By Amy Lenzo
Cross-posted from the World Cafe Community

I want to share the story of a phenomenon that my colleague Mark Szpakowski dubbed the “Triple World Café”. I co-produced this event in late June of this year with Michael Chender, member of the Governing Council of the ALIA Institute, Mark Szpakowski, and other key ALIA & World Café members, as part of the Shambhala Summer Institute Program.

The Triple World Café experience was an extraordinary experience of collaboration, inspiration and magic among a large and loosely structured team – we learned an enormous amount, deepened old friendships and began new ones, got rave reviews and exceeded everyone’s expectations, but most of all we stepped out on a limb of sheer intention and imagination and felt it miraculously hold our weight.

Here’s how it happened: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m constantly trying to bridge what is so beautiful and so special in the great classical music, and I’m fighting for the role of these arts within the dilemmas of the modern world.

Great art should be there where the real problems are, especially there where people are solving those problems, who are making the tough decisions… These people need help, so I always say the artists have to come and help them.

Miha will be joining us for ALIA Europe 2010, and also playing at the Cathedral of Chartres in May 2009. His website is mihavision.com.

Miha Pogacnik - The Art of Gentle Warriorship from ALIA Institute on Vimeo.

Excerpt from the 2008 Summer Institute Opening Address

by Michael Chender
“Our working hypothesis here at the Institute is this: Whatever the question you’re carrying, and whatever the specifics of it and the skills necessary to bring to it, that the ability to act powerfully, accurately, compassionately, and sustainably, is rooted in authenticity. So what do we mean by authentic leadership?”

To hear the audio file, click here.

Presentations from the 2008 module Solving Tough Problems

Watch the video by Louise Koch here. Flipchart notes reproduced here. Read the rest of this entry »

A slam poem by Chris Corrigan, as part of the harvest of a World Cafe conversation at the Summer Institute, June 23, 2008.

Time to reform, see our relations reborn
from the inside out watching repression die into clarity
wet in the eyes where
hope falls in
and old worlds shed their skins
and we sit in the raw light of the new. Read the rest of this entry »

From the World Café Community Blog. By Juanita Brown.

I’ve just recently returned from the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Nova Scotia, where Tom Hurley, who is guiding the global evolution of the World Café network, led a module on Leadership in Emergent Networked Systems. I co- hosted, with Claudia Chender, a young leader from the board of Shambhala, an inquiry into future possibilities for the Shambhala Institute in the arena of multi-generational collaboration, a thread we had begun with the first Intergenerational Dialogues at Shambhala in 2004. Read more…

Greg Judelman of Bruce Mau Design shared his experience of the 2008 Summer Institute with his colleagues in Toronto using this presentation. If you would like to post your own presentation, contact us.