"So many beautiful souls spinning around together"

Emmanuel was one of the participants of last year's (r)evolution lab and co-organized together with a bunch of likeminded peers imp!act Geneva in spring 2017. Here's how he experienced the programme.

Amazed. Inspired. Empowered. Dreamful. I felt so, and so much more, during my experience at the RevLab in 2016. After seeing with my bare eyes what a crazy pack of changemakers could do in only 3 days at imp!act, I couldn't stand it; I wanted to be a part of it, and in turn give what I received.

Turns out, I learned so much more again! The RevLab was truly tailored to our needs and demands, I felt, and I really felt like euforia was unravelling under my eyes. So many beautiful souls spinning around together, to deliver a surprising solution-oriented training for an organisation team. The training is so complete, in fact, that I use almost everything in my daily life and NGO even now, after imp!act is finished.

With its very clear shape (2 week-ends, each of them oriented towards specific parts of the event planning) and its awesome guests and speakers, RevLab really has premium feeling with a friendly taste, as I could not feel rigid or heavy hierarchy during the sessions. RevLab is simply a gathering of same-minded individuals that want to come together to unfold the potential of youth, and let it explode! Truly a next-gen training session, the kind I want to find again as I move through my path towards the state of change enabler <3

Join (r)evolution lab and organize your own transformative event in your neighborhood, city or company! The next programme cycle will start soon: 24-24 September (Zurich) and 3-5 November (Bern) 2017. Find more information and the registration form here.
 

seif Business Creation Seminar

seif is holding once again its Business Creation Seminar for Social Entrepreneurship (May 30th, 31st, June 8th, 19th and 29th, 2017). This five-day seminar is aimed at people who have an idea for a social enterprise and want to take it a step further. Throughout a series of workshops crucial issues around the initial phases of founding a social enterprise will be discussed, including business modelling, marketing & communication, and financial strategy and resources. Guest speakers, coaches as well as real-life social entrepreneurs will share their knowledge and experience with those attending the seminar. Future social entrepreneurs will also have the chance to put into practice those learnings by working their own business idea. The seminar will equip you with the tools that you need to successfully start a social business, as well as introducing you to other social entrepreneurs and active members oft he community.

Find further information and the link for registration online. Places are strictly limited.

Radical Collaboration Retreat

Our first Radical Collaboration® workshop with Malika and Théo, will take place from Friday March 31st until Sunday April 2nd in Brénaz, France (Arrival in the evening of Thursday 30th of March). It is a three day interactive training, which focuses on five skills that are essential to building and maintaining climates of trust and collaboration between individuals, team and within organizations: Collaborative Intention, Truthfulness, Self-Accountability, Self-Awareness and Interest Based Negotiation.

Radical Collaboration® is a guide for individuals and organizations wishing to become more skillful at collaborative relationships. Collaboration doesn't just happen by itself, it requires both a skill-set and a mind-set, both of which can be learned through this workshop.

It will take place in a beautiful farm, renovated in an environmentally friendly way, in the French countryside and will include several sessions outside in nature. Brénaz is at about 1h from Geneva.
This 3 day training includes:

• Accommodation from Thursday 30th of March to Sunday April 2nd
• Transport from Bellegarde to Brénaz (Bellegarde is easily accessible from Geneva by train)
• Local, fresh, vegetarian and organic food
• Healthy Snacks
• Facilitation by Malika and Théo, who are certified Radical Collaboration® trainers
• Radical Collaboration® learning material

In other words, you will only have to worry about learning and experiencing this life-changing workshop, we will take care of the rest.
Max. 12 participants, first come first served!

Love

Malika & Théo

>>> SIGN UP HERE

>>> Website

Step into action is back – bigger than ever this summer in Bern!

At the moment, 14 highly motivated young people from all over Switzerland are working together to realize the next step into action event, which will take place in Burgdorf (BE) from the 4th to the 6th of September 2017.

At this step-event, 1500 teenagers are going to go through an interactive parcours to learn more about social and environmental causes, how to tackle them and how they can step into action to make the world a better place. The participants will get in contact with relevant NGOs and sustainable companies, which will be on site.

Keep your eyes open for further information later in the year, if you are interested in participating at the event as a volunteer.

18 new Radical Collaboration® trainers in the euforia community and new trainings coming up soon!

We are happy to have a bunch of freshly certified Radical Collaboration®  trainers in our community and to offer the first trainings in and around Switzerland. Together with our Chief Euphoric Officer Chantal, who became a trainer one year ago, we are now 19 trainers – the only ones in Switzerland!

Jim Tamm, the creator of the Radical Collaboration® methodology, and the psychologist and Radical Collaboration® trainer Malou Laureys facilitated the seven-day Trainer Certification course for 18 euforians in Geneva. The course was a deep-dive into the topic with a lot of space for reflections and discussions. The two trainers gave a great example on how radically collaborating creates an atmosphere where people complement each other and can flexibly come up with new solutions. Jim and Malou were happy to have the chance to train Radical Collaboration® trainers in a new country and to open up opportunities for a new group of young participants.

The aim of euforians to become certified trainers is to create more training opportunities for people within and from outside of the community. From now on Radical Collaboration® trainings will be offered regularly. Check out the next trainings:

March 24th to 26th
(only 2 spots left!)

March 31st to April 2nd
(12 spots available)

More trainings will come up in May and in Summer. You will find more information soon in our calendar. If you would like to book a training for your organization, get in touch with us!

What contains the three-day Radical Collaboration® training?
The three-day, highly interactive Radical Collaboration training is designed to teach people five very practical and immediately useful skills essential to building collaborative relationships between individuals and within teams and organizations. It is appropriate for anyone whose circumstances have the potential for disharmony, misunderstandings and conflict, and who would like to improve their effectiveness. It is also particularly helpful for individuals responsible for creating more collaborative environments within a team or organization. It provides participants with step by step tools how to initiate, lead and reach closure in negotiations and how to build successful long-term relationships.

KICK-OFF: Social Impact Award Switzerland 2017

Toujours eu envie de changer le monde ? Vous avez une solution à un défi social et/ou environemental ? Prêt à expérimenter l'entrepreneuriat ?

Que vous soyez étudiants, jeunes diplômés ou professionnels, rejoignez-nous pour découvrir le concours et explorer toutes les possibilités qui s'offrent à vous !

Au programme:

• Une conférence interactive où vous découvrirez le concours et le rôle de l'entrepreneuriat sociale dans notre société.
• 3 ateliers participatifs: bost your potential par euforia, générer des idées innovatrices par Impact Hub Geneva et échanger avec des jeunes entrepreneurs à succès: Share a Dream et The Fair Traveller (gagnants SIA Suisse 2015).
• Et pour finir: un cocktail pour votre permettre d’échanger avec d’anciens participants, networker ou tout simplement discuter autour d’un verre.

>>> March 7th 2017, 18h — Evénemen t bilingue : français et anglais.

Qu'es-ce le Social Impact Award (SIA)? Le SIA est l'un des programmes les plus importants pour la conception et le développement des entreprises sociales en Europe. Il est destiné aux jeunes qui souhaitent réaliser leurs propres projets et ainsi changer le monde. Le programme sensibilisera les jeunes à l’entrepreneuriat par le biais d’ateliers, puis mettra en compétition les idées les plus prometteuses pour gagner un cursus d’incubation de trois mois ainsi qu’un coup de pouce financier.

Registration here.
Facebook event here.

Cat’s Cradle - The first euforia Unleash weekend in Bern

Katalin from unMonastery is engaged as part of the host team to organize the first workshop cycle of the unleash project.

“The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well in each other’s thick presence” — Donna Haraway: Staying With The Trouble

Image source: blog.rowleygallery.co.uk/cats-cradle-1/

According to the dictionary, Cat’s Cradle is a collaborative game played with strings by two or more people. During the game complex patterns are formed. Each person needs to focus on the collective effort as they take over and complicate their partner’s configuration.

Playing together requires many skills beyond the rules of the game. According to the author of Radical Collaboration, Jimm Tamm, the five principles of collaboration are:

Radical Collaboration ©

Interestingly, 4 out of the five principles refer to feelings rather than intellectual capacity. It seems to be the case that to be able to work together better, a personal journey to deal with unresolved feelings, vague fears, inarticulated needs and hidden assumptions is necessary.

I have to admit, I am not comfortable with the term, personal well-being, and the army of self-help books that teach tricks on how to solve problems within oneself. There seems to be a whole new level of consumerism directed to feelings, as if now that the world has become nearly uninhabitable both on a physical and an emotional level thanks to unsustainable practices of production and consumption, we are now offered the opportunity to spend yet more money and time on learning ways to be able to deal with this devastation.

However, having worked with various groups in the last years, and seen beautiful projects go astray due to personal conflicts, lack of communication, and an inability to move beyond personal defensive attitudes instead of moving forward together, it seems inevitable that personally taking responsibility for one’s own inner universe is absolutely necessary in order to work together in new forms of organisations such as Teal or Open Organisation.

It is therefore not a coincidence that I found the first weekend of the Unleash program by euforia focused on personal wellbeing not only interesting but quite useful. We learned a wide range of different methods enabling us to engage with and accept our own fears, aspirations and vulnerability, and use these insightful strategies also to relate to each other.

For a weekend focused on the individual, most of the workshops required team work and in-depth conversation with one another. It provided an opportunity to get to know each other beyond the visible roles we each play in that particular community. The only thing the various techniques required us was to be truly present for ourselves, and for the others, not as experts, problem solvers, critics, defenders, judges or protectors, simply “as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”

The unleash project: “It’s a bit like finding a watering hole in the desert”

Katalin from unMonastery participated at the kick-off of our new program the unleash project and is now engaged as part of the host team to organize the whole workshop cycle. In the following she shares her experience with euforia and the program.

You may not have heard about the unleash project, but you probably heard about euforia. And even if you have never heard of euforia, you have probably encountered the conundrum of work: a staggering number of people are unhappy in their working lives, while volunteering and activism is changing the way how the world deals with crisis situations - just think of the refugee crisis in Europe. In particular, young people are eager to engage and work very hard for causes they believe in. At the same time, Millenials are famously difficult to integrate into traditional workplace environments. the unleash project is offering solutions both for companies struggling with reinventing themselves in order to accommodate this new, extremely valuable human resource, and for people who are young or young at heart, finding it difficult to enter a hierarchical, competition-based, achievement-oriented workplace that does not offer purpose and satisfaction on a personal level.

The first meeting of the unleash project took place November 25-27, 2016, in Bern. Attending any Euforia event is a bit like finding a watering hole in the desert - familiar and unfamiliar characters come together to share their experiences and questions in a unique and nurturing environment. Workshops are designed to facilitate people with differing learning styles; delicious food and brief energising and meditation sessions break up the day, to nurture body and mind while learning; participants are encouraged to actively participate and share their own concerns and solutions to any given problem. Tools from The Art of Hosting are applied, including circles, world cafe, and other tricks, to maximise integration and collaboration. You meet highly successful business professionals, activists, artists, social innovators, students, freshly graduated young people searching for a better working environment, the employed and the unemployed, refugees, post-graduates. The overarching connection is the sense of community and shared values. It is a truly magical experience.

The unleash project will continue - if you missed the Kickoff, you can still sign up and participate in the rest of the events cycle. You can step into the cycle at any point, since it restarts in May 2017 as the current series come to an end.

Upcoming events:
20 - 21 January 2017: Personal Level: Focus, Mindfulness and Wholeness
Impact Hub, Bern

3 - 4 February 2017: Team Level: Creating a collaborative working environment, Share & Grow Night
Geneva

10 - 11 March 2017: Institutional and Societal Level: SDGs and Impact Initiatives, Share & Grow Night
Impact Hub, Bern

12 - 13 May 2017: Debriefing
Wylerringstrasse 36, Bern (Innovationsdorf)