Workshops:
COOKING RESILIENCE (6 hours) – Sunday, March 27 and Monday, March 28
With Isabella Guerrini
– Findhorn Foundation & Ecovillage Scotland
This course is about how to make a consciousness living on Earth, doing what we love, creating, especially through living food, a pathway of life with mindfulness without exhausting our adrenal, and honouring the planet Earth.
This course will be a high vibe getaway where people will receive a healing therapeutic dose of what we need to up-level our health and life, by pursuing cooking passion and making an incredibly personal positive impact in our world.
By the end of the workshop, participants will confidently know how to make their own superfood meals and rejuvenate their unique body. The purpose is to learn how to be resilient, more flexible and fully aware of our body from the inside out.
Isabella Guerrini de Claire has a strong connection to plants and their usefulness: as food, medicine or inspiration for design – nature’s language, symbolism and elements.
Before discovering the healing pathway of food preparation, I worked extensively worldwide as advisor in circular economy for land sustainability development and as a landscape designer. I’m a management sustainability resource person for the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland. At the moment I’m designing a resilient food system for the local Scottish bioregion. I work also as workshop trainer with children and adults and as journalist, writer and author.
You can find more information about Isabella Guerrini and her work here:
Loving Living Food Aurora Sustainability – Linkedin – Ecopaesaggio
WORDS CAN CHANGE THE WAY WE EAT –
Writing workshop with Elise Matilde Lund
What if we had vegetables columns in the newspapers, agricultural reporters making headlines and food researchers visible in the public discussions on sustainable development for humans, animals and the soil’s health?
Join our writer’s workshop and learn how to make food readable and how words can change the way we eat. You will get a map and a compass to navigate in the landscape of genres and a toolkit for making complex food topics understandable for everyone.
Elise Matilde Lund, who writes about food production for newspapers and magazines, and works with food, agricultural and research communication at a science center in Norway.
Please bring a notebook or your computer. Let’s write about how it grows, how it tastes and how better food can make a better society.
WHAT IS FEEDING YOUR CHANGE? – The Art of Connection (Focus on human connection)
With Eike Schmidt 
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever does” –Margaret Mead
When we talk about change it is sometimes frustrating, overwhelming or just too big for one single human being. Luckily there are more. Human connection or feeling connected is one of the basic needs, as we are gregarious animals. Though this is in professional or university contexts often ignored. If we want to bring change into the world, if we want to change ourselves or if we just want to live a life filled with happiness, human connection can give us most of what we need.
In this workshop you are invited to further explore this topic together. We want to explore, how we can connect to other people in pretty simple ways. I will share my experiences and invite you to enrich the group with yours. This workshop will be both theory and practice. In the end my goal is to give you a little bit of an insight of how important human connection is in this world and (hopefully) a big feeling of connectedness.
What is feeding your change? – The Art of Connection (Focus on spiritual connection)
With Eike Schmidt
There are many dimensions of connection or feeling connected. You can connect to people, to nature, to yourself or to the universe. In this workshop I invite you to experience connection in a spiritual dimension and how this dimension can foster not only our own change, but also change our greater environment. You will learn two basic QiGong exercises that are quiet unifying, so we will definitely step into practice. Also we want to share our wisdom about our own practices and experiences. Don’t worry, there is no previous knowledge needed. Let’s see what happens, looking forward to seeing you!
My Name is Eike Niclas Schmidt. I am 26 years old and in the finish of environmental and sustainability studies, actually writing my thesis. Next to that I get trained as a QiGong-teacher. I work with the Art of Hosting practice and Theory U a lot. As I studied almost four years of environmental studies I realized pretty quickly that the world needs a shift in awareness, we need a cultural and spiritual evolution. This is a huge topic, sometimes too huge to grasp, but I see my own role in this evolution in giving my gift to the world. I love to see people bloom, to see eyes gleam and people shine. I found this happens, when people feel connected, to other beings, to nature, to themselves, to their purpose or to the universe. So that’s what I dedicate my life to: Connectedness.
WHAT’S UP IN THE SKY?
What does this mean to all the beings in Earth?
With Kerstin Hemlin (max 20 people)
We will put our interest in the planets and the stars surrounding us. How can we connect our microcosmos to the macro cosmos? Why is it that there’s different calendars for planting in the garden depending on the planets and stars?
Kerstin has deep knowledge in these subjects and will offer us an overview to clarify concepts and gain a better undertstanding about our relationship to the sky.
For those who want to go deeper into the theme, she will give the possibility to prolong the workshop after the first 1,5 hours.
DANCE WORKSHOP
With Jaynese Poole
Jaynese Poole from South Central, Los Angeles, has been an intern at Street Poets Inc. for over 3 years, performing spoken word and holding safe spaces for youth in schools and juvenile probation camps throughout Los Angeles County and beyond.
She is currently a fellow of OutSet, the Young Filmmakers Project from LA LGBT Center and Outfest, a filmmaking workshop for LGBTQ young people between the ages of 16-24. She is a member of Luminary Tribe, a collective of artist who is very passionate about uplifting the community through Hip-Hop, dance and other art forms. She is a volunteer for a nonprofit called Youth Mentoring, empowering at-risk youth by matching them with caring and skilled mentors who see their unique gifts and help them achieve their life goals.
She will give a workshop on old school hip hop and party dances.
COME DANCE WITH JOJO! – Introduction to Waacking
With Johanne Saintelus
This workshop will teach the basics of waacking, a dance style based from the US inspired by disco, funk and hip-hop. Everyone from beginners to advanced dancers can come join me! Bring your dance shoes and a fun attitude!
STREET POETS – WORDS AS MEDICINE
With Art Quiros and Francisco Escamilla
Join us for a writing workshop where we explore the power of personal and communal healing through the language of poetry and the practice of storytelling.
Art Quiros, Youth Outreach Coordinator & Recording Studio Supervisor
Arturo was born and raised in the city of Los Angeles. After falling in love with Hip Hop, Arturo “Art” Quiros also fell in love with rhyming and free styling. His lyrics often described being raised by hardworking low income parents who migrated from Central America striving for a better life. Seeking initiation but lacking the presence of mentors in his youth, Art looked to the streets to fill the voids that felt empty in his life at an early age. Art began to walk a path often glorified by the media, that continued to influence and fuel fear and violence in his community. Losing peers and friends in his upbringing, Art was escorted down a path often described as the school to prison pipeline. Through his poetry and music, Art gives voice to a story, similar to countless individuals, who like him fell through the cracks of the flawed public school and justice system. Learning to walk with what he carries, Art found ways to utilize his love for words to share his story and to invite folks to do the same.
Frank Escamilla, Teaching Artist
Known in the streets and open-mic venues of Los Angeles as “Bus Stop Prophet” for his propensity to bust rhymes in unexpected places, Frank has been deeply engaged in creative peace-making work for over 15 years, both here in LA, and as far away as South Africa. A gifted poet, spoken word-artist, open-mic host, community-builder and teacher, Frank first connected with Street Poets in 2013 and has been working with us ever since. In his capacity as an SP teaching artist, Frank facilitates writing workshops for everyone from Compton elementary school 5th graders to formerly incarcerated adults at Homeboy Industries. In any setting, his passion for the healing power of poetry is truly infectious.
Street Poets Inc.
Street Poets Inc., is a non-propit organization that uses poetry and a tool for transformation. Street Poets Inc’ mission is to inspire, empower and create.
ANNA’S KITCHENTABLE: Once upon an onion (Sunday and Monday max 11 people)
With our incredible chef Anna Wynant
Everything you’ve always wanted to know about oniions, sage, nettles, vegan cooking for conferences, secret love affairs between apples and roses, perfect tomato sauces, challenging taste buds and serving consciousness with golden teaspoons.
With love & sea salt.
Anna
ANNA’S KITCHENTABLE: Bake it till you make it
Revealing some of the magical secrets and mysteries of the wonderful world of bread baking. The alchemy of mixing water and flour, stretching gluten, flying dough and playing with fire. A work out guaranteed.
With love & sea salt
Anna
Anna, 25, loves cutting apples, apple pies with ice-cream, talking to rocks, chocolate with pink pepper, Sunday morning pyjama dancing, red wine & cheese plates.
HARVEST WORKSHOP IF
with Maíra Rahme
When change makers gather and engage in dialogue, is is normal for individuals to have a fantastic experience and gain many insights. But if we want to move things forward in a collective, individual insights are not enough: the group needs some sort of mechanism to know what it knows. Until the group knows what it knows, it has no intelligence of it’s own. Harvesting is a way of gathering and making sense and making meaning out of the collective intelligence. It is about capturing insights and feeding it back to the group, to help the whole system stay informed about the process and to create value and make the conversations more useful.
In this workshop we will explore the basics of harvesting, from theory to different forms of harvest outputs, as well as coaching the teams who will be holding the morning Meta Harvest throughout Initiative Forum.
Maíra is interested in anything that conveys beauty, meaning and truth into this world. In her early twenties she attended the International Youth Initiative Program (YIP) in Sweden, where she experienced the new paradigms of human conviviality and learned about the challenges we face today. Since then, she has devoted her work with visual design and visual thinking to help individuals and organizations find and express their authentic purpose, operate from a higher level of intentionality and generate sustainable value for society and the planet. She holds a BA in Visual Design (ESPM Brazil) and a M.Sc. in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability (BTH Sweden).
EXPLORING THE MAGIC OF BEES
With Julie Armstrong
Small and vital, bees work together for the good of the whole ecosystem. Let’s join them!
What is your connection to honeybees? Come and explore insights from biodynamic beekeepers about how vital the bees are for “more than honey, more than food!”
Through drawing and artistic activities we will deepen our connection with the bees.
Are the bees calling to you?
Julie Armstrong
A return visit to the Findhorn Foundation in 2013 awoke in me the urgency of the Global Bee Crisis and ‘ACT for Bees’ was created that summer after realising there was a clear lack of bees in Australia. http://actforbees.org
We are raising awareness of the importance of healthy bees for the sustainability of life.
Important threads weaving through my life have been working with textiles as a Handwork Teacher in a range of Steiner Schools in Australia and sharing nature with children in Earth Education programs. More recently I have been using dowsing as a tool to harmonise places of discord in the land and also to heal houses. I’m very much looking forward to meeting young ‘change makers’ and sharing resources, networks and ideas for creating harmony for all life.
DYYING WITH PLANTS
With Rosie Armstrong
Dyeing wool and cotton with plants is such an explorative craft. Natural dyeing as it is known is a unpredictable and surprising way to make colour. Did you know you can get a pale pink from avocado skins? And a beautiful green from red onion skins? Come to this workshop and we’ll explore the colours of plants and vegetables around us.
CO-CREATING A FIREPLACE
With Arvid Jansen
My intention is to get participants more connected with each other. We will do this through creating a Fireplace together outside where we can gather around. I want to bring back the Fireplace and how it was used long before our time – a space where everybody can listen and share their stories. Together we will make benches of pallets, creating a warm circle where there is space for conversation.
What is eating your food without having a nice place to share your meal?
THE MYSTERY OF APPLE DIVERSITY AND ITS HIDDEN FACES – How to become friends with an apple tree.
With Marc Lateur
By having this interaction with young people my wish is to share a larger awarenes on the discovery of
- to what we participate when we buy and eat an apple from a common supermarket
- how large the diversity of the apple kingdom is, coming from a very old history betweem human and apple trees
- how each of us can become friends with an apple tree, experience joy and participate in safegarding the rich diversity of old varieties
Practically, the introduction workshop will let discover some basic botanical feature on the metamorphose of a flower bud to an apple ready to harvest and to eat. The threat of the disappearing of the rich apple diversity will be talked about and practical approaches will be presented: the different ways to consume apples, how to raise, graft, plant and educate an apple tree in a simple garden. A practical walk between apple trees of the garden around “Vita Hus” will help to understand basic principles on how to manage and prune apple trees.
VEGAN CREATIVITY
With James Muschler from Moon Hooch
In this workshop, James will prepare a vegan meal using wholesome and fresh ingredients. He will talk about his experiences with food and cooking on the road and share some ideas about the future of food and cooking, the science of cooking, and of being creative in the kitchen.
(UN)SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE
With Pieter Ploeg
This workshop builds on the lecture from Sunday morning. We will be able to dive into questions, clarifications, underlying themes and issues that came up for you in the morning. If there is time left we can look at the questions “What is sustainable agriculture?” and “How can I contribute concretely through my choices and actions?”.
MATBYGGET – Fermenting veggies together.
We’re not so good at speaking about ourselves.
But we love to put edible things in jars.
That’s what it’s about.
INTRODUCTION INTO CRADLE TO CRADLE
With Malte Vetter
Cradle to Cradle is a concept to design products for closed loops. If the concept would be fully implemented, there would be no waste anymore, products who are not needed anymore will be the ressource for new products. Other aspects of the concept are healty material use, sustainable production, renewable energy use and social fairness. How does that work? How good does it work already? You will find out and have the opportunity to ask questions and discuss.
TRICKSTER TREASURES
With Ruben Wätte and Lucas Grind
What kind of special abilities and traits might be useful to a maker of change today?
How can we nurture and cultivate those (often hidden) aspects of ourselves and how can we establish a culture in which those aspects can be manifested, trusted and supported?
Together with you, we wish to explore the many possibilities of the Trickster archetype.
We want to invite participants to a treasure hunt that will take place within our personal inner landscapes as well as in the outer landscape that we all share. On our way we might find gems that can be of great use for our future work as agents for change, or we might find disturbing insights that make us lose track of what we used to consider as good or bad. We might also end up empty handed, with nothing but scraped knees and bruised egos, but that is a risk we are willing to take and we hereby invite you to take it with us.
Please join us with a childish sense of curiosity, wonder and craving for sweets!
Ruben Wätte
I am an artist mainly interested in creating understanding and change – within myself as well as within the world I live – thru creating, exploring and altering relations and situations.
I am longing (and always striving) to become whole. My greatest personal fears include; having a full time job that I don’t like, being disconnected (psychologically and socially, more than digitally) and being overwhelmed by fears that separates me from the world. I believe that humility is the only cure from the disease of toxic shame and that is probably the most current lesson my life is trying to teach me.
Lucas Grind
I am a Kaospilot working with change processes and leadership, while simultaneously expressing the artist in me through video and social sculptures. I wish to disappear into the world of myths, magic and poetry to re-enchant my world. I wish to challenge todays myths about our separation from nature, human centrality and domination over other species and the myth of progress. One of my greatest fears is stepping into the dark unknown, not knowing what to do next – that’s why I am trying to expose myself for those situations over and over again until being in the dark is no longer fearful…
Sfäriska Skolan
The Spherical School is an artistic platform for participatory action learning. The spine of our work is the monthly Open Spheres that we (Ruben and Lucas) host together with various guests that we invite to work with us and the participants. The underlying theme of this ongoing collaborative research is that we explore diffirent aspects of the wild, within us, between us and far far away from us. Our main goal is to create an athmosphere that feels safe enough for all of us to show up as who we really are and to evolve from there.
SOCIAL CHANGE AND EURYTHMY
With Nicholas White
How a handful of salt broke the might of the British Empire.
Gandhi and the Salt Satyagraha: From the 12th of March till the 6th of April 1930 Gandhi walked across part of India,with the purpose of harvesting salt from the Ocean – thus breaking British law. This workshop offers the opportunity to know Gandhi better through looking at the idea of Satyagraha, this event and his words, in Eurythmy.
Nicholas White
I grew up in South Africa under apartheid and its birth into democracy, and lived for eight years in Switzerland where I studied eurythmy. I have an interesting in art as a means to bring consciousness the current world events, and great individuals who have made difference in the world.
Currently living and working as a Steiner school teacher in Devon, England.