ART OF HOSTING
THE NETHERLANDS
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
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:
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ready to step into their passionate & edgy work holding the seed of a new idea for innovation;
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eager to bring new life to a project, initiative or vision and are looking for ways to do it collaboratively;
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new, emerging leaders and are asking HOW to make inclusive decisions, create a horizontal work culture;
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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:
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Engage in hands-on, practice based training during these days.
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Design collaborative initiatives and projects for teams, groups, communities.
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Host meaningful conversations and harvest actionable insights.
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Apply Art of Participatory Leadership methods to your projects and challenges (such as World Cafe, Open Space Technology, Circle Practice… )
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Leverage models for working with complexity, conflict and emergence.
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Translate your ideas and seeds of innovation into experiments and initiatives.
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Introduce the benefits of participatory leadership to your own field.
ECONOMY PRINCIPLES
The fees for our trainings allow us to cover each person’s attendance and includes materials, location rent, administration, team travel and accommodation costs as well as basic fees for the hosting team. A good number of participation and any extra support received will allow us to enable a few participants who cannot afford the regular fee to attend, as well as pay the hosting team a more sustainable remuneration for their work. Therefore, if you’re coming from an organisation with a training budget or an individual with a salary and/or abundance to participate, please know that you are enabling 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.
Within this economy, we will do our best to offer a number of scholarships to some young activists, changemakers, persons from marginalised backgrounds or those who would otherwise find it difficult to join, so please be mindful when applying.
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.
The Art of Hosting (Participatory Leadership) offers the awareness and practices necessary to face complexity as we transition between paradigms and collaboratively create new ways of organising towards new regenerative futures.
We live in times of multi-level, interconnected crisis. We are experiencing these crisis both at local & global levels due to unsustainable practices that lead to loss of biodiversity and ecological degradation. Each of us is impacted, whether we face changes in our organisations, families or communities.
The status quo is no longer an option. This leads to climate denial, continuation of extraction and colonial practices, and ‘hero’ style leadership that does not serve the times we are living.
This level of complexity is inviting each of us to cultivate:
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new ways of perceiving that enables us to operate from a new worldview;
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new skills that allows us to grow into relating and connecting differently;
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new collaborative approaches where solutions are discovered through trans-disciplinary and collective means.
Many of us are already involved in the search of discovering regenerative futures.
We know that the urgency and imperative we are experiencing in our different contexts, is inviting us to embrace the complexity in these challenges, learn and move to new levels of living and working.
SOME OF THE QUESTIONS WE EXPLORE ARE:
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How do we become aware that our current worldview might be what is blocking us and how do we learn a new one?
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How do we move beyond the ‘hero’ image of a leader and the individualism that many of us live in?
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How do we learn collaborative skills such as listening, sensing, discerning?
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How do we create the conditions for more participative societies to arise?
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
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Business / Corporate / Government: €1750 + VAT
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NGO, Small enterprises (<10 employees), University: €1450 + VAT
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Independent participants €1150 + VAT
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Special discount for 3+ people from the same organization
(10% off on all 3 tickets) -
Limited scholarships upon request
The participation fee includes:
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3 days of training
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a (digital) Art of Hosting Workbook to support your continued learning
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Daily lunch and dinners, fairly sourced coffee and tea, fresh fruit / snacks
The participation fee does not include accommodation.