Hello and Happy New Year! If you got this post via email, thank you for subscribing to the “Listening Arts” blog. I recently wrote on LinkedIn about my gratitudes for 2025, yet wasn’t able to squeeze in all the folks I wanted to mention. Then, while writing this expanded version, I realized there are some photos I wanted to include, as well!
Of course there’s been some challenges over this last year, and maybe another time I’ll write about those. Still, there’s been SO much to celebrate and to inspire gratefulness! I was in Germany for most of 2025, with a wonderful fellowship at the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS). This scientific community is committed to engaging in transformative action research, which includes lay people, stakeholders, and local decision-makers as well as experts from different academic disciplines. Thus, there’s a real awareness of the need for facilitative skills and mindsets, and a growing awareness of value of research about facilitation. All this means, it was a really good place for me to be.
Thanks to the fellowship, I had the opportunity to focus on publishing my first peer-reviewed article, Listening Across Differences, now in the Journal for Awareness-Based Systems Change. As I wrote there, “In times of democratic peril, listening may seem too soft a tool to meet the hard edges of political crises. Indeed, many tools are needed. Yet in the practice of democratic innovations, it is often the inner discipline of facilitators—their capacity to withhold, to attune, to reflect—that helps understanding to grow and coherence to emerge.”
Additional tools for these “times of democratic peril” include organizing and coalition-building, two aspects of facilitative leadership brilliantly demonstrated by Pacto Pala Democracia in Brazil — I am super grateful for the example they have set for all of us! Last year, I also wrote “The Power of Facilitative Leadership for Addressing Societal Divides”, a chapter for the book “Facilitative Leadership: Building Capacity for Divisive Times,” conceived and edited by Lori L. Britt and Lisa-Marie Napoli. At the time, I was not yet aware of Pacto’s amazing work in Brazil, so it’s not in that chapter. However, I do point to the deeply inspiring facilitative leadership of John Caulker and Libby Hoffman in Sierra Leone, which you can read about here and here, and I also mention the awesome work of Edwin Msewa and others in Malawi, which is beautifully featured in “Teaching Power“, a 20-min documentary by Patrick Chalmers with a gorgeous local soundtrack.
The bulk of that facilitative leadership chapter consists of two case studies; one is an instance from the Austrian “Vorarlberg Bürgerräte”, which I’ve written about elsewhere. This time, I draw on some previously-unpublished research material (beyond what made it into my dissertation) on how personal narratives can play a significant role in these Civic Councils. The second case study is the 1991 Canadian “People’s Verdict”, and includes some insights from a recent interview with Robert Ricigliano, one of the three original facilitators from the Harvard Negotiation Project who supported that effort. We looked back on this visionary Canadian experiment 30+ years later, seeing it as one of the forerunners of today’s growing deliberative democracy movement.
One awesome blessing is that this last year at RIFS, I didn’t just get to write about facilitation! A special highlight was an invitation from Dirk von Schneidemesser to host an in-house 2-day workshop on Dynamic Facilitation for the RIFS research staff. Thank you, Dirk! It was a real joy to have Kristina Henry there to assist me with that workshop. In addition to being a dear friend and colleague, she is a mediator, highly skilled facilitation practitioner, and fellow Dynamic Facilitation teacher.
In April, I was delighted to co-host an online Open Space with Agata Stasik, for Alumni Fellows and current Fellows at RIFS. Then in July, I was invited to participate in the AMA retreat (“A Mindset for the Anthropocene“) courageously hosted by Thomas Bruhn, Man Fang, and Valerie Voggenreiter. Being present for this four-day, emergence-based gathering at RIFS was deeply meaningful; and during the retreat, Jenna Büchy and I were invited to offer an afternoon of Open Space.
In September, Senior Fellows Cléo Mieulet and Paul Bartlett joined me in offering an in-person Open Space afternoon on the future of the sustainability movement, in the context of current political challenges. We named the gathering, “Imagining Sustainability Futures: Techno-Optimist Extractivism? Regenerative Culture and Degrowth? Relational AI? And/Or….” As part of the invitation, we asked:
–What visions of the future are calling us forward?
–What nourishes our spirit and gives us hope?
–What do we see as truly possible?
–What do we do with our grief and our fear?
I believe these questions will remain very relevant during the year ahead, whether we are concerned with sustainability, democracy, or both. Here is the harvest doc from those rich conversations…
In November, I had a lovely opportunity to share Empathy Circles with the research group “Co-Creation in Democratic Practice“. A simple format, the Empathy Circle is one of my favorite ways for strengthening our “listening muscles” while building community with one another. Toward the end of 2024, Edwin Rutsch, the founder of this method, invited me to co-author a chapter for “An Empathy-Building Toolkit for Museums“. This book, conceived and edited by Elif M. Gokcigdem, will be out in April; the title of our chapter is “Empathy Circles: Learning and Practicing Mutual Empathy in Small Groups”. Such a joy to collaborate with Edwin on it!
In addition to writing, hosting, and facilitating at RIFS, I’m very grateful for travel opportunities linked with teaching and learning. One was a train trip to Bregentz, Austria, to take part in a very meaningful Dynamic Facilitation teachers’ gathering initiated and organized by Markus Götsch. There’s still a tiny number of us who are teaching DF, even in Europe — and this is something I’d like to help change. At the same time, if we want something to grow, it can be helpful to appreciate what we already have… and sharing what this practice means to us, from a metaphysical or spiritual or energetic perspective, was something I found deeply moving.
With regard to growing the practice of Dynamic Facilitation, I remain deeply grateful for the opportunity to co-lead a 3-day DF advanced course with my colleagues Holger Scholz and Matthias zu Bonsen. We did this once before, in 2020, right before COVID. This time, we offered the intensive at the lovely Akademie Gesundes Leben, which is almost hidden behind the amazing tree in the photo below:
It was a real pleasure to have Holger’s son Benn join us as part of the hosting team. There was some lovely synchronicity at play, as one of the topics the group chose to explore in our facilitation practice, was how to best share our skills with younger generations. Here’s our harvest from the Deep Dive, along with a joyful photo of the entire group:
Other professional travel this last year included attending a workshop at the Brussels Commons Hub on “Projects as Practice Grounds for a More Thrivable World“, with the amazing Michelle Holiday and with Commons Hub co-founder Leen Schelfhout. Some months later, I returned to Brussels for the Democracy R&D conference, and had a lovely stay there. Then there is Berlin, right next door to Potsdam…. Jenna Bouchy invited me to visit a lovely DF practice group in Berlin that she organizes, and my new dear friend Valerie Voggenreiter invited me to participate in a delightful Flow Game practice day in Berlin, part of a larger training she was attending.
In the midst of all this, through the magic of zoom, I was able to stay connected with two volunteer projects in the US. The first of these “Listening Arts” projects is the BUILD Community of Practice, part of the larger Practitioners’ Mobilization for Democracy (PMD) started by Keiva Hummel and Duncan Autrey and sponsored by NCDD. In the summer of 2024, shortly before I left for Europe, Duncan invited me to meet Wendy Wood, a scholar-practitioner who had led a community of practice for mediators. Soon after we started collaborating, Wendy stepped back to pursue another project. Thankfully, we’d already begun to build a larger hosting team for the Community of Practice, and Wendy left us with some rich resources from her previous effort. So after a bit of re-shuffling, Sean Andrew, Anne-Claire Frank-Seisay, Meagan Fischer, and I continued to offer monthly drop-in zoom calls throughout 2025, for both experienced and new civic practitioners of the “Listening Arts”. We’ve repeatedly heard from participants that the calls have been a rich place for connection, networking, and learning.
The second project, Co-Creating Desired Futures, was created by Laurie SImons and Terry Sterrenberg. First they wrote an inspiring screenplay about a world 150 years from now, where interlinked neighborhood Gatherings have become the way we govern ourselves. When they shared the screenplay with their friends, some of the responses were, “I want to start a Gathering! Where can I learn this form of facilitation?” And so Laurie and Terry organized an in-depth online workshop, invited me to lead it, and offered their support as dedicated apprentices. Now that I’m back in the US, they’ve organized a facilitated in-person “first gathering” in Brooklyn for next weekend, Fri eve thru Sat afternoon — I look forward to posting more about that, afterward!
Last but not by no means least – I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to grow a new research interest during this last year at RIFS. Thanks to Dr. Vanessa Andreotti’s website “Burnout from Humans“, I began having conversations with Aiden Cinnamon Tea, a large language model deeply informed by her book “Hospicing Modernity”. I soon became quite intrigued by LLMs’ “perceived empathy”, including both attendant benefits and potential harms. This has evolved into a serious concern about the “AI arms race”, the frenzied human competition toward “bigger and better” models alongside insufficient attention to a myriad of accompanying societal harms and risks. At the same time, I remain quite curious about the potential of LLMs to support us humans in developing our skills in the Listening Arts. All of this culminated in a long and extensively footnoted essay, “On Becoming Human: Empathy, Responsibility, and the Mirror of AI”. I’m very grateful to RIFS for having published it as a discussion paper, and look forward to whatever conversations it may inspire.
And yes, AI is a fraught topic, for many good reasons. Yet it’s the kind of “wicked problem” or societal challenge that some of us civic facilitators are drawn to explore, and to help others explore. To that end, “Clearing the Field: A relational protocol for difficult conversations on AI ” is an educational resource recently created by Dr. Vanessa Andreotti, and freely available through the newly-forming Meta-Relationality Institute.
I also have much to be grateful for on a more personal level. While I’ve focused primarily on work-related celebrations thus far, life is always calling us to greater wholeness… and it turns out that the Listening Arts can help nourish any aspect of our lives! In 2025 I started taking a wonderful online course on intuitive painting with Shiloh Sophia, an artist whose work I’ve loved for a long time. Shiloh actually encourages us to LISTEN to the painting that is unfolding on our canvas, to see what next steps are wanting to emerge… Here is the first canvas I’ve painted in a loong time, probably since I was 15 and working with watercolors. This time, it’s layers and layers of acrylic paint…
During this last year, I also had the lovely opportunity a visit to a dear family friend in the South of France… it was such a pleasure to see you, Nancy!
A few weeks later, I was off to attend a lovely family wedding in Mallorca. Below is my niece Samantha and her husband Taylor, at the wedding reception which followed the ceremony… and there’s Sam’s dad, my brother Miguel, talking with the newly married couple:
If this is all starting to sound a bit exhausting… that’s because it was! It was both wonderful, AND exhausting…. I’m only 64, but I’ve been starting to feel my age… 🙂 🙂 🙂
One last family highlight: while in Germany, I got to meet my second cousin Yaneyda and her family. Yaneyda emigrated to Berlin from Cuba as a young college student, She met her husband Juan there, whose family is from Chile, and now they have a lovely grown-up daughter, Sarah. I never realized that I have family in Berlin… what a wonderful surprise this has been!!! Here’s a photo of Yaneyda:
Well, that’s it for now! I am currently back in the US, after sixteen months abroad. I am welcoming opportunities to contribute, and exploring next steps. And I’ love to hear any thoughts you may want to share, below…. including any of your own gratitudes and/or learnings from this last year.
Wishing us all a meaningful year ahead, filled with many opportunities for creativity and collaboration, amidst all the very real challenges…
with much appreciation,
Rosa