Hosting Artful Collaborations Across Communities and Agencies

with Jennifer Charlesworth and Chris Corrigan

Old systems are coming apart and new notions of community are on the rise. What are we learning about how groups, networks, and organizations thrive? What kind of leadership is needed to engage collaborations across boundaries? How do we shift the focus from outside-in management and intervention to inside-out engagement, trust, commitment, and transformation, with leaders and agencies playing the role of catalyst and host? What does it take to host transformational questions within the systems in which we work?

In this module you will learn new ways of seeing and acting in your life and work. You will practice approaches to leadership that engage more of yourself and others, and that lead to positive culture change. You will become more effective as a host of collaboration and collective action.

Using approaches from the Art of Hosting community of practice, as well as elements of Theory U and Peter Block's ideas on community, we will explore new leadership moves for organizations and communities. This module is for community and public sector leaders and change-makers. Teams are especially encourage to attend, bringing their current challenges and questions.

Jennifer Charlesworth has worked in the human services field for over 30 years. She has had the privilege of being a front-line child and youth care practitioner, team leader, facilitator, consultant, trainer, researcher, educator and a Cabinet advisor for two different parties. She has worked in government, non-profit, philanthropic, university, and private sectors. Jennifer has a BA and PhD in Child and Youth Care and has studied at the University of Victoria, Cambridge University in the UK, and the University of British Columbia. She is currently the Executive Director of the Federation of Child and Family Services of British Columbia – an organization that is the provincial voice for community-based child, youth, and family services in the province. In this capacity, she has been building stronger connections between community agencies, provincial government ministries, and post-secondary institutions to support healthy dialogue, mutual learning and constructive change in human service policies and practices. Jennifer is the co-author of All Together Now: Creating a Social Capital Mosaic, which explores opportunities for co-creating healthier communities, and Emergent Practice Planning, which challenges human service practitioners to work with the complexity in case practice. Most recently, she has contributed to a new edited work entitled Standing on the Precipice – Inquiry into the Creative Potential of Child and Youth Care Practice. 

Chris Corrigan is a facilitator of conversation in the service of emergence. His business is supporting invitation: the invitation to collaborate, to organize, to find one another and make a difference in communities, organizations and lives.

To read more about Chris and his work, see his site. You'll also find there, a taste of the art of hosting.

“In a changing and complex world, there are no answers, there is no certainty. Leadership and questions are everywhere. We are called to be in active engagement with the world around us, to make sense of things we are seeing and to act on our visions and ideas for the good and benefit of all.”

ALIA West Modules

Action Inquiry: Transformational Leadership in the Midst of Action with Bill Torbert and Mary Stacey
Embodied Leadership – Empowered Life with Wendy Palmer
Hosting Artful Collaborations Across Communities and Agencies with Jennifer Charlesworth and Chris Corrigan
Leadership in Networked, Emergent Systems: Practical Challenges and Opportunities with Thomas J. Hurley and Keith Webb