May East is a sustainability educator, spatial planner, and social innovator. Her work spans the fields of ‘artivism’, urban ecology, and women’s studies. Designated one of the 100 Global SustainAbility Leaders three years in a row, she leads a whole generation of regenerative educators and practitioners in 49 countries working with community-based organisations and intergovernmental agencies in the development of policy guidance and projects strengthening climate resilience, food security, and livelihood action. A UNITAR Fellow she has an MSc in Spatial Planning with specialisation in the rehabilitation of abandoned villages.  As CEO of Gaia Education, her passion is to co-develop Project-Based Learning trajectories supporting indigenous and migrant communities and their traditions to survive in rapidly changing environments while enhancing their opportunities to become the designers of their desired future.

Peter Garrett

I worked closely with David Bohm (theoretical physicist) from 1984 to 1992 on the formulation and development of Dialogue - see 'Dialogue - A Proposal'.  In 1993 I began Prison Dialogue to take Dialogue into the Criminal Justice System, and have continued to work in prisons and criminal justice ever since.  For some years I partnered with Bill Isaacs as a director of Dialogos, helping to develop the Leadership for Collective Intelligence programme.  Then in 2003 I began Dialogue Associates with my long-standing business partner Jane Ball, for international commercial and social consulting work, which we continue to do.  

I co-founded the Academy of Professional Dialogue in 2016 and currently act as Chairman of the Board of Trustees.  To promote good Professional Dialogue work, I formed Dialogue Publications in 2018 with Cliff Penwell.  I am Chair of the Professional Standards and Accreditation Board, within the Academy of Professional Dialogue, which is laying the foundations for the recognition of Dialogue as a Profession.  My wife and I are based in the UK, and spend part of the year in Spain and South Africa.

James O’Dea

is author of The Conscious Activist, Cultivating Peace , Soul Awakening Practice (June 2017) and other acclaimed works. James is a former President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Washington office director of Amnesty International and CEO of the Seva Foundation. He worked with the Middle East Council of Churches in Beirut during a time of war and massacre and lived in Turkey for five years during civil upheaval and coup d’etat.

He has taught peacebuilding to over a thousand students in 30 countries. He has also conducted frontline social healing dialogues around the world. He is a member of The Evolutionary Leaders group and on the Advisory Board of The Peace Alliance and Kosmos Journal. James also mentors emerging leaders. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Laszlo New Paradigm Institute. James is both an activist and mystic.

see: https://Jamesodea.com

Helena Demuynck is Founding Partner of Konsensus Leadership Coaching & Development and of oxygen4leadership. Both platforms offer international expertise in developing Leadership Development Trails for Senior Leadership Teams and Executives. Helena is a dynamic, outcome-driven leadership coach focused on driving leadership success through a compelling range of coaching and consulting skills and expertise. She is passionate about the power of authenticity and coaches executives and senior leadership teams to recognize, visualize, and actualize success using the power of authenticity. She provides insight, feedback and helps leaders build a collaborative environment where the future can be envisioned and systematically enabled. Helena is an evangelist for women in leadership and has been on speaker panels for summits, events, and organizations. Helena shares her thoughts on authentic leadership via speaking engagements and regular blogging. With coaching certifications by Marshall Goldsmith, Authentic Global and Center4Selfmanagement, Helena has facilitated leadership development and executive coaching across a broad range of industries. Her extensive client portfolio consists of prominent companies, such as Deloitte, EY, UCB, J&J, Microsoft, Bridgestone, and Aleris. She holds a Masters degree in Law from the Ghent University and has completed advanced programs and certifications such as Conversational Intelligence, Systemic NLP Master Practitioner, Systemic Team Coaching, and Lego Serious Play. Helena is certified in the use of TEIQue, PDA, and numerous other assessments.

FireHawk Hulin

Born in the British Isles, FireHawk came to the US as a very young man – to study and to find his way in the world. He spent his early professional years immersed in theatre arts and large-scale communication projects, using multi-media, emerging computer graphics tools and his burgeoning love of photography (which continues unabated to this day)

He says that meeting his teachers 25 years ago helped him to find something that he had been seeking (without consciously knowing it) his whole life; a real and practical connection to the wisdom and beauty of Mother Earth.

The designs of the Medicine Wheels spoke to him of both very ancient memories as well as the new promise of coming to a healing of our separations from ourselves, from each other and from all of the rest of our more-than-human world.

He and Pele have agreed to pass along this ancient lineage to those who are following behind, thereby keeping alive one of the threads of wisdom that help us to live on our home planet as wise stewards and true partners with Earth.

FireHawk is father of two sons, stepfather of three daughters and one other son, and grandfather to nine grandchildren (and counting!). His blended family is an example of the patience that is required to truly heal our old wounds by choosing listening and love in every situation.

Rudy Vandamme

Transformation catalyst, teacher, writer, and coach, these are my main roles. I serve leaders, teachers, coaches, and social workers to become genuine change makers in their professional practice. 

Already for 20 years I call myself a designer. It still holds true that my main talent is to create new methodologies for communication, community, business, healthcare and education which are based on a more relational and integral worldview. Due to my hybrid profile, being academically and NLP trained, my foremost gift from life is to be able to translate new ways of thinking into practices and pattern language that are easy to integrate in your life and work. 

Katherine Trebeck

Formally, the biography would go something like this: 'Katherine is Advocacy & Influencing Lead for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. She has over eight years experience in various roles with Oxfam GB: as a Senior Researcher for the Global Research Team, as UK Policy Manager, and as Research and Policy Advisor for Oxfam Scotland. Katherine, with Lorenzo Fioramonti, instigated the Wellbeing Economy Governments (an alternative to the G7); developed Oxfam's Humankind Index; and led Oxfam's work on a 'human economy'. She was Rapporteur for Club de Madrid's Working Group on Shared Societies and Sustainability and is on the advisory board for the Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity (University of Surrey); the Omina Foundation; the Living Well Within Limits project (University of Leeds); A Good Life for All Within Planetary Boundaries (University of Leeds); and the Economic Democracy Index project (University of Glasgow). Katherine has a PhD in Political Science from the Australian National University and is Honorary Professor at the University of the West of Scotland and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde. Her  book The Economics of Arrival: Ideas for a Grown Up Economy (co-authored with Jeremy Williams and published by Policy Press) was published in early 2019'.

Less formally, it would be more like this: Katherine loves rain; the Scottish mountains; Australian wine; both country's rugby teams; and cooking for friends as often as life allows.

Paul is an award-winning documentary film director with 20 years experience making films for the BBC, PBS, Arte, and others. He created films and documentaries around the wold and now supports up and coming filmmakers and other storytellers.

Paul established Brilliantio to help people to realize their storytelling potential and gain audiences. With over 26,000 students online in 151 countries, Brilliantio's mission is just getting started!

These are challenging times for all-beings and humanity is certainly on quite a journey!
Maybe you are also asking yourself these questions these days:
What can be done to navigate through these challenging times?
What new qualities and approaches are there to be developed to adapt to these new challenges?
What could the next steps in my personal and in societal evolution look like?
Those questions have been at the center of my attention for the last two decades.

And the (first) answers I found for myself made me passionate about the new possibilities and perspectives for the personal, team and organizational development that have become available to us in those last two decades and continue to develop rapidly day by day.

These latest developments, especially those that are about digging into the collective wisdom, supported me to believe in men's developmental possibilities and the possibility of mankind to master this (huge) challenge.
Not naive and blindly, but because of what is happening in positive developments everywhere in the world. And yes, the clock is ticking, there is not much time for more delay.

One thing that became very clear to me:
We are in this all together, no one person, organization or even country will be able to master this alone.
Therefore I made the Art of Dialogue to a central part of my attention, as new alliances, new teams, new cooperations have to be developed.

My coaching approach is an integral one, bringing together personal and team goals, skills, identity with the bigger framework we are part of in one integral structure of work.
This guarantees transformable and sustainable results that last instead of short time results that often go together with new crises and rapid fallbacks.

If you resonate with this insight and would like to connect, then a short free introductory conversation could give you and me clarity about the project, your wishes, the methods I use and help to find out if we can be a good team together.

As a Coach with a long personal history as a medical doctor, sports teacher, communication trainer, mediator and artist there is a broad potential of insights, tools, and perspectives I am able to put also at your disposal to support your personal development or that of your team in all possible ways.

Feel free to contact me by email for any further questions or use the possibility to book a first introductory conversation on this page.

I am looking forward to connect with you!

with warm regards

Michel van Amsterdam 

Marie-Ève Marchand  

has a Ph.D. in adult education. Her research focused on Bohm dialogue as a means of developing the reflective capacity of adults. She took a keen interest in the potential of dialogue within an organizational context. She taught dialogue for several years in the Department of Management at Laval University, in Quebec, Canada.

She has extensive experience as a senior executive within the public service of Canada. She is also a therapist, a graduate of the Gestalt Institute of Toronto, and a certified coach in integral development.

She is a member of the international organization The Academy of Professional Dialogue. She gives dialogue training workshops on a regular basis. Her current focus is on dialogue and the development of consciousness.

She is the author of a book published in 2019, first in French under the title Vivre en dialogue à l’ère du textoand, shortly after, in English, under the title The Spirit of Dialogue in a Digital Age.

Hassan Ghiassi is the Founder of Aristotle's Cafe, a format shown to improve the ability to communicate effectively, think critically, and at the same time increase cultural and emotional intelligence. He has brought this unique approach to small group discussion to the world with new groups popping up each and every month. With the belief that the most successful organizations find ways to communicate effectively. Hassan has been trusted by startups and established companies alike to revamp internal communication strategies to build teams towards a unified vision. His goal is to help others improve their communication skills - taking the mystery out of creating engaging conversations. Training individuals to become captivating speakers and masterful leaders in their own communities. He has worked with Fortune 500 Companies, Universities, and was a workshop presenter at the Techsauce Global Summit, one of the biggest Tech events in Asia in 2018 & 2019. With 14 years of international experience working across 3 continents, Hassan knows what it takes to connect with people both personally and professionally.

John Croft

trained in biogeography and social planning, and obtained a PhD in Community Development. He worked with several international organizations (London University Institute of Education, The British Council, The World Bank, The FordFoundation, etc.) for which he carried out various social and rural / regional development projects in Africa, Indonesia,Papua New Guinea and Western Australia. He has been a researcher in Paris for UNESCO.

He is currently an active lecturer, trainer, researcher and project consultant, who travels around the world, giving DragonDreaming workshops and accompanying related events: such as the Dragon Dreaming Confest, the Transition and PermacultureMovement or the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN).

Mary Alice Arthur

I grew up as the oldest daughter of two teachers. I got hooked on stories from the first moment I saw a book. I was the kid who kept reading after lights out and walked to school reading two books at once (fortunately, I grew up in a flat place!). During school holidays the family piled into the car and took to the roads, and that gave me an itchy foot. Before long I was 17 and being an exchange student gave me my first taste of the wider world. The stage was set for a love of wondering coupled with a delight in wandering — the ideal attributes for a Story Activist and a self-professed citizen of the world. 

Working with an international student organization taught me the power of working across diversity. I learned about the compelling nature of purpose, the importance of a spark of  vision and the power of cohesive practice. I began to think -- and work -- around the world.

I caught the story bug in earnest in the early ’90s while living in New Zealand. It happened at the first international storytelling festival. That was the moment when I saw the power of storytelling for the first time and I started hanging out in the library gathering as many stories as I could. I performed as as storyteller, but I soon realized I wanted to hear other's voices more than just my own. There seemed to be something important in sharing stories and working with them. That's why I was part of the first gatherings of organizational storytelling practitioners a decade later. 

At the same time I was honing my craft as a facilitator, working with everyone from the Treasury and government departments to volunteer organizations. I worked to connect teams, support groups to get strategic, I even facilitated a successful telecomunications merger. In 2007 I found out about the Art of Hosting. Then one day I met a futurist at a conference who told me one of the top upcoming trends would be "leader as storyteller" and I began to dream of the day my process work and my love of stories would unite. 

Now I join StoryWork with a leading edge skill in using participatory practice to help groups become high performing communities, able to step up, co-create a compelling story, and from it, wise sustained action. These days I work around the world with leaders in all levels of public and private organisations and communities. As an international steward of the Art of Hosting network, I teach storyworking skills and participatory practice, and host participatory gatherings all over the globe. 

I am sometimes at home in Columbus, Ohio and a lot on the road.  

Stefan Bergheim is the director of the Center for Societal Progress in Frankfurt, Germany. He developed and applied “Quality of Life Processes”, which start with inclusive dialogues, condense the insights of those into visions, identify suitable indicators, and initiate appropriate actions. At the summit he will share his experience from working in the German Chancellor’s “Dialogue on Germany’s Future” and with the national government’s “Wellbeing Dialogue”, as well as insights from his own dialogue projects at the local level and on “Quality of Life in the Digital Age”.