Beloved Community Bootcamp: A Training for Bridge-Builders

This 5-day immersive training is designed specifically for facilitators, coaches, and leaders who want to elevate their ability to navigate complex group dynamics and support productive inter-group exchange in an increasingly polarized world.

We believe that improving your capacity to lead in these challenging times requires relating to conflict facilitation as a pathway of self-discovery.

This fundamental principle shapes our multi-modal approach, which integrates contemplative practice (Zen meditation & inquiry), deep developmental psychological work, and practical facilitation techniques.

Why Now?

Today we find ourselves living in unprecedented transitions. The global scope of crises we face are disrupting how we live, work, and love, and the changes only continue to escalate. As facilitators and leaders in this context, we are called to be more than neutral parties helping groups find common ground. We must often take courageous stands that disrupt groupthink on all sides of the political spectrum, advocate for our shared humanity, and create powerful invitations that reveal novel ways of being together.

The most effective facilitators today know when to maintain neutrality and when to boldly challenge groups toward what’s possible—creating spaces where our diversity and our profound common humanity are honoured. In a world of increasing polarization, where fear, anxiety, and resentment drive us apart, those who can build bridges and hold space for transformation are needed more than ever. Beloved Community offers a framework and practice for standing in the liminal space between the world as it is and the world as it could be, developing the hearts and minds needed to embody and enact respect, care, and equity in all spaces we inhabit.

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” – Rainer maria Rilke

Why Beloved Community?

Beloved Community is the antidote to our fractured politics and unbridled ethnocentrism. It offers more than just a set of skills—it provides a framework, a vision, and an unrelenting commitment to everyone and our shared humanity. This way of being and doing was powerfully modeled by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis throughout their lives and work. In this training, we are borrowing their approach and applying it specifically to the domain of group facilitation and conflict resolution.

At its core, Beloved Community recognizes that effective facilitation requires spiritual development—not in a religious sense, but in the profound work of clarifying who we are in relation to others. This training centers compassion as a powerful force in responding to division and pain, while acknowledging that our evolutionary journey, both spiritually and developmentally, revolves around settling the fundamental question of what is self and what is other.

As we deepen our understanding of who we are, we become more effective bridge-builders, able to source our actions from genuine compassion rather than reaction. Beloved Community is a practice of standing in the liminal space, serving as a bridge between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be, honing hearts and minds to embody and enact respect, care, and equity in the spaces where we work, live, and play.

Enter the Bootcamp

This bootcamp provides rigorous practice and skill-building for professionals who work with teams, organizations, and communities, equipping them to become instruments through which a better future can transform itself.

By developing advanced techniques to bridge divides and transform conflict, participants learn to embody the future they wish to create, allowing new possibilities to take shape within themselves before manifesting in the groups they serve.

The training creates environments where diverse perspectives can thrive together, recognizing that the future we seek must first find form within us as facilitators and leaders.

This training is for you:

• If you are clear that ethnocentric, rivalrous dynamics are an evolutionary dead-end. And, that we need to discover real and enlivened ways to embody Beloved Community.
• If you are a leader working at two levels – the job you were hired to do & humanizing the workplace. You desire to grow your skills in working with difference in service of creating more coherence and wholeness.
• If you are a coach, facilitator or consultant who is looking for novel ways of sensing, feeling, and thinking about us-them dynamics.
• If you are interested in reacting less from ego and more from your innate wholeness.
• If you have a learner-mindset: you are open, humble, and yearn to learn.

What you will receive:

• New ways of being that enable powerful new choices and actions to enact clarity, compassion and love
• Real-time coaching and feedback
• Increased capacity to navigate uncertainty, difference and conflict
• Tools and frameworks to work transformationally with individuals, teams and communities

Daily practice will include:

• Embodiment exercises for wellbeing
• Group practices to grow capabilities interpersonally, emotionally, and cognitively
• Zen meditation and teachings on compassion and love
• Opportunities to connect to nature

Testimonials

“I would recommend this training to people because it truly delivers on its promise of altering your perspective. The possibility of reaching across the barrier that divides us had not been possible in my lifetime before this training.” -Ahmad Wright, Assistant Dean of Career Education, Stanford University

“This training was unlike any training around equality I’ve ever had… it had the power to encourage everyone in the room to be an agent of new resolutions, while being courageous enough to help the room get real about their growth edges, in the spirit of mutual support.” -Roshanda Cummings, Community Catalyst, Impact Hub Oakland

“This workshop was the most powerful equity, diversity, inclusion experience I have ever had. Gabe, Lisa and team did a terrific job holding and cultivating an unpredictable space and created the conditions for a truly remarkable outcome. It deeply touched my heart and expanded my perspectives. I highly recommend this workshop for those who authentically care about diversity and want to dive deep into the conversations that matter most.” -Adam Leonard, Executive Development, Google

Daily Schedule

A detailed schedule will be emailed to you about 30 days prior to your program. Click here to view a sample program schedule.