3-5 July 2025 in Drongen (Belgium)

You are warmly invited to join us for a 3-day immersive training in the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter. Throughout the training, you will learn and practice participatory leadership skills to foster engagement, collaboration and impact. You can immediately apply these skills to the issues alive in your own contexts. Because meaningful conversations begin with a powerful question, our training will also be guided by a question, creating focus and purpose for our time together.

Framing the calling question for this training

We live in a time that can feel unsettling. Old certainties are rapidly falling apart and multiple narratives co-exist about how the future might look. Complex and contradictory emotions are simultaneously alive within us, and polarisation in society is intensifying. Many of us are grappling with uncertainty and asking: what is mine to do, and what is ours to do?

Yet this time also holds an invitation: to pause, reflect, and make clear choices about who we want to be as human beings and how we want to live together on – and with – the Earth now and into the future. It makes sense, then, before we move into action, to take the time to come to stillness and tap into our deepest longings. 

What do you most long to give to the world? Let’s sit together, listen deeply, share our lived stories and explore what they tell us about what we value and desire. Let’s hold space to deeply connect with ourselves, each other and the natural world we are part of. Let’s be curious about what grounded action arises from our being together. Chaos will be our friend on the journey, and we’ll get to appreciate its generative qualities, as well as its discomfort.

To lend coherence to our process, our conversations during this training will centre around this core question:

In these times of increasing chaos and complexity, what might emerge from our shared stillness and silence? 

You are warmly invited to join us for 3 days of co-creating a space where stillness can lead to clarity, connection can spark action, and shared wisdom can guide us towards a future that is conducive to life. We’ll learn and experience together how to host ourselves, host others and how to be hosted in conversations that matter. 

What is the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter? 

The Art of Hosting is an approach to life that scales up from the personal to the systemic through personal practice, dialogue, facilitation and co-creation to address complex challenges. It is a highly effective way of harnessing the collective wisdom and self-organising capacity of groups of any size. Based on the assumption that people give their energy and lend their resources to what matters to them – in work as in life – the Art of Hosting blends a suite of powerful conversational processes (such as Open Space Technology, World Café, Circle) to invite people to step in and engage with the challenges and opportunities facing them.

Groups and organisations using the Art of Hosting as a working practice report better decision-making, more efficient and effective capacity building and greater ability to quickly respond to opportunity, challenge and change. People who experience the Art of Hosting typically say that they walk away feeling more empowered and able to help guide the meetings and conversations they are part of to move towards more effective and desirable outcomes.

The Art of Hosting is more than a suite of methods, it is also a practice: it is an art to become skilful at helping ourselves and others work well together. We talk about hosting, because the practice gives attention and care to all aspects of people’s work together in a way that fosters conditions for creative and fruitful relationships. It includes the whole process: all the preparations before the participants come together, what happens while they are working together, and how the results of their conversation – the ‘harvest’ – support next steps that are coherent for their purpose and context.

The training

An Art of Hosting training is an action-based experience designed to set you on the path towards embodying the skills to host meaningful conversations. Over three days, you will be immersed in both the group’s process and your own learning – it can be quite intense! You will get to know theoretical models and engage in hands-on practice. You will be invited (and supported) to actively participate in hosting various processes. Our approach emphasises complex experiential learning, offering insights and techniques that you can work with right away in your own contexts. 

For whom

This training is for anyone who values collective inquiry and action – regardless of whether this is in a professional, personal or other context. Whether you are already leading group processes, or just sensing that more is possible in the collectives you are part of, you are welcome to join! 

Among those interested, we imagine people active in diverse fields: citizen and community-led initiatives, social entrepreneurship, organisational innovation, art, schools, multi-stakeholder dialogue facilitation, cooperatives, impact-driven businesses, environmental activism, parenting, health care, sociocultural organisations, municipalities and governments … the list is endless! 

What you will learn and practice