Our Art of Hosting workshops are a place to bridge practices

Kelly Foscroft-Poirier hosts a session during an Art of Hosting we did at Tseshaht back in 2019.

I had a lovely call today with Sean Andrew, a colleague in the world of hosting, complexity and systems change work. At one point we were both sharing stories about what the Art of Hosting workshop meant to us as experienced practitioners. We both came to the Art of Hosting approach after years of facilitation and practice in other domains.

For experienced practitioners, the Art of Hosting, as a learning workshop can offer an important bridge between practices. Both Sean an I credit the Art of Hosting in part with moving our practice from methods-based to a broader capacity to work with groups and organizations. Many who come to the Art of Hosting as a “facilitation training” leave with skills related to design, personal work, and how to work with self-organization and emergence. It alos broadens the conversation to more strategic questions about how hosted interventions can be consequential in the broader context of the organization’s or community’s questions.

If you are a practitioner that is familiar with methods, or you have a long standing organizational development practice, the Art of Hosting may be one of those places where you find badging and connection between different approaches and some practice tools to help deep your work.

It certainly helps that our teams are quite diverse. In our Ontario offering on Reimagining Education (October 16-18 in Peterborough), we have Jennifer Williams who is education with an electic resume of teaching on tall ships and in wilderness settings and who supports organizational development as a consultant and host. Troy Maracle is a long time Indigenous educator and community builder amongst those supporting Indigenous students in the Ontario school system. Systems change is his life and he brings worlds together in his teaching and practice. Cedric Jamet teaches in the Human Systems Intervention program at Concordia and is a poet and musician and we share a love of theory and simplicity of practice.

In Vancouver (November 17-19) our team is likewise broadly experienced. Caitlin Frost, my partner, whose body of work has developed over thirty years of practice, helps us inquire into our own limiting beliefs to activate our own capacities to work with uncertainty and complexity. Kris Archie, who I have worked with for more then 20 years, is currently the CEO of The Circle, an Indigenous national organization working with settler philanthropic organizations around how they can use their resources well to support Indigenous work. Participatory practices are deeply embedded in her own life and organizational design. We have worked on massive systems change projects together and I live in awe of her commitment to grounding all of this work in Secwepmc culture and worldviews. The same goes for Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier, a gifted artist, graphic recorder, host and language learner. She works in her own communities, which are the most challenging places to bring new practice and grounds her work in Nuu-Chah-Nulth principles and knowledge. She is a gifted host who is able to love the people in the rooms she supports no matter the work at hand.

We live those bridges and connections and new welcome all to these spaces of learning and connection as we all deepen our practices, in multiple ways for the benefit of the people wow are invited to support.

Join us at these upcoming workshops to build some new bridges yourself.