I’m currently engaged in a number of projects that have me working at the margins, exploring margins, eliminating margins and generally working with difference, otherness, power and exclusion. These projects include: Running an Open Space Technology event in September to create collaborative actions around reducing addictions-related stigma in the health system in Vancouver. Working with the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service in the United States on supporting and expanding a culture of welcome and acceptance in their work with migrants and refugees, work that is stunningly radical in the context of the current “conversation” on immigration in the USA. Part …
Three Art of Hosting learning events are coming up this fall in western Canada. Join us in Saskatoon or here on Bowen Island to explore the leadership capacities needed for convening the conversations that matter in our time. Art of Participatory Leadership and Social Change, September 26-28, 2011, New York City. Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter: Leading thoughtful collaboration and wise action, September 19-22, 2011, Saskatoon, Sask. Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter, October 23-26, 2011, Bowen Island, BC.
Just out from an Art of Hosting practitioner. The guide is a free download: The Lotus – A Practice Guide for Authentic Leadership in Strategic Sustainable Development – presents nine personal leadership capacities that authentic leaders find essential in their work when facilitating large-scale, complex, transformational change in organisations and communities. Furthermore, it suggests practices (ranging from contemplative and spiritual to physical, engaging both head, heart and hands) that help in developing your personal leadership capacities via The Lotus | A Practice Guide for Authentic Leadership in Strategic Sustainable Development.
Come an join Teresa Posakony, Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and me for an Art of Hosting learning retreat on our home island, Bowen Island, near Vancouver this October. Held at Rivendell, atop Cates Hill, this Art of Hosting will explore recent work and learning about self-organization, participatory leadership and community resiliency. We will explore a number of participatory facilitation methods, engage in personal reflective practice using The Work of Byron Katie and delve into models of systems change being developed through the Berkana Institute. For registration information, visit the Berkana website, and please consider joining us for a power …
I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice. We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of “What time it is in the world?” We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing. We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were …