People on the Move:
Evolving Humanity's New Story

A Collective Inquiry into
Place * People * Passion * Profession * Perseverance

A Stories for Change Conversational Series Hosted by Mary-Alice Arthur & Amy Lenzo

 Join us for an entirely new, interactive online series featuring five powerful stories of challenge and change.

Over a series of five sessions we will hear from some extraordinary people who’ve had powerful experiences of transition and movement. Their stories will serve as a springboard to enter into an arc of inquiry about the theme of People on the Move. In the series, we'll weave our own stories with theirs and together explore what these experiences might mean - both for our individual life journeys and the collective story we're living into together.

We’d love to have your voice in the circle. 

Please pass this invitation onto all who might benefit.

We hope that you join us for the entire series, but you may also choose to join us for just one or more of the sessions.

See pricing & more details on the Registration Page.

Register for Session Four

Register for Session Five

Themes

Refugees are landing on the shores of Europe in their thousands provoking a humanitarian crisis. Immigrants in America are pushing the conversation about race, equality and the distribution of resources.  Disasters are forcing people to leave their homelands or changing centuries-old patterns of co-existing.  Digital nomads are taking to the skies and finding their bases everywhere.

We now live in a world of People on the Move.

This trend is provoking dramatic responses both in the people moving and those in the places where they move to.  We are seeing both the constriction of fear and the building of walls and the opening of boundaries and new possibilities.  It doesn’t show any signs of stopping.

• What can we learn from the stories of those involved in the front lines of this great movement of people? 

• What clues do their -- and our -- stories have to offer about the evolution of Humanity’s new story?

• How can we become more conscious of the stories we are living in -- and the ones we are living into? 

• How do we take back the power of our stories and make a conscious choice about the future we are creating together? 

Using five powerful personal stories of challenge and change we will be working with an on-going arc of inquiry across this series and listening for the emergent new story to come.

Format

Each session will last 2.5 hours. 

We will use the Collective Story Harvest method to work with the stories and then spend time sharing our insights and our own stories.

Collective Story Harvest is a simple, potent method using focused listening to make sense together across a number of selected themes. 

Some of our themes will run across all the stories in our series, building a depth of overall understanding, and some of our themes will be particular to the questions each story evokes.

An important focus of the series will be harvesting our collective inquiry as a stimulus to the international conversation going on now, using our collective sense-making over these stories as an experiment in story activism.

Register for Session Four

Register for Session Five

Your Hosts

This is part of the Stories for Change initiative and is hosted by Mary Alice Arthur, Story Activist and Amy Lenzo, Online Hosting Pioneer.  Together, they create a safe and welcoming virtual circle where we come to share experiences and stories and make meaning together.

Guest Storytellers

Staying committed to a brighter future. How do we create the phoenix from the ashes of disaster and do that together? How do you keep going towards a new future when the past wants to pull you back in? 

Bob Stilger has had a lifelong love affair with Japan after being there as a university-aged exchange student.  Based in Spokane, Washington, since the Triple Disaster in 2011 he has been tirelessly working to support local people to create the new future that is seeking to be born.

22 February
Session Two: PASSION
Being called to action and volunteering at the border to assist refugees.  How do you follow your inner call and keep your ground when everything is on the edge? 

 Steve Ryman currently lives as an intentional nomad, following invitation and his intuition to the places where he can learn and contribute.  Originally from the US, he now has taken on the world as his home base.

29 February
Session Three: PLACE
Standing in the midst of challenge and change in a home place.  What happens to community when systemic breakdown comes? What can we do in our own place to create new ways of living and working together? 

Maria Scordialos is an international consultant living in Athens.  As a living systems/living wholeness and participatory practice expert she finds herself both equally able to support the current crisis and impacted by it.

7 March
Session Four: PEOPLE
A refugee’s story of changing identity. What is identity and what do you do when all the markers change? How does it impact your life when you are uprooted at an early age and must reestablish yourself and your family in a radically different place?

Mahmood Nisar is originally from Afghanistan and came as a teenager and a refugee with his family to Germany.
 
14 March
Session Five: PROFESSION
The Swedish Red Cross had just embarked on implementing a new humanitarian strategy with “Taking compassionate action” and “Acting as one Red Cross” as the two pillars for strengthening the organisation in its vision that nobody is to be left unsupported during an acute crisis, when the refugee crisis hit and suddenly thousands of refugees needed our help in Sweden and thousands of volunteers wanted to get engaged.

Peder Johnson stepped out of his ordinary role in business development and local capacity building  to lead the Swedish Red Cross operation related to People on the Move

Register for Session Four

Register for Session Five

Costs & Options

You may choose to attend one or more particular sessions or come to all of them and participate in the whole series. 

We are practicing gift economy pricing, so while our suggested fees  reflect what it actually costs to produce these events, we offer alternatives based on your current financial situation, including an option to contribute a bit extra so that others are able to take part.

There are alternative options for the full series, and each of the five sessions in the registration form; if you need another alternative please contact us to make arrangements.

We also offer the opportunity to directly support the harvesting being done for this series so that our collective results can be shared and widely circulated. Thank you in advance for your support.

More about our Hosts

Mary Alice Arthur is a Story Activist, specializing in using story in service of positive systemic shift and to access and create collective intelligence on critical issues. Founder of Soar, she sees her art as creating and hosting spaces where people can step in, step up and step out powerfully together and take back the power of their stories.

Amy Lenzo - As weDialogue, Amy has been hosting online engagement for well over a decade with some of the most influential thinkers and social-change agents of our times. A pioneer in her field, Amy is passionate about online interaction that can re-connect people to their senses, each other, the natural world, and the sacredness of all Life.