Belonging & Purpose - a microsolidarity learning and practice journey for growing local community

Belonging & Purpose – a Microsolidarity learning and practice journey for growing local community

Overview

Join us for an eight-week journey into community and purpose in Berlin. Together we will explore how small groups of benevolence and coherence can foster a sense of belonging, trust, safety, and care, and enable us to contribute meaningfully towards a more beautiful world.

Background and Context

In a world grappling with environmental degradation, rapid technological shifts, widespread mental health issues, eroding democratic norms and deepening social divides, it can be easy to fall into despair and overwhelm. As we confront these seemingly insurmountable challenges, the need for cohesive local communities built on compassion and collaboration has never been more critical.

We believe that building tight-knit local communities focused on friendship and working together is key to addressing our individual and shared challenges. Such environments are essential for fostering personal growth and collective resilience, empowering us to transcend our feelings of isolation and powerlessness. Yet it’s not always clear how we can tap into the vast potential for support and collaborative action that lies within our immediate circles and neighbourhoods.

So how do we actually do this?

Our Approach

Belonging & Purpose aims to bring people together who want to cultivate spaces where trust, mutual support and belonging can thrive. We’re setting out to build small, interconnected communities that can be the change we all want to see, boosting our ability to contribute purposefully in ways that matter.

During this eight-week program we’ll be sharing tools, practices and structures for growing an active network of support, cross-pollinating inspiration and ideas and helping each other’s projects and goals flourish. This journey is about finding ways to not just cope with the complexities of our times but to thrive by connecting and making a positive impact together.

Along the way we’ll also be cultivating our skills and capacities to build these spaces and connections wherever we go, whoever we’re with.

This journey is for you if you…

• Are looking for a deeper sense of belonging in your local communities or neighbourhood
• Would like to feel more agency and the ability to contribute to positive change
• Want to enable more trust, support and care in your relationships
• Want to mingle and cross-pollinate with other change-makers
• Look for opportunities for mutual support and collaboration
• Want to empower yourself and others

In our journey we will…

• Learn to facilitate and host wholesome group spaces
• Increase our capacity for authentic sharing, deep listening and giving and receiving feedback
• Practice embodying more of our whole selves in groups
• Learn concrete methods, practices and structures for community-building and collaboration
• Explore our personal purpose, challenges and direction
• Enable collective mutual support in our lives and projects
• Learn how to apply Microsolidarity to our own relationships and networks

This invitation is not just a call to learn but to discover the richness within our networks, explore our unique gifts and align our life energies with our deepest values. Together, let’s grow, flourish, and become active agents for building community in our city.

Format

We will meet for eight two-hour in-person sessions in Berlin, integrating practices from Microsolidarity, Work that Reconnects, Liberating Structures, Art of Hosting, Internal Family Systems, Nonviolent Communication, Mindfulness, and Self-Compassion.

Based on Microsolidarity’s premise that different group sizes are suitable for different purposes, we will apply these practices on different scales: self (you), dyad (you and someone else), crew (up to 6 people) and congregation (up to 150 people).

Each session will feature theoretical content and peer-led practice within crews. If you join alongside people you already know you will have the option to form a crew with them. Simply indicate this in the application responses.

Dates

The journey will take place on Wednesdays 19:00 – 21:00, from 10th of April to the 29th of May.

Location

The journey will take place at a venue in Kreuzberg. The exact location will be announced soon.

Hosting crew

Jocelyn Ames

Jocelyn is a social change facilitator, community builder and mediator. She supports individuals and groups to develop collaborative skills and structures for inclusive coexistence. As a key organizer and facilitator for the Microsolidarity Network, she promotes a spirit of hospitality and leaderfullness among a self-organising collective of community building practitioners. With a decade of training and practice in Nonviolent Communication, Internal Family Systems and systemic transformation she guides decentralised organisations and self-managing teams as a collaborator with The Hum. Interwoven with her professional endeavours, she has built up extensive experience of hosting and living within co-living projects and intentional residential communities around the world. Having grown up in five different countries amidst diverse cultures, Jocelyn’s upbringing instilled in her a profound belief in humanity’s innate drive for connection and belonging, transcending cultural boundaries. For more insights into Jocelyn’s work and story, visit www.becomingtogether.net

Nicolas Endres

Nicolas is a facilitator, mediator and community builder living in Berlin. Combining his background in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy with practical skills in coaching and mediation he supports individuals and teams in their journey towards new ways of relating, collaborating and being. He is passionate about creating communities built on trust, purpose and belonging where we can enable one another to thrive and be the change we want to see in the world. In line with this vision he co-founded, and for years co-directed, Imago Space, a self-organised co-working community in Berlin-Kreuzberg and offers courses on microsolidarity and community-building. Since his early twenties he studied Buddhist and Daoist psychology and philosophy and practiced extensively in the fields of meditation, Yoga, Qigong, Taichi, breathwork and plant medicine. He currently offers courses on inner science, meditation and Qigong and gives public talks on science and philosophy.

Experiences from participants

“Having struggled to wrangle my individual friendships and engagements into a more cohesive structure, the Microsolidarity Project brought an unexpected type of consistency and trust to my weekly rhythm. I found a container where I could witness myself and others sharing and receiving support in close proximity, and that has helped me reconsider how I might take my wishes for community into my own hands. The end of the project felt more like a waypoint – the connections and inspiration I left with are still simmering and moving towards some new outlet.
The broad scope of the project and the mixture of participants aligned in their care for experiencing community left me with plenty of space for new ideas to emerge and existing ones to ripen. I think anybody with the time and emotional bandwidth to show up for themselves and engage new people will find themselves met by the group and its processes.”

Jackson Wolf

“I joined the Berlin Microsolidarity project from a place of curiosity and largely because of the great trust I have in Jocelyn [and Karl and Catherine] as a facilitator to create and curate spaces and experiences for deep connection, and individual and collective growth.
Participating in the project has been really meaningful. It supported me to deepen existing friendships and connections, from an already close 10 year friendship, to some people I’d had on my radar and had wanted opportunity to get to know further.
Participating in the project and deepening these connections had significantly contributed to a growing sense of ‘at home-ness’ in Berlin.
I would recommend this project to anyone seeking to connect deeply with others in Berlin, build/ strengthen community, and/or looking to bring a project to life with mutual companionship and support.”

Sarah Pelham