Community calls to nourish the field of practitioners
It is with great warmth and gratitude that we invite you to join us on a journey with fellow practitioners. We explore the questions:
“How do we stay in practice together?
How do we grow as practitioners together?”
We want to strengthen each other as practitioners, by sharing our stories and journeys! There is a big welcome for your story or your listening!
You are welcome to join us
This is a cycle of online calls, with a monthly rhythm, on every first Monday of the month, since November 2020, at 19:00 CE(S)T. During each call, there will be a deeper dive into one key aspect of the Art of Hosting DNA, guided by a steward who holds that practice dearly.
Who is invited? The Art of Hosting community.
How to participate? If you would like to get reminders, you can sign up to the Art of Hosting List serve and events are also announced in the Art of Hosting Facebook page.
Framing for this cycle of calls: Dancing into the next phase
November 2020 – Our world is embraced in change, and we are dancing from one phase of our journey and into the next. As we dance, new patterns are forming and it feels good to honour the journey we have been on during the last 7 months of the Corona-calls. The learning from this time is helping inform our new patterns and we are deeply grateful to everybody who held the flame at the centre of helping those calls happen. Now we are experimenting with “What next?”
Recently on our sensing calls, we listened for what the needs of our practice community are. We wanted to find a clear purpose for the coming calls which would serve our learning and help us grow our capacity and capability as practitioners. We might be a community of practice, but in order to do the practice, we have to be practitioners. So – the purpose of these coming calls is to hear stories of how our practices are benign activated and used in our lives.
The practice and the practitioners
In this period of digital working, language feels more important to accurately communicate the subtleties of what we are doing. There is a lot in the subtlety of a word, and this is true for the subtle difference between practice and practitioner. We often use the beautiful term “Community of Practice”; A community of people who are giving life to a practice by their care and attention to it. However, those who activate the knowledge of the practice are the practitioners, and this subtle shift in language holds a powerful invitation for us all to step into the role of practitioners, a place beyond being the holders of the knowledge…. those who put the knowledge to work in the three-dimensional world- the place where communities and human beings live, where projects happen and life moves forwards.
Without the focus of being in the world and using our practice, we might be simply a community of “knowing stuff” or perhaps a community of passion, or a community of practices. Being a community of practitioners is activating our knowledge by using it where we discover invitation, in our lives and in our communities.
A simple design
We have found a simple design which we hope can provide the structure upon which different types of learning can be hung on our coming calls. There will be:
– Time to check-in as mates
– Time for a deeper dive into one of the key aspects of the AoH DNA, hopefully with the guidance of a steward, who holds that knowledge with dedication
– Then we will be in the practice of sharing our stories around where we are each practicing in our communities and workplaces, and where our Practices of AoH bring us strength and solidity as we stand in complexity.
– Time for resourcing the community (“Wanted Ads”)
– A check-out.
We hope that this simple flow will offer just enough structure to enable more self-organisation. We hope others can follow it and insert their topics, curiosities and flairs – and we offer this outline flow as a simple framework for us to journey with for some months to see if it serves us.
We would love the heartbeat of these calls to be continued in a participatory way, and for others to feel empowered to step in and be practitioners and host a call. The sign-up document will be shared through the Art of Hosting List serve and in the Art of Hosting Facebook group.
Some of the harvest
>>> HARVESTS AND VIDEO LINKS ARE SHARED HERE <<<
The previous series:
Community calls for sense-making around corona and beyond
A series of Art of Hosting community calls started in March 2020 and ended in September 2020. Mira Bangel reached out to the Art of Hosting community, inviting Art of Hosting practitioners to explore the current situation Corona invites us in and to do some sense making around the question:
“What is our role in this, what can we do and how can we be of service?”
Since then until June, online calls in English have happened twice a week always at the same time:
– Monday at 9am Madrid/Brussels time (Asia-friendly time)
– Thursday at 7pm Madrid/Brussels time (LA/US-friendly time)
The conversations gave rise to a wealth of written and visual harvest. Below is some of the visual harvest so you can get a sense.
“How do we stay in practice together?”