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An expanding and flourishing network of facilitators in Europe is supporting and empowering each other across borders to have the symposium reach out to new countries and new target groups. My wife and I live in Stockholm Sweden and are actively involved in this work. I was Facilitator Trained in the UK one year ago, after which I ran a training in Sweden. By the end of March participants had attended from Norway, France and Turkey, taking the symposium to their countries.
The symposium in Estonia
In May, we were invited to Estonia by the activist Erki Kaikkonen to offer the first symposium in that country, organized by him and Marit Stepanova. It was hosted by Estonian Student Union and held at the Representation of the European Commission in Estonia. The room felt truly international with all the flags of the European countries present. Altogether, 25 people participated and the magic of the symposium seemed to reach through the language barrier in Estonia as in many other cultures before.
The area of social justice turned out to be of particular interest, since the Baltic states recently have suffered similar austerity measures as Greece is experiencing today, enforced by international banks, with increasing gaps between rich and poor.
The Symposium reaches Sardinia
We are also supporting a group on Sardinia, Italy, who are involved in bringing the symposium to their island. On October 2, we facilitated a symposium with 20 participants on "Costa Smeralda" in the northern part of Sardinia. Some Swedish facilitators with connections to Italy joined us to support the growth of the initiative in the country, among them Eva Milanesio Bagge who helped translate the symposium and Ulrica "Ica" Horn who lives part of her time in this area.
In the symposium, there was a "dance" between four different languages: English, Italian, Swedish and Spanish. The response was very positive and several participants committed themselves to support a continuation. The work will be coordinated with the work carried out by a group in Rome who have already come far in developing an Italian version of the AV materials, supported by Vivian Dittmar from Be The Change Germany.
We are also part of the European efforts to reach new target groups, not the least the business area. A new initiative, the Re-Vision Program, is being developed by Be The Change Germany and the Terra Institute to adapt the symposium to this audience. In Sweden, I have been working since January with the new CEO of an educational company, Axelsons, that has for almost 50 years been a national and global leader in the area of health and body therapies. The CEO, Rolf Elmström, participated in the symposium last December and felt that this was the next step for his company. During the spring I worked with him to design the new "meta story" of Axelsons which resulted in their new vision "A World of Touch" - that is, an interconnected world!
They want to take full advantage of the new market that is emerging as a result of the new holistic worldview - and they want to be a leader in co-creating this worldview. They have already done a lot to shift the collective consciousness of Sweden, through their initiative "peaceful touch" in which hundreds of thousands of Swedish children have learned to give massage to each other (which in its turn has lead to a radical decrease of violence in schools). Now they are taking the next step through expanding the concept of touch... The contents of the symposium was brought into their kickoff in the beginning of September, and it was a great success.
Training in Germany
An expression of the spirit of interconnectedness in Europe was the "train the trainer" program in Germany in July, in which Maria-Conchita and I were part of a group of 12 participants who came from six different countries. Through our various backgrounds, a big part of the world was present with all of its possibilities and challenges such as the Israel-Palestine conflict. Our feeling is that we together can develop the true spirit of European Union, not to build walls against the rest of the world, but to lead the way and be a living example of an inter-dependent and interconnected world.
By Niklas Hogberg
