Leading Change:
Building Our Collective Capacity
Our world needs committed leaders who are equipped to navigate uncertainty and complexity, facilitate connection, and produce powerful results, even in the face of significant challenges.
The Leading Change intensive seeks to answer this call by training participants to facilitate meaningful and impactful collective interventions, fostering a network of resilient, healthy, and socially-just businesses, communities, and systems.
Program
Have you ever walked away from a meeting or conference where you knew so much more was possible, so you felt dissatisfied with the results? Were you wishing for more connection, exchange or the earnest exploration of joining forces for collective impact? We spend so much of our time gathered together in meetings and conferences where we confirm what we already know, rather than explore possibilities. Skilled facilitation is the art of making that time together as productive and meaningful as possible.
During the Leading Change intensive, participants cultivate a set of facilitation skills that provide a solid foundation for leading change in diverse communities and systems. The team guides participants through a process of learning by doing, by inviting attendees to exchange and explore their unique experiences, challenges, and wisdom in a collaborative, participatory learning environment. Participants have an opportunity to practice the tools in real-time, receiving live feedback and coaching on their facilitation approach. Participants can expect to form relationships with other change-makers from their community and beyond, who seek to bring about meaningful action. Attendees emerge from the intensive with a possibility for collaboration on future projects, and an ongoing learning community.
Leadership
The Leading Change team brings together four streams of learning and practice, a powerhouse of approaches to navigating the complexity that our human systems present:
The Art of Hosting and Harvesting Conversations that Matter – combined 13 years of practice.
Mobius Method embodiment + reflection – 12 years of practice.
Mindfulness – over two decades of combined practice.
Systems Thinking – three decades of combined practice.
Theory U
Mindfulness
Open Space Technology
Systems Thinking
World Cafe
Divergence Convergence
Proaction Cafe
Creative Movement
Dana Pearlman
Anamaria Aristizabal
Amelia Terrapin
Laura Yates
Partners
Please reach out if you are ready to have meaningful and impactful meetings that unearth what is most important, and lead you towards solutions even when things are uncertain and complex. Leaders who can effectively host difficult conversations achieve what seems impossible: to increase understanding of each other amidst different points of view and co-create, in spite of divergent agendas.
Participant Experiences
I found Leading Change to be an excellent experience, both personally and professionally. The training was a wonderfully-blended experience of practical skills-building and deep personal growth. Through the workshop, I came to better understand my perspective and personal motivations, as well as build a deeper confidence in my skills and the value of my work. The visioning exercises we learned have already been useful in both conversations with colleagues, as well as within current work projects. I was also able to add more interactive and participatory elements to large community event, the Indianapolis Sustainability Summit, which allowed for it to be more fruitful for everyone involved – a direct benefit of the facilitation training!
We made the Summit more participatory by using some of the techniques learned during the Leading Change workshop. The summit would have likely followed a more typical speaker/panel style for all sessions. Over 300 people attended the event, with approximately half participating specifically in the workshops that were participatory/cafe style activities. The workshops were also the launch of our public input period for the City’s first Sustainability and Resilience Action Plan, and helped set a positive and engaging tone as we continue to gather input over the next few months. The input from summit attendees will help critically shape our sustainability plan by ensuring it is based on community needs and priorities. Given how well it went we plan to continue to use participatory engagement in future events.
More testimonials from Leading Change Participants...
“I anticipated that this training would help me find a graceful way to transition out of my current work setting. Instead, I found renewed reasons to stay at it and ways to engage others around me, with similar frustrations, to start working toward meaningful change.”
Dana Pearlman
Dana uses powerful questions to unearth wisdom at the individual, team, organizational and community and systemic levels. Her intent is to steward a world that is more whole, interconnected and in alignment with our true selves for wiser + conscious impact. Her sweet spot is at the intersection of authentic leadership, tapping into collective wisdom, and cultivating communities of practice in order to collectively transform failing systems in our world.
Dana has designed and facilitated sessions for the State of Vermont, The Ministry of Education of Tanzania, Accenture Tech Vision Advisory Board, Zoomdata, Swissnex, Public Health Institute’s Population Health Innovation Lab, GlobeMed, Dalai Lama Fellows, California Association of Hospitals and Health Services, Sonoma Co. Sustainability and Energy Dep., Impact HUBs, Stanford Leadership Experiment, CIIS, Sonoma State U’s CORE Leadership, Sustainability Learning Centre, BTH in Sweden: Masters in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability.
Dana is lead facilitator for Mycelium. She designed and delivered the inaugural Bold Academy. She hosts intensives in The Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter and leads workshops in Authentic Leadership from her co-created research and published: The Lotus: A practice guide for Authentic Leadership towards Sustainability. Dana is Advisor to the SelfDesign Institute, Curriculum Advisor to Dalai Lama Fellows, Founding Board Member for The Base Camp and mentor for HIVE Global Leaders Program. Dana is catalyzing and accelerating world-changing leadership necessary to meet the profound challenges of the 21st century.
“Dana is a tremendous force who excels in connecting others more deeply to themselves and to others. She has been an invaluable advisor, mentor and colleague over the past few years. Her insights into and support with the Dalai Lama Fellows’ Ethical Leadership curriculum have been deeply meaningful. Dana can distill her wisdom nonverbally and briefly, and also in great detail–we are lucky to be working with her.”
Anamaria Aristizabal
Anamaria sows the seeds of inspiration, encouraging others to own their power, and to create and lead in a way that transforms and responds to what the world needs. She works with New Ventures West, a world class coaching school, as a coach and coach trainer. She is a leadership trainer at George Washington University’s Center for Public Excellence and at Byron Fellowship, both leadership development initiatives for change agents from around the world. She is an Art of Hosting practitioner and trainer, with extensive experience designing and facilitating powerful learning journeys for different groups.
As a social innovator, she co-founded Aldeafeliz ecovillage in 2006 near Bogota Colombia, a community whose purpose is to be a demonstration center for resilience and sustainability. For 11 years a group of 25 adults and 10 children have been experimenting with various social and ecological technologies, including sociocracy, non violent communication, and permaculture, aspiring to live harmoniously with each other and with the land they are stewards of. Anamaria a member of various organizations that aim for personal, organizational and societal transformation. She is chair of the Colombian chapter of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) dedicated to offering learning circles that foster systems thinking. Also founding member and executive board member of the Foundation for Peace and Reconciliation, and a member of the ImpactHUB Bogotá.
Prior to her coaching and facilitation career, Anamaria worked as a consultant for McKinsey, the World Bank, CAF- Development Bank of Latin America, and various government entities in Colombia. Anamaria has an MBA and a Masters in Environmental Management from Yale University and a BA in Biology from Mount Holyoke College. Anamaria is based in Bogotá, Colombia, and recently published her first book in her country (October 2016), translated as “Life Re-Vision: A Guide to Find your Path when you Lost Your Way; A Journey to Rediscover your Essence, Reinvent Yourself, and Renew your Future Vision”.
Amelia Terrapin
She founded Mobius to use movement as a powerful learning tool for groups that range from schoolchildren and at-risk teens to engineers and business executives. Through movement, participants gain a deep understanding of complex ideas, build trust, and discover new ways to collaborate effectively. She has spent 12 years refining the method into a useful human technology that can be used in a variety of settings.
Her approach has been presented at the Engineers Without Borders Sustainable Resources Conference, the Applied Improvisation Network Conference, and Bioneers by the Bay. Clients have included the Byron Fellowship Educational Foundation, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, the North Dakota STEM Network, the Teton Science Schools in Wyoming, the Rainbow Community School in North Carolina, and MetaIntegral Associates.
Laura Yates
Laura currently serves as Program Coordinator for the Byron Fellowship Educational Foundation, where she plans a week-long intensive for emerging leaders, social entrepreneurs, and changemakers. Laura also manages relationships with the Byron Alumni network and organizational partners, working with the mentor team and educational partners to develop trainings and content to support Byron Fellows well beyond their week on-site.
Laura also serves as Project Manager for the Breaking Through Gridlock initiative, which supports people in having difficult, values-laden conversations in pursuit of a better world. As project manager for the educational initiative, Laura delivers Breaking Through Gridlock workshops, develops curriculum resources to support educators in incorporating the BTG methodology in their classes, and interfaces with faculty partners.
Laura graduated from Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs in 2016 with a Master of Science in Environmental Sciences (MSES) and a Master of Public Affairs (MPA), concentrating in Sustainable Development and Policy Analysis. Laura holds a BS in Economics and a secondary major in Earth, Environment and Global Sustainability from Bentley University, where her research covered cross-cultural communication, environmental economics, and sustainability in business.
From 2014 to 2017, Laura lived in a self-designed, self-built tiny house, as an experiment in sustainable, values-driven living and design (hear the story from Laura’s 2015 TEDx talk).
Clients, Partners,
& Affiliations
