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?
Whether you’ve participated in one of our online-courses or in-person trainings, or this is the first time you’ll be connecting with us around the topic of leadership – 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.
What you can expect
Co-Creation
Contribute to shaping the experience with your own ideas, questions, and experience. Ask for feedback or peer-support and offer your wisdom to others.
Relationality
Cultivate relationships with others who play similar roles in other organizations and initiatives and discover the power of supportive peer relationships.
Tailored Support
Use the opportunity to spend 4 days with our trainers and guests and get tailored support on your real-life challenges.
Practice
Use the opportunity to put what you’re learning into practice right away – in a sandbox environment where nothing really can go wrong.
Input
Learn from our trainers and special guests and their different approaches to leadership.
What PRevious Participants have to say
What’s going to happen?
The Integralead Gathering is a co-created experience. We’ll use Open Space Technology to surface the topics that are most relevant to the group every day. Participants, Guests and Facilitators will shape where we focus together and we’ll deepen our understanding of leadership together via mutual exploration.
The precise plan remains to be determined but you an expect something similar to this:
On the first day we’ll spend some time getting to know each other – who is here, what perspectives on leadership do they bring, what are their superpowers and current learning edges. You are invited to formulate a research question for yourself, that represents a real-life leadership challenge you are currently facing and that you would like to make progress on during the gathering.
After having set the stage in this way, we’ll co-create the agenda for the next day: everyone can propose sessions. These can be workshops, discussion rounds, playful exercises, feedback sessions, regenerative activities – whatever you feel supports you best in following your research.
Our Understanding of Leadership
We understand “leadership” as accepting responsibility for creating conditions that enable others to achieve common goals in the face of uncertainty. We want to support a process of integration past oppressive leadership paradigms and emerge with a clear, grounded and skilled, developmental approach to it.
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
Joanna Spychała volunteered in Greece, working with people living in local refugee camps. She is the co-founder of Poznańska Garażówka and a member of the informal group Humans of Aleppo. An educator and dedicated volunteer, she completed postgraduate studies in pedagogy, specializing in teacher training and oligophrenopedagogy (education for people with intellectual disabilities). Joanna is actively engaged in pro-migrant initiatives.
At Lepszy Świat, she coordinates projects, manages communication with partners, and supports a range of grassroots initiatives. Since January 2024, she has been the president of the Association, previously a member of the board. Currently a member of the Council for Migrants at the Poznań City Hall.
Natalia Juszkiewicz-Wrotek is a professionally trained visual artist working across painting, spatial forms, and drawing, with an interdisciplinary approach to art. Since 2015, she has been involved in volunteering and non-formal education initiatives focused on supporting children and youth. Participates in various initiatives to promote culture and art. As an animator, she designs and facilitates both artistic and language-cultural activities. Since 2019, she has been coordinating an educational project in a school in Nepal. As of January 2024, a member of the Board of the Lepszy Świat Association. Currently, she is committed to strengthening child safeguarding practices within the organization and is dedicated to building her leadership capacities to better serve her community and causes she believes in.
Special Guests
We’ll have some special guests for this event – stay tuned, we’ll announce them soon!
The Location
We’ll be staying at a hut of the Austrian Scouts, just outside of Vienna. The venue is reachable from Vienna’s city center in a long bike ride (around an hour), by riding a tram to the final stop and walking for about 30 minutes or by getting picked up by the team from a nearby bus stop.
We’ll be truly in the woods, yet very close to Vienna. To get there from Vienna’s mainstation takes about 1.5hrs, including the walk at the end.
Money
The Integralead Practitioners Gathering is part of a project co-funded by the European Union. We have some funding to pay for food, accommodation, trave and trainers and organizers salaries. However our budget is not huge, so if you can, we ask you to contribute 80-200€. 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.
FAQ
I can’t participate in the whole gathering – can I just come for a portion of it?
Unfortunately it won’t be possible to only partially participate. We really believe in creating a space of inquiry, reflection and transformation together. Those goals require more focus and people coming and leaving throughout the time doesn’t support a transformative process.
I’ve participated in the “Integralead Immerison Weekend” before. Will this event be interesting for me?
Absolutely! While the immersion weekend is primarily led by our trainers and structured around their input, the gathering is co-led by our facilitators, special guests and all participants. We’re gonna create the agenda together every day so you can bring the topics that are most relevant and alive for you.
I haven’t participated in any Integralead trainings before. Can I still attend?
Absolutely! As long as you recognize yourself in the “Who you are” section further up, this event is for you. We will give our best to create a level playing field at the beginning of the gathering. If you have any doubts, please let us know!
What does leadership have to do with grassroots groups?
In some grassroots communities, leadership has become synonymous with outdated models of hierarchy and exclusion. People may reject concepts like “top-down leadership,” meritocracy and instead champion equality, consensus, and inclusivity. While these values are vital, they can sometimes lead to environments where leadership itself is viewed with suspicion, causing a lack of structure, clarity, and shared purpose that hampers the group’s potential. We understand “leadership” as accepting responsibility for creating conditions that enable others to achieve common goals in the face of uncertainty. We want to support a process of integration past oppressive leadership paradigms and emerge with a clear, grounded and skilled, developmental approach to it. In our experience this perspective on leadership is highly relevant also for grassroots groups.
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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.
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