Art of HOSTING Training | Art of Hosting NL

U P C O M I N G T R A I N I N G S

Art of Hosting

Societal Transformations
Training

1-3 December, 2026
@de Poort, Groesbeek

How can we practice what we most care about now?

The Art of Hosting / Participatory Leadership is a response to our global complexity, at a time when institutions and democracies themselves are failing to address the increasing chaos and disruption in our world. It is a testing ground for those seeking to find new effective and healthy patterns for organising, innovating and interacting to create new forms that serve us all better.

The annual training that we have been hosting in the Netherlands since many years, is fully participatory to allow participants to experience methods, models and practices.

WHO IS THIS FOR?

This training is for people who are:

ready to step into their passionate & edgy work holding the seed of a new idea for innovation;
eager to bring new life to a project, initiative or vision and are looking for ways to do it collaboratively;
new, emerging leaders and are asking HOW to make inclusive decisions, create a horizontal work culture;
already hosting emerging movements, networks or systemic change initiatives and asking how to deepen them, make them sustainable or scale them up.

WE INVITE YOU!

Social entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, professionals, decision-makers and teams, managers within municipalities, NGO and development workers, community leaders and program managers, corporate innovators and consultants, convenors of cross-sector dialogues. educators, creative souls & artists.

It will be an opportunity to learn and connect with others who are practicing participation, leading change, innovation and system transformation in The Netherlands, Europe and worldwide.

WHAT WILL YOU LEARN?

Together we will explore new perspectives, tools and practical ways of engaging a diverse group of people to discover new ideas and solutions by working generatively with complexity, conflict and emergence.

Specifically you will learn how to:

Engage in hands-on, practice based training during these days.
Design collaborative initiatives and projects for teams, groups, communities.
Host meaningful conversations and harvest actionable insights.
Apply Art of Participatory Leadership methods to your projects and challenges (such as World Cafe, Open Space Technology, Circle Practice… )
Leverage models for working with complexity, conflict and emergence.
Translate your ideas and seeds of innovation into experiments and initiatives.
Introduce the benefits of participatory leadership to your own field.

RESERVE YOUR SPOT

LOCATION:

All our trainings are residential. We encourage all participants to stay in the venue where the training will take place: De Poort - Groesbeek, Netherlands).

The trainings are hands on and experiential and training days are long. Evenings are reserved for coaching and individual / group preparations for the upcoming days (and also sometimes a collective celebration!)

De Poort is a beautifully designed training location, surrounded by woods and nature. They offer rooms at various prices and also camping.

PARTICIPATION FEE

EARLY BIRD OFFER (Valid till September 7th)

Business / Corporate / Government - Early Bird: € 1600 (instead of 1750) + VAT
NGO, Small enterprises (<10 employees), University - Early Bird: €1300 (instead of 1450) + VAT
Independent participants - Early Bird: € 950 (instead of 1150) + VAT
Special discount for 3+ people from the same organization (10% off on all 3 tickets)
Limited scholarships upon request

The participation fee includes:

3 days of training
a (digital) Art of Hosting Workbook to support your continued learning
Daily lunch and dinners, fairly sourced coffee and tea, fresh fruit / snacks

The participation fee does not include accommodation.

These are times when we are invited to wake up to what we most care about and act on this. Care comes from the old English word Caru, which originally meant “sorrow, anxiety, grief”. What becomes possible if we perceive our shifting world order, the earth heating up, our daily disorientation as invitations to access what we most care about and not crises. The word Krisis, in Greek primarily meaning to discern in order to decide, offers us another reframe. Yet what can help us to practically shift from being overwhelmed with uncertainty to staying attuned to what we care about enough to transform our grief and sorrow into decisive stances?

"Very great changes start from very small conversations, held among people who care"
- Margaret J. Wheatley -

"We need to move from competitive urgency to collective care. Urgency is a tool of oppression; deep, intentional care is how we build the future."
- Adrienne Maree Brown -

Meaningful conversations become arks, safe enough spaces, where we can turn inwards and to others, to inquire, share stories, imagine forward. These ‘held spaces’ offer us just enough room to meet our own limiting beliefs, question our lenses of how life works, meet aspects that no longer serve, and embrace dreams that are just breaking to the surface. If we see meaningful conversations as carriers forward, then our care becomes a navigational tool that can help us to steer through uncharted waters.

Hosting spaces where diversity can actually go to work is an active, often challenging choice. It requires us to realise that accessing our care is also accessing our agency. When we choose to lean into our courage - especially when encountering others who hold deeply diverse, sometimes conflicting perspectives - we open the possibility for an incredibly transformative power to be released. This is an invitation to practice moving from isolation toward a messy, authentic sense of belonging. Together, we can begin to challenge modernity’s illusion of fragmentation. We invite you to explore with us what becomes possible when we open ourselves to deeper relationships. To channel intelligence that goes beyond the dominant, rational logic. Could we learn to listen to the 'more-than-human' world, notice our body wisdom, learn the pattern language, trust our inner knowing and truly feel one another? This is an invitation to practice becoming wise together.

We invite you to the Art of Hosting and Harvesting Meaningful Conversations in the Netherlands to learn how to create the conditions for care, clarity and courage to emerge and go to work. Over three days, you will experience meaningful conversations, explore living systems frameworks and step into practicing to embody what you are learning. You will learn: what are the conditions that can support others to become clear, learn and act together? 'What becomes possible when we care enough to step into the practice of shaping the future we want? And ultimately “How can we practice what we most care about now?”

"We are searching for a world where we can be human without permission. To get there, we must practice the messy, uncomfortable art of becoming human to one another."

- Cherríe Moraga -
This Bridge Called My Back

The challenges we face today cannot be met with the same ways of seeing that created them. Perhaps the art of meaningful conversations is ultimately the art of cultivating possibility. When we slow down enough to truly listen—to ourselves, to one another and to the living systems we are part of—we create space for something genuinely new to emerge. Instead of merely solving problems from yesterday's thinking, we begin to co-create futures that are rooted in care, courage and imagination.

RESERVE YOUR SPOT

ECONOMY PRINCIPLES

We will do our best to offer a number of partial scholarships to some young activists, changemakers, persons from marginalised backgrounds or those who would otherwise find it difficult to join.

If you are in a position where you can add a donation to your training fee, this will be fully allocated to these scholarship funds.

If you wish to join us and cannot afford to pay the full training fee, please reach out to aohnetherlands@gmail.com and we will see if there is a way for us to offer you a partial scholarship.