My friend Robert Oetjen was a key member of our hosting team at Altmoisa. He brings a lovely capacity to the work, being the head of an environmental learning centre in southern Estonia, he understands the deep connection between human and world, and is a practitioner of the most ancient arts of human kind: tracking and fire building. He is a man who is a beautiful learner from his environment. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, he moved here in the early 1990s as a Peace Corps worker, teaching English in the days in which Estonia was hungry to claim …
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This group we are working with in Estonia is cracking a lovely design for a six month learning journey around hosting, harvesting and participatory leadership. They began in September with a little Art of Hosting retreat, are together now in the Art of Participatory Leadership and in February they will gather one more time. In between workshops, they are working on projects in their organizations and communities, deep in real practice and real life. As a result they have much to share with one another and it is only up to Toke and I as teachers to offer a few …
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Toke and I along with our Estonian colleagues, Piret, Robert and Ivika, began our three day participatory leadershipworkshop today. We were join at Altmoisa by 20 young-ish leaders who have been training together since the summer in the Art of Hosting and who have been using participatory meeting methodologies in the places of work. Tis workshop is intended to take the exploration of those practices deeper, and extend the learning that comes from hosting into the realms of leadership. This is the first Art of Hosting workshop I have done in a language different from mine. Although most participants speak …
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Leaving Tallinn this afternoon, we headed for Estonia’s west coast to a retreat centre on the edge of the Matsalu Nature Preserve. This is a lovely house, built by German Churches originally for young people to use for education, but it hosts conferences and nature retreats now and is a popular spot with birders who come in the fall and spring to watch the migrations along the Baltic flyway. We’re very close to the seashore here. Estonia reminds me a lot of southern Ontario, even though we’re at 58 degrees north, almost as far north as the Yukon border. The …