting Meaningful Conversations is an approach to leadership that scales up from the personal to the systemic using personal practice, dialogue, facilitation and co-creation of collective intelligence to address complex challenges.

What is the pedagogy of the training?

We are designing for an experience that is potent, pragmatic and immersive – a laboratory exploring collaboration through the lens of “care and kinship”. We will introduce mental models and theory on complexity and practise collective leadership through inviting participants to step into hosting and harvesting during the training. You are invited to bring your ideas, projects and challenges to work on, co-create with others and to find ways to apply the learning in your own contexts after the training. We are hosting a participatory learning and practising space for meeting people with similar values and ideas to learn from their stories and experiences. We will dive into new forms of leadership, based on Living Systems, where interconnection, collaboration and self-organising around purpose can lead to collective wellbeing.

This training is for you if you are

• Looking for new ways of working and leading to engage with the challenges and potentials of our times
• Working in a complex environment where collaboration beyond existing paradigms is needed
• Following a call that you are not completely clear about you wish to work on
• Ready and curious to explore your work, your community or your personal environment through the lens of “care and kinship”
• Wanting to deepen into practices of collective inquiry and collaboration to apply in your contexts
• Wanting to foster engagement and participation in initiatives and activities you are cultivating
• Wishing to learn new ways to facilitate meaningful conversations
• Wishing to become part of a growing network of change practitioners in Berlin

We invite you!

• Community leaders and organisers
• Social entrepreneurs & intrapreneurs
• Decision-makers and project managers
• NGO and development workers
• Artists, activists & social designers
• Facilitators, coaches and consultants
• Corporate innovators
• Convenors of cross-sector dialogues
• Policy makers and managers within municipalities
• Teachers, trainers and life-long learners

What will you learn?

You will experience methods, models and process design techniques that will support you to explore working with collaboration strategically so that diverse or even conflicting perspectives can create new beginnings and deepen relationships.

Concretely you will learn how to:

• Host meaningful conversations and harvest collective insights/intelligence
• Learn how to host yourself, especially when facing challenging or vulnerable spaces either within yourself or externally
• Introduce the strengths of participatory and collective leadership to your context
• Apply ‘Art of Hosting and Harvesting’ methods to your initiatives/projects and challenges (Open Space Technology, The World Café, Chaordic Design and others)
• Design collaborative initiatives and projects that aim to tackle the challenges of our times
• Perceive your environment through a living systems lens, needed to adapt to an ever-changing world
• Apply models for working with complexity, conflict/polarity and emergence

And, you will be introduced to a local and global network of practitioners actively involved in creating new systems of living and working.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

When and where?

Dates

Friday, 31.03.2023 10:00-18:00

Saturday, 01.04.2023. 10:00-18:00

Sunday, 02.04.2023. 10:00-17:00

Language

The training will be held in English.

Location

bUm – Raum für die engagierte Zivilgesellschaft

Paul-Lincke-Ufer 21, 10999 Berlin

What are the costs? 

Extra Supporter    1000 EUR
(eg. corporate/ business)

Supporter                800 EUR
(eg. public institutions)

Standard                 600 EUR
(eg. NGOs)

Supported               400 EUR
(eg. students, unemployed)

We care a lot about making the Art of Hosting training as inclusive and accessible as possible and hence offer four different tiers.

The standard fee allows us to cover each person’s attendance and includes catering (coffee breaks and lunches), materials, location rent, administration, team travel and accommodation costs as well as basic fees for the hosting team. The supporter and extra supporter fees allow us to enable participants who cannot afford the standard fee to attend and pay the hosting team a more sustainable remuneration of their work. Therefore, if you’re coming from an organisation with a training budget or have the possibility to invest more, please consider choosing the (extra) supporter fee so that we can allow people from different economic backgrounds to participate.

We operate in an economy of trust. We trust you to make a wise choice based on what is possible and realistic for you and taking into consideration the value of the offering and all the work that has gone in.

If you want to come and cannot afford the supported fee, feel free to email us at aohberlin(at)gmail.com and we can see if there is a way for us to offer you a scholarship, potentially in exchange for another kind of non financial contribution/ work exchange.

* The fee covers: participation in the three-day training, materials, a workbook, vegetarian/ vegan lunches, and coffee breaks.

Please note that the training fee does not include accommodation.