Fielding World Café in The Netherlands September 19-20, 2025

Invitation to Fielding World Café in The Netherlands September 19-20, 2025

Fielding students, faculty, alums, and friends who live and work in Europe, or who will be in the Netherlands at the time, are cordially invited to join us on the 19th and 20th of September 2025, for a World Café. The gathering will be hosted by Fielding Graduate University and is being organized by faculty members Katrina S. Rogers, Ph.D. and Fred Steier, Ph.D., along with alums Pauline Albert, Ph.D. (HOD), Sergej van Middendorp, Ph.D. (HOD), and Elena Nicklasson, V.P. of University Relations. The event will take place in the collaborative workspace shared by Sergej’s community of creatives and entrepreneurs.

A World Café offers each participant an opportunity to engage in small group dialogues—during several rounds—about questions that matter to them. Everyone is encouraged to share their ideas; some people will change tables at each round and others will remain to host the next small group. This format engenders sharing, listening, cross-pollination of viewpoints, and knowledge building, in an interactive form.

We will be meeting on the De Horst estate in National Park Utrechtse Heuvelrug, close to the city of Utrecht, near Amsterdam. This green area is one of the few hilly places in The Netherlands, and the forests and the plain of the river Rhine provide a beautiful backdrop for our being together.

A heath in the forests of the National Park near our event location

The World Café, as a dialogic form of meeting, has a long and storied history at Fielding. Juanita Brown, one of the founders of The World Café, continued her development of it as the featured part of her dissertation. Several of our faculty and alumni have also been involved in co-developing it further, helping to make clear the importance of The World Café as part of our participatory and generative tradition at Fielding.

This World Café intends to bring the wisdom of the Fielding community to the challenges facing our world today, which can be seen as a polycrisis, first defined by Morin and Kern (1999) as the “complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrollable processes, and the general crisis of the planet” (p. 74) and was more recently described by Lawrence et. al (2024) as: “the causal entanglement of crises in multiple global systems in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects” (p. 2).

Given the scope and significance of the questions we ask, we might wonder what we have to offer in terms of knowledge, wisdom and hope in the face of such complex, dynamic, and ambiguous challenges. How do we each relate to the diverse and yet interconnected aspects of the polycrisis? What are our personal experiences as they surface in our research and practice? How do we meet this defining moment in our history, together?

The medieval centre of the city of Utrecht

On the morning of September 19, we will use a process called The Work that Reconnects, developed by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown (2014), and will include a practice called Global Social Witnessing (Matoba, 2021), that helps us engage with the polycrisis in an embodied way, so that we can face its reality while remaining grounded in the spirit of our community and support for each other. In the afternoon, we will use the World-Café method to bring the wisdom of our community to the challenges we are facing as we engage with the polycrisis.

One question that we will be exploring is how a future series of online and in-person World Cafés might be supportive for our community to continue to engage in asking these questions and generating responses to the challenges the polycrisis will continue to  present.

The World Café starts with an optional dinner on Friday evening 19 September and will take place on Saturday and end at 5 p.m.

Contact Sergej van Middendorp with inquiries about the program at svanmiddendorp@email.fielding.edu.

To R.S.V.P. your attendance, please contact Development Manager Marlen Bautista at giving@fielding.edu or 805.898.4029

References

Lawrence, M., Homer-Dixon, T., Janzwood, S., Rockstöm, J., Renn, O., & Donges, J. F. (2024). Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement. Global Sustainability, 7(e6), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.1

Macy, J., & Brown, M. Y. (2014). Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects. New Society Publishers.

Matoba, K. (2021). Global social witnessing: An educational tool for awareness-based systems change in the era of global and humanitarian planetary crisis. Journal of Awareness Based Systems Change, 1(1), 59–74. https://doi.org/10.47061/jabsc.v1i1.548

Morin, E., & Kern, A. B. (1999). Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium. Hampton Press.

Resources for preparation

Global Social Witnessing

The World Café

Relevant recent publications of the conveners:

Appelbaum, R., Steier, F., Stillman, P. & Willis, D.B. (2021).  Leadership in Sustainability.  Fielding University Press.  (Available as an E-book).

Rogers, K. S., & Wildflower, L. (2025). Coaching to Heal the Heart and the Planet. In K. Akouris & A. Emond (Eds.), Transformational Coaching: An Evidence-Based Guide. Fielding University Press.