Co-creation Session

Dear Reader,

When starting this Value Creators project we knew engagement with our network was going to be an important focus. As much as we tried to develop possible interventions and strategies to tackle our subject we knew we needed our network for this as well.

Collaboration and systems thinking is crucial when understanding complex situations. Our network has been formed to supply our project with different knowledge and points of view.

We decided to host a co-creation session, an event with our network that would allow for conversation, understanding and collectively working towards shaping the project.

Planning a co-creation was a challenge, we invited everyone out of our network and managed to find a suitable day for the co-creation to take place and a comfortable location.

The people who attended were; Frédérique te Dorsthorst – working in the field of personal narratives, stories and archetypes; Annemarie Wiersema – engaged in healthcare, constellation work and space-holding; Dimitar Borumov – political economist, representative of the InterFaith network and a teacher of history, literature and more; Herbert Alfonson – art freelancer; and Zarina Boekhoudt – GPCM student, working on her thesis in the field of diversity and authentic cultural exchange.

The session was divided in three stages – Connect, Explore and Create and it gave us great insights and directions to move forward.

We started off our session with a small guided meditation, to accompany a safe space and provide room to ‘’land’’ and feel our presence. After that we moved over to a large table and provided everyone with a large paper and some drawing materials. We prompted the question;’’What does your passion look like?’’ After drawing for 10 minutes we spoke about our drawings and got to know each other. Then Nico provided a circle of influence exercise which went more into depth on our professional life.

After we got to know each other we started exploring the topic of duality, we hosted an organic talking session which let everyone speak up when they felt they wanted to bring something to the table. We had questions prepared if the conversation needed direction. It was very insightful to hear our network speak about the topic of our project, it provided us with a lot of valuable knowledge and direction.

The creating part of the session was unfortunately cut short, due to the time we had available. We would have liked to focus more towards shaping an intervention together but were engaged in conversation for a long time, which was okay. We thoroughly enjoyed our co creation session and we received great and useful constructive feedback.