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The times we live in are challenging across all domains of work, family, and community. Narrow, polarized perspective is often privileged and perpetuated. Inclusion and diversity are championed in word, yet often not in practice. Increased complexity is creating reactiveness and defensiveness rather than compassion and understanding. Systems are collapsing at scales ranging from local to global. Cumulative challenge is exhausting too many of us. The times call for depth, not shallow. The times call for communal ability, not more isolation. 

In North America excessive resources of time, money, and even despair, are spent annually on leadership development programs. However, results so often fail to live up to hoped-for expectations. Too many individuals and too many organizations are settling for convenience, when what is needed is the heavy lifting of inner and outer work. 

We don’t lack leaders -- people who have others following them. We lack wise leaders -- those who remain grounded when gale winds blow, those who can think strategically with heart, those who can create conditions for groups to bring forward their gifts individually and collectively, and those who remain committed to what is beyond the storm.  

Fire & Water Structure -- In Person + Virtual 

This program is a 16-month leadership and learning commitment. It is intended to have both specific learning and participation accountabilities, as well as deliberate spaciousness to welcome what arises, surprises, and that requires more integration time. We will cap total participants at 24, so as to support an essential intimacy and unique colleagueship together. The large group will also be formed into smaller support teams of six people each. All participants should plan on:

• 3 residential, face-to-face gatherings that run Wednesday evening through Sunday afternoon at Hope Springs Institute, located in Peebles, OH. 
• Bi-monthly whole group web-based video conference calls (Zoom), in which we further knit together questions, experiences, and connection from the entire cohort.
• Bi-monthly support teams video conference calls (in the off months of whole group calls), in which teams of six connect to share learning, experience, and lend support in applied practice.
• 2 personal coaching sessions from either Quanita or Tenneson, as well as one shared in-person coaching session (at Hope Springs).
• Bi-weekly engagement through a private online community platform (Basecamp) to stay abreast and connected with fellow cohort happenings. We will use Basecamp instead of email for our communication. It helps to keep everything organized and in one place, including handouts and participant offered resources. The Basecamp will be available throughout the life of our time together. You can download anything you’d like to keep.

Workshop Information

10/30/19 - 11/03/19: Gathering 1 — The Call & It’s Departure from Norms 

04/29/19 - 05/03/20: Gathering 2 — The Journey & The Facing of Ordeals    

11/11/20 - 11/15/20: Gathering 3 — The Return & Recognition of Gift 

All participants are expected to commit to the full program. All learning will be of mind, heart, and spirit.  

* Travel Expenses are additional and the responsibility of each participant.

Facilitators

Quanita: I am the promise of forgiveness and reconciliation in the world. I haven’t always known this but I have always been moving toward it. I started my healing journey at a young age. I am a shaman. It has taken me a long time to grow into this...to grow into me. Mostly because I never quite understood why a person would choose this life. Now I understand that it chooses you. 

I believe we are in a time that is calling us to remember. Remember what really matters. Remember the truth of who we really are. Remember that we belong to each other. 

I am a facilitator dedicated to addressing embedded trauma. I am a spiritual teacher, speaker, author, life coach, and a storyteller. My work over the past 20 years has been focused in the areas of healing, initiation, grief, leadership, diversity, and inclusion. Currently I am working on a couple of national projects including work with The Kellogg Foundation’s, Truth, Racial Healing, & Transformation Program and People’s Action’s Heartland Initiative: A Listening Tour of Rural and Small Town America. 

I have a background in Organizational Management and Development with a concentration in Integral Theory which has supported me in looking at the world in a more holistic way. I also have had the privilege of studying with some amazing elders. Including Sobonfu Some and Jojopah Maria Nsoroma, keepers of ancient indigenous wisdom from the Dagara Tribe of Burkina Faso, Fanchon Shur in Embodying Creative Leadership through Growth in Motion, and Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea of The Circle Way. 

I live in Cincinnati, OH with my two children. I am inspired by the Ohio River and the stories of freedom that were birth from here. 

Tenneson: All of my life, I’ve been the kind of human that has had as much interest in the unseen as I have had in the seen. I’ve had interest in the mystery and the mystical, with an inherent hunch that things are not as they seem, despite the human ability to concretize belief systems and leadership practices. It is only for a little of my life that I’ve been able to articulate any of that. My hunger comes from a despair, native to times such as these -- I continue to learn that many of us are feeling it. My hunger for such re-storying of who we are as human beings and what we are up to in our work, family, and community comes from an innate desire to evolve myself and the systems I’m part of. 

I am a facilitator, workshop leader, teacher, blogger, and coach committed to improving the quality of collaboration and imagination needed in groups, teams, and organizations — to help us be in times such as these with consciousness, kindness, and learning. My work over 20+ years has been to design and lead meetings in participative formats. From strategic visioning with boards to large conference design to communities just learning to listen again to one another. Lately I have been working with faith communities, educators, and foundation leaders. 

I post a daily blog on my website, Human to Human, in which I offer reflection on varied aspects of participative leadership practices, insights, and human to human depth. Three orientations -- living systems, self-organization, and emergence inspire and inform all of my work. So does emptiness, breath, and a fresh-picked garden tomato. My education background includes an undergraduate degree in psychology and a graduate degree in organizational behavior. My work lineages include The Berkana Institute with Margaret Wheatley, The Circle Way with Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea (and now teaching with Amanda Fenton), and The Art of Hosting with Toke Moeller. 

I live in a small town where urban meets rural in Lindon, Utah, in a valley at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. I’m originally from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I am a father to three children (and father-in-law to one son inlaw), all who continue to teach me about exciting and tender aspects of life. A new enjoyment for me is kayaking. 

I’m glad to be in colleagueship and friendship with Quanita to offer Fire & Water to people in many walks and runs of life.