April 9-11, 2025

How can practicing The Art of Hosting support us in creating thriving futures for all? How can we engage together to create a thriving estuary landscape? How do we lead and work collaboratively to find solutions to complex issues?

This experiential, hands-on training will be tailored to support members of the Lake Superior Headwaters Sustainability Partnership in developing skills for working collaboratively together and with the community. These skills will have broad applicability within the partnership and work within your agency or organization.

This is a leadership capacity-building retreat to learn, reflect, practice, and plan how to integrate a more collaborative, participatory approach in your work and community. If you are working with others in these times of rapid change, being able to skillfully use approaches for collaboration is essential!

What To Expect

Each day will be a full work day. You may sign up for a role that could require some evening preparation, so plan for at least 1 evening session as well.

Snacks, beverages, and lunch will be provided each day. In order to be kind to the environment, we suggest bringing your own water bottle and a travel mug for warm beverages if you choose.

This is a casual, experiential, engaging experience with a lot of movement. Dress casually and bring a journal to take notes.

Your registration includes a workbook (pdf) that is an invaluable resource for your ongoing work!

Come prepared to participate all day every day! Plan to arrive on time and stay the entire 3 days.

This isn’t the kind of training where you can come and go - it requires you to fully step in.

This training is experiential - you will have opportunities to practice “hosting” various participatory processes and methodologies, through the lens of the invitation question. The training will support you to host more effective, purposeful meetings, and apply collective intelligence in complex systems. The learning includes:

Experience simple, powerful tools for collaboration such as: Circle, World Café, Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, Designing for Wiser Action, Collective Story Harvesting, and more.
Learn models and frameworks that are useful for navigating complexity, designing and hosting (facilitating) engaging meetings, processes, and organizations.
The Art of Harvesting - how to capture and make sense of meetings and conversations for clarity, learning, growth, and wise action using tools like visual graphics, photography, writing, and synthesis.
Apply what you are learning directly to the change projects that are important to you and your community or organization.
Join a diverse and supportive global community of practitioners!