KARLSKRONA - Key Persons
Andreas is a systemic coach, heilpraktiker for psychotherapy and communcation trainer who lives near Düsseldorf, Germany. He is trained in Systemic Coaching, Business Psychology, Neuro Linguistic Programming, Energy Psychology and Touch for Health. He developed the 360° Coaching for Job and Life Orientation and runs a Coaching-Practice in Neuss. He developed his hosting and organisation skills during his 25 year career at the Shakespeare Festival in the Globe Neuss. In 2015 he got to know the Art of Hosting and is a practitioner and host since then. He focuses on Complexity and how to deal with it. Also in 2015 he started hosting a LGBT Sports Conference with Ruta J. from Vilnius. He hosts conversations about Trauma and conversations for Volunteers in the German Refugee Movement with Ybe Casteleyn. In 2017 he started a cooperation with the Düsseldorf and Cologne U-Lab where he introduces methods of Art of Hosting.
Anna-Karin is a co-founder of the consultant cooperative Kooperativet Synvända, senior adviser and facilitator that lives and works in countryside of Skara and in Stockholm, Sweden. Through Kooperativet Synvända she supports the emergence of local and regional ecosystems for trust, collaboration and social innovation that are needed in order to meet our societal and environmental challenges. Anna-Karin worked for 15 years in the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKL) with Sweden's municipalities, regions, civil society, central government and international organizations. Together they have developed new knowledge and practice in the broad field of dialogue, co-creation and collaboration. She also holds a Ph.D. in Social and economic geography at Uppsala University, and researched how to develop abundant local communities, democracy and rural development, Nordic local welfare models, gender studies and entrepreneurship.
Caroline works with teams from executive level to factory floor, using participatory practices to solve intractable problems in Human Rights and the Environment. Her goal is to deliver sustained alignment and heightened effectiveness in the environmental and sustainability domain. She has served as coach, advisor and strategist to senior teams in multinational corporations, government, and international & local NGOs in the US, Europe and Africa. She is the founding and managing partner of ren-new, a company that works with people in organisations to make sustainability fruitful for individuals, companies and communities; and is a steward of the Art of Hosting, working internationally, and based in Switzerland.
Charlotte's (she/her) life swirls around the question of how to be a paradigm shifter and the connection of inner states, outer behaviours, and systemic structures.
How does a stronger connection and spending time with the land and nature support our understanding and feeling of interrelatedness?
With a background in psychology and as a gardener at heart Cora (she/her) came to Sweden for a transformative learning journey in the Master Programm of Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability.She highly enjoys to spend time in sub culture bubbles like the MSLS students, her gardeners community, the farm team she used to live and work with and other lovely human beings - who are all practicing different ways of living like horizontal organization, regenerative approaches, appreciative and open cultures of high awareness, curiosity and healthy responsibility. It is important for her to be in those spaces where she is welcome with all that she brings and at the same time she is trying to stay in touch with the reality of main stream approaches and less like minded people. Does this duality even exist? Let's find it out together :)
Eike was born in Germany and studied Environmental and Sustainability studies in Lüneburg, Germany. After completing his studies in Karlskrona with the Master in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability, he stayed in Sweden and now lives in Gothenburg. In his working life Eike is a process designer and facilitator/host. He is hosting training's, conferences, seminars, workshops and youth events. He is passionate about working with young people as there is so much potential to be unlocked, not only for the benefit of the individual, but also for the world. Letting people shine, connect them and let them tap into their potential is what makes him shine in his full potential. The topics he is addressing in his work reach from sustainability, over personal development and coaching, political education, up to spirituality and Qi Gong. Ultimately, Eike believes that we can make the world a more beautiful space as soon as we listen to and act upon the wisdom of our hearts and act from a place of love and connectedness.
What do werewolves, monasteries, and desert plastic have to do with participatory facilitation? Emmy's (she/her) interest in facilitation was sparked a decade ago when a cousin turned a stiff family reunion into an immersive detective world through a game of ‘Werewolves'. She soon realized that facilitation meant responsibility, as she frequented a monastery to cultivate compassion, joy, and simplicity in an international community. Less ancient was the cutting-edge innovation studied in her bachelor's, where she dived into Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence. However, not only was she disappointed by how blindly these tools were applied for the few rich, but she was also shocked to witness the damage humans are inflecting everywhere on the planet, including in the rainforests and deserts. Keen to escape the dangerously low-lying Netherlands, she moved to Sweden to acquire two masters in sustainability, specializing in gathering people with playful and holistic methods to find collective meaning towards sustainable pathways. She looks forward to journeying together with you this August! Based in Netherlands / Sweden.
Eren is a sustainability, learning and leadership practitioner, based in Istanbul. He works towards regenerative organizations through focusing positive impact. Eren typically designs learning sessions within organizations in order to define their leverages for being sustainable and healthy organizations as well as individuals. It is the point he uses lots of Art of Hosting and Harvesting methodologies and participatory leadership approaches. He is an environmental engineer by training and holds a master's degree on Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability and loves to read and share about complex adaptive systems, living systems thinking and self-organized systems. Nowadays, he is apprenticing for a more participatory lifestyle
Felix (he/him) is passionate about self-organizing and re-imagining how we collectively take care of needs in our local communities. He started a community project to foster civil participation and regional development in rural Germany where he is based next to his soon to be home Amsterdam. Here he can experiment with organizational development and facilitating self-organization, and do a lot of research into human dynamics and deep relating. Felix is fascinated by the principles of presence and space that are essential ingredients to deep listening for him. He just graduated with a master thesis on nervous system and trauma informed facilitation and is in the midst of a two year education on trauma-integration. He is beginning to make designing systemic approaches to societal transformation and facilitating clever interventions that take complexity into account his job.
After 30 years of living in Brussels and working for the European Commission as a linguist and gentle provoker of change (including seeding the practices of the Art of Hosting into the institutional metabolism), I have retired from organisational life and city living. I now live on a smallholding in the Flemish countryside (Belgium) in community with two close friends, where we practice conscious co-creation with nature and place, applying the principles and methods of permaculture. In recent years I have started to respond to a strong call to return to the Wild and rediscover my pagan roots as an indigenous European, spending more time in nature and in the company of other women.
What form will allow this intention to thrive and create generative outcomes? How can we work towards collective liberation for all beings? Isabel (she/her) is an educator and pedagogy enthusiast acting as a researcher, process designer, and participatory leadership trainer. Her work is to create (un)learning processes and to lead strategic planning projects in education and the non-profit sector. She has been working as a program coordinator and consultant with The International Youth Initiative Program, Brave Space Social innovation, the Unschool of Disruptive Design, and the Amazon Summer School. She is now pursing a second Masters in Degrowth Ecology, Economy and Policy while remaining a visiting contributor at alternative education programs and working with freelance projects as a graphic facilitator. She is more interested in questions than answers. Based in Stockholm (Sweden) // Mi'kma'ki (Canada).
Isabel creates learning environments that support, illuminate, and catalyze individuals and groups. An avid listener and learner, she works across sectors and communities to foster collaboration, see the bigger picture, and make collective decisions based on insights and questions. She is currently a strategic and creative process consultant for Brave Space social innovation, co-organizer/leader of the Amazon Summer School sustainability education program in Brasil, and an alumni of the Unschool of Disruptive Design . Her studies at ALIA (Authentic Leadership in Action), Masters in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability (M.SLS) and the Art of Hosting internationally have provided the theoretical basis for her practical experience working on projects related to participatory leadership, sustainability, and radical education. This has led to collaborations with teams and projects across South America, North America, and Europe. She was a co-organizer of the 2014 Art of Hosting in Karlskrona and is looking forward to returning to the Rotundan.
Johan helps people and organisations thrive.
He is a consultant, coach and trainer and is always learning and exploring the realm of personal and organisational development. He supports organisations and teams creating better results with participatory leadership approaches, collaborative practices and creative processes.
As a structural thinker he helps to unlock everyone's unique potential and create the structures that allow people and organisations to make clear choices and create the outcomes they really want.
He is a practitioner of the next organisational paradigms that have self-organisation and wholeness at their center.
Through conscious embodied movement and deep dialogue Justas
creates spaces of personal inquiry and catalyzes groups towards their
shared purpose. As a philosopher, yogi and dancer he uses his heart, body
and mind to uncover passion, harmony and clarity. He has been on a learning
journey across Europe to explore the edges of his practice and questions
around what radical education could be. He brings people to together in
dialogue around education in Lithuania and also uses Art of Hosting to
serve his business by bringing together different sectors to co-create
mindful strategies for their future work together. He lives in Vilnius
with his wife Katia and son Jurgis.
Kajsa's passion is how we can unleash our individual, organisational and societal capacity to change - and co-create the future and present we want. She has been a cultural entrepreneur for 20 years and participatory leadership is core to her practice, whether she operates in the fields of arts, conscious business, education or society. Kajsa is one of the leaders and entrepreneurs behind internationally renowned Cirkus Cirkör, which established contemporary circus in Sweden with the vision to change the world it. "All parts of society have a lot to learn from the circus world, not least in terms of cross-collaboration, dedication and relationship to risk. " Kajsa is co-founder of Unleash, a Swedish based consultancy and training company. She is also a co-founder of Sweden 3.0 and an adjunct in cirkus management and entrepreneurship at Stockholm University of the Arts.
Mahmood Nisar is an entrepreneur, living and working in Germany and Afghanistan. He immigrated to Germany when he was 15 years old. The vision that leads his life is to engage himself fully for peace, particularly in Afghanistan. Since 2010 he is engaged in the development of Afghanistan within the German Development Cooperation and leads a team of international and national expert for a program in Northern-Afghanistan. Together with his wife, he established the label "MADE IN Afghanistan" which supports entrepreneurial development. Art of Hosting principles build a strong base for his activities, especially in cooperation with his team, business partners and the young professionals he mentors.
Marco (he/him) is working primarily in facilitation and capacity building to help teams navigate an unpredictable world more effectively. As a facilitator, he facilitates teams and multi-stakeholder dialogues with a diverse range of partners: from LGBTI communities worldwide, to nanotechnology scientists at Harvard, and more. Primarily his work consists of providing teams with formats to improve their capacity to make sense and skillfully act on complex challenges. His work is informed by complexity theories, a decade of experience in facilitation, and over five years as a university lecturer, having taught sustainability science and leadership to over 300 master students.
Marco likes to see himself as "bilingual" in his academic background, since he holds a MA in semiotics and social science in Italy and later pursued an MSc in sustainability science from MSLS. He is a trainer and active member of the "Art of Hosting" world-spanning community of practice of facilitators.
Marco believes in the power of dialogue to solve intractable challenges. In his current work as a consultant he facilitates teams through complex problems by using participatory approaches that have Art of Hosting as an operating system. He is passionate about helping diverse, purpose-driven teams: from co-designing and facilitating events for LGBTI activists to learn from each other and design skillful actions, to helping teams of researchers at Harvard craft a new research agenda, and more. After an education in both social sciences and sustainability studies, he served as a pedagogy faculty at MSLS (Master in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability) and is glad to come back to Karlskrona and contribute to building capacity with a purpose-driven collective.
Mary Alice is a Story Activist, working with story in service of positive systemic shift and for focusing collective intelligence on critical issues. In plain speak, she creates spaces where the right story can take people into a flourishing future. Taking back the power of your own story is a foundation for your personal journey of transformation and a keystone in answering the question: "What is mine to do?". She is an internationally recognised process host, building capacity for people to host and harvest the conversations that matter and the stories that surround them in the systems they live and work in. She has worked as a consultant all over the world and is now based in Columbus, Ohio, in the US. She is inspired to work with large and small systemic stories that hold keys for a more generative future. She hosts a Facebook page called The Story Dojo. Mary Alice is a sought after process host and teaches participatory process all over the world as an international steward of the Art of Hosting
Melinda believes in the power of communities and is passionate about helping them grow to contribute towards a sustainable society. Having worked in different sectors - from education to trade development - she has found that the closest topic to her heart is sustainability. She has co-founded Impact Hub Budapest, a global community based coworking office. She enjoys engaging with people in meaningful conversations about their environment and enabling them to recognise their own true power to make steps towards a more sustainable world. In the last 7 years she has been facilitating and designing such dialogues and processes with participatory methods such as Art of Hosting and Theory U.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Harvesting Team
Narayan is passionate about helping people and organizations to learn and transform in order to realize their highest potential for creating a positive impact in the world. He grew up in Brazil, but also calls many other places home. Sweden is one of them, as it is where he completed his MSc. in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability in 2013, and returned every year since then to be part of the Art of Hosting trainings in Kalskrona. His base for the last 7 years has been Asia, where he has worked hosting processes for learning and innovation for numerous organizations, from small NGOs to large corporations. His passion for transformative education also led him to be a UNESCO ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) Youth delegate in 2014, and lead the Knowmads Business School in Vietnam until 2017. He is currently based in Shanghai, working at the sustainability consulting agency Constellations International.
Narayan grew up in Brazil but sees himself as nomad, having experienced learning and working in several countries. With a MSc. in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability in Sweden, he is passionate about helping people and organizations to realize their potential for creating a positive impact in the world. During his year in Sweden, he experienced his 1st Art of Hosting training, which had a huge impact in his work. Since then he has dedicated his life to this field, and for the last years he hosted processes for numerous organizations around the world, from small NGOs to corporations such as Nike and Mercedes-Benz. Narayan is also passionate about transformative education. That led him to be a UNESCO ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) Youth delegate in 2014, and work for the Knowmads Business School in Hanoi, Vietnam. He has been based in Asia for most of the past 5 years, but this will be the 6th time in a row he will join the AoH training in Karlskrona, a place he is glad to call one of his homes.
Phil Cass, PhD just completed 16.5 years as the CEO of the Columbus Medical Association and Affiliates, 12.5 years as President of the Franklin County Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board and before that 5 years as the CEO of Southeast, Inc., a mental health services provider. He is now affiliated with the TPL Group, Inc. where he provides strategic consultation, process design and facilitation as well as coaching, Phil's work is local, national and international. He holds a Bachelors Degree from Kenyon College in Biology, a Masters Degree from Fairfield University in Counseling and Guidance and a PhD from The Ohio State University in Counseling and Guidance. He lives with his wife Laura and is a proud father, step-father and Grandfather.
Priska (she/her) is based near Kassel in a project called Region in Change though will live in Amsterdam until February 2022.
Priska is passionate about systemic and nervous system oriented change-making towards sustainability and facilitation in this context. She sees herself as a lifelong learner in these fields. After her completed master's studies in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability, she will be doing an internship at the Presencing Insitute and mainly be working with the Bioregional Weaving Labs. Priska has a background in arts, philosophy, and deep ecology, and continues education in nervous systems based conflict transformation and a body-based trauma therapy approach called Somatic Experiencing.
Stephanie (she/her) is based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and currently working as a organiser within the climate movement in the Netherland, as well as engaging in a study to become a biographical practitioner, learning and practising how to create and hold space for individuals to explore meaningful current questions in their lives. She is a contributor with the Art of Hosting to the Youth Initiative Program, in Sweden. Her education has been a masters in Cultural Anthropology from Utrecht University, where she did research on food insecurity in the U.K. and a bachelors in Philosophy from the University of Glasgow.
Steve is a global nomad, often a Sacred Outsider, traveling the world, witnessing life's unfolding, asking questions, listening and sharing stories, offering himself and his gifts where he can contribute. But most of all, he is continually learning what it means to be fully human and how to be more present in all situations. Steve has worked for 35 years in American healthcare facilitating innovation, collaboration and change process, and developing high performing work teams. As a practitioner and steward of the Art of Hosting Conversations, he has a particular interest in frontier areas of the world and in helping to build capacity and supporting newer practitioners in their learning. That has led him to work for the last 6 years in China, India, Vietnam, Africa and Europe with individuals, organizations and communities, helping them find innovative solutions to their challenges.
After completing studies in Utrecht, California and the MSLS programme in Sweden in 2017, Stéphanie Heckman traded her native Dutch blonde dune coast for the wild cliffs of Northern Ireland. Combining her background in social psychology, art & design, and strategic sustainable leadership she now works internationally from her homebase in Belfast as a graphic recorder/facilitator and events producer. Her style as a visual facilitator is characterised by a sharp synthesis of the content as well as the atmosphere of a gathering, in striking visual landscapes that capture the essence of what took place in the room.
Tracy is guided by a passion for building individual and collective capacity for conscious leadership, deep connections and wise action. Through designing and hosting transformative learning experiences and strategic change initiatives, she illuminates connections between people, planet and new possibilities. Tracy is an Art of Hosting Steward and founder of Blue Heron Associates, an independent consultancy based in the US. In the ‘90's she co-founded and directed a sustainability education center based on permaculture, social entrepreneurship, nonviolence and community resilience, following a decade in environmental education & leadership development. From 2011 - 2015, Tracy was the Program Director of MSLS (Msc in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability) at BTH in Karlskrona and is grateful to be returning ‘home' to contribute for her 5th year on the AoH Karlskrona team.
Job Titles:
- Sustainability Strategist
Yannick is a sustainability strategist and systems change practitioner who designs and facilitates transformative learning experiences and collaborative change processes. He operates from a firm belief that the challenges we face as society are far too complex for any individual or organization to solve alone and therefore require radically different ways of working and being together. Yannick is currently part of the core team at the Master's in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability (MSLS) after graduating from the master's himself in 2017. Prior to that he co-led a multi-stakeholder change process aimed at exploring new forms of systems wide collaboration in order to make real progress with regards to the energy transition in the Netherlands. Yannick also holds a Master's of Arts in Intercultural Communication. He loves to listen for patterns, connect the seemingly unconnected, and build the relationships that serve as the social fabric for a resilient learning container.