Integralead Immersion Weekend – Civil Action Network

A 3-day in person leadership development deep dive for changemakers.

May 30th – June 1st 2025 in Katowice, Poland

People who take responsibility for their civic initiative often experience immense pressure. Stepping up to shape the direction of a social change initiative can feel exposing – you’re holding lots of uncertainty so others don’t have to. The Integralead Immersion Weekend is designed to create a space where you can shed the load of your day to day engagement for a while, immerse yourself in a social context of peers from other initiatives, learn from each other aswell as our experienced trainers and experience different leadership styles first hand. You’ll return home with fresh perspectives on leadership, practical tools to try out and a load of new relationships you can lean on when the going gets hard.

Who is this for?

This training is for you if you recognize yourself in this description:

You are part of a civic initiative for the common good. You feel (co-)responsible for the success of your initiative. Often you find yourself reducing the complexity of the experience for others by bringing proposals, helping to structure the work, pointing out risks or asking people to uphold agreements. When your initiative is not doing well you are one of the people who are likely to lose sleep. At the same time you are unsure how much power to claim in your group. Ideally you’d like to work on an eye level with everyone, but it’s not always easy to find ways of doing so that feel good. Sometimes you feel under a lot of pressure to bring clarity because you are one of the ones others tend to look to for orientation when the going gets hard.

Leadership is the collective practice of enabling each other to act for a shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.

What you’ll get

The Integralead Immersion Weekend is designed for 3 main purposes:

Provide a space for people like you to take a breath, reflect and learn in a relaxed environment
Support the forming of peer relationships across initiatives and borders, that you can lean on beyond the duration of this training
Expose you to useful frameworks around leadership that can inspire your development as someone who takes responsibility for a shared vision.

Topics we’ll cover:

Leadership as 5 collective practices: telling stories, cultivating relationships, structuring teams, strategizing, facilitating action.
Qualities of leadership: how to show up, to create an empowering environment that supports peoples development
Telling Stories: How to use the power of storytelling to foster a common narrative and align on a direction
Structure and Rhythm: A steady backbone for powerful initiatives
Peer Support: How to hold space for each other and open up new perspectives without giving advice or “fixing problems”
Meeting well: unlocking the power of the one to one meeting (1on1)

If you’ve participated in our online training series “Integralead Essentials” some of these topics may sound familiar. It’s worth joining the in person training anyway – we’ll dive deeper in to each of them during the immersion weekend. If you haven’t participated in the online training, don’t worry – there’s no pre-requisites to joining the immersion weekend.

In our participatory and experiential learning approach our main priority is to meet you and all other participants where you’re at and shape the experience together with you. You’ll have a chance to contribute with your own knowledge and experience as well as shape the direction of the training by saying what you are most interested in. While we are certain that the topics named above will come up to some extent, what we dive deeper into depends on what each of the participants bring and therefore the agenda may be subject to change during the weekend.

The team

Trainers

Jan Horzela is a community organizer with many years of experience in facilitating group processes. In the years 2007-2015 he worked as an educator in Warsaw in a socio-therapeutic youth center for young people at risk of social exclusion. Since 2016, he has focused on creating spaces for social activation and supporting social movements through various projects using art, pedagogy and other approaches. To combine his knowledge in facilitation and political education, he co-founded the Civil Action Network. Over the years he’s found that challenges in groups often arise around questions of power and leadership. That’s why Jan is excited to share his experience in the frame of Integralead Essentials.

Jonas Gröner is a professionally trained and certified leadership coach, community-builder, and facilitator strongly committed to the regenerative paradigm. He’s been working in self-organized contexts from permaculture farms to start-ups, co-ops, and non-profits for the past 10 years and is passionate about supporting people with a vision for a world that works for all life, to find ways of putting that vision into action by cultivating resilient relationships, networks and communities. He sees that the world around us is becoming increasingly uncertain and that great leaders are those who can help others to act in the face of that uncertainty. That’s why he cares about supporting more people to develop these capacities.

Organizational Team

Asia is an active activist and educator, engaging in volunteer and educational activities related to refugee issues. At A Better World, she coordinates projects, works with partners and brings together a variety of initiatives.

Natalia is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in painting and drawing. She is involved in the artistic informal education of youth and children. At the Better World Association, she works on various initiatives and coordinates volunteer work in Nepal’s Bakrang-6

About the location

The training will take place in the beautiful city of Katowice, Poland. Right in the city center and conveniently located next to the train station we’ll be guests at Banhof Katowice.

Banhof Katowice is a self-organized meeting and educational space, held by a diverse community of activists from different backgrounds. We’ll be having our training sessions and shared meals in the rooms of Banhof. Accommodation will be provided in a nearby hostel.

Money

The Integralead Immersion weekend is part of a project co-funded by the european union. We have some funding to pay for food, accommodation, travel, trainers and organizers salary. However our budget is not huge, so if you can, we ask you to contribute 50-100€. If it’s not possible for you to contribute financially at this moment, that’s also okay.

We have the possibility of supporting some (but not all) participants’ by reimbursing their travel expenses. Please indicate if you need support with covering travel expenses during registration. We ask you to check in with yourself, whether you really need the support, as our ability to reimburse travel costs is limited.

Would love to join but don’t have time? Sign up for our newsletter to get notified when we run this program again.

The project “Integral Leadership Skills for Civil Society”, is co-funded by the European Union’s Erasmus+ Programme as a Small Scale Partnership (Project Number: Project Number 2024-1-AT01-KA210-ADU-1450D872). However, the views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the OeAD-GmbH can be held responsible.