Community Leadership Fellowship:
Authentic Effective Leadership
Leading From The Emerging Future
PLEASE NOTE: This event has already taken place. To see Upcoming Community Praxis Co-op Events, see the Events & Resources tab.
Facilitated by Peter Westoby.
Facilitated by Peter Westoby.

The Fellowship will:
Be a Fellowship of experienced colleagues led by Gerard Dowling, Peter Westoby and others from Community Praxis Co-op.
Move beyond previous Community Praxis Co-op programmes, this is an intensive five-month journey of engagement and encounter towards the deepening of our leadership in organisational, community and social practice underscored by traditions and sensibilities that offer guidance for our praxis in challenging times -including Rabindranath Tagore, David Whyte, bell hooks, Martin Buber, Paulo Freire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Peter Senge.
Be an intensive journey as part of a ‘community of practice’, aimed at developing the faculties and understanding necessary to deepen your capacity for leadership in reflective community and social practice.
A programme that observes the rigour of academia whilst challenging its ways of thinking and engages learning through a practising community.
The idea:
To build community and a robust reflective community and social practice, courage is needed,
courage to go within (soul-work) so that we may work without,
courage to act by becoming ever more receptive, to feel the world arise or fall inside our own bodies;
courage to work on our thinking, moving it towards the dialogical and participatory,
and to recognise the heart as a phenomenological organ of perception,
to experience our bodies as our way of relating,
courage to work with others on refining our practice,
courage to challenge the very grain and gesture of our times.
The modality:
A community of practice that convenes for four one-day sessions, spread over five months - that commits itself, each and every one, to completing readings and reflective journals during the intervening weeks, sharing deeply of self and practice, through writing, through reading and study, through reflecting together (perhaps small groups), through bringing field practice into the room under the tutelage and in the presence of Gerard, Peter and others, who will dedicate themselves to holding, challenging, drawing this community onward, and resourcing its engagement with a rich body of literature.
The content and faculties:
To start the Fellowship, you’ll be invited into a courageous and vulnerable exploration of what soul-work means for us as leaders in our workplaces and communities, perfectly poised on the early edge of 2020, coming together with experienced colleagues for a day in January.
Then we will journey into a challenging space of examining our practice and leadership anchored firmly in the wisdom of dialogical and participatory traditions of community and organisational development. This will be a pre-Easter deep dive.
For that April month of turning towards Autumn we will invite you into a phenomenological social practice, underpinned by a Goethean sensibility. We will explore, appreciate and affirm our most authentic selves as artists of the invisible applying subtle skills of delicate activism to our roles as organisational and community leaders.
May will have arrived, and we will stand on the solid foundations we have established and explicitly explore how we can share what we have learned with our people, staff and colleagues through creative and engaging group processes of leading learning organisations that are willing and able to be deeply engaged with the emerging future.
The Fellowship will be potent and practical for:
Be a Fellowship of experienced colleagues led by Gerard Dowling, Peter Westoby and others from Community Praxis Co-op.
Move beyond previous Community Praxis Co-op programmes, this is an intensive five-month journey of engagement and encounter towards the deepening of our leadership in organisational, community and social practice underscored by traditions and sensibilities that offer guidance for our praxis in challenging times -including Rabindranath Tagore, David Whyte, bell hooks, Martin Buber, Paulo Freire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Peter Senge.
Be an intensive journey as part of a ‘community of practice’, aimed at developing the faculties and understanding necessary to deepen your capacity for leadership in reflective community and social practice.
A programme that observes the rigour of academia whilst challenging its ways of thinking and engages learning through a practising community.
The idea:
To build community and a robust reflective community and social practice, courage is needed,
courage to go within (soul-work) so that we may work without,
courage to act by becoming ever more receptive, to feel the world arise or fall inside our own bodies;
courage to work on our thinking, moving it towards the dialogical and participatory,
and to recognise the heart as a phenomenological organ of perception,
to experience our bodies as our way of relating,
courage to work with others on refining our practice,
courage to challenge the very grain and gesture of our times.
The modality:
A community of practice that convenes for four one-day sessions, spread over five months - that commits itself, each and every one, to completing readings and reflective journals during the intervening weeks, sharing deeply of self and practice, through writing, through reading and study, through reflecting together (perhaps small groups), through bringing field practice into the room under the tutelage and in the presence of Gerard, Peter and others, who will dedicate themselves to holding, challenging, drawing this community onward, and resourcing its engagement with a rich body of literature.
The content and faculties:
To start the Fellowship, you’ll be invited into a courageous and vulnerable exploration of what soul-work means for us as leaders in our workplaces and communities, perfectly poised on the early edge of 2020, coming together with experienced colleagues for a day in January.
Then we will journey into a challenging space of examining our practice and leadership anchored firmly in the wisdom of dialogical and participatory traditions of community and organisational development. This will be a pre-Easter deep dive.
For that April month of turning towards Autumn we will invite you into a phenomenological social practice, underpinned by a Goethean sensibility. We will explore, appreciate and affirm our most authentic selves as artists of the invisible applying subtle skills of delicate activism to our roles as organisational and community leaders.
May will have arrived, and we will stand on the solid foundations we have established and explicitly explore how we can share what we have learned with our people, staff and colleagues through creative and engaging group processes of leading learning organisations that are willing and able to be deeply engaged with the emerging future.
The Fellowship will be potent and practical for:
- Community and social practitioners who want to reflect deeply on themselves as ‘source’, the key instrument in our practice
- Group and organisational leaders who’d like to lean further into their leadership practices of observation, deep listening, and discernment
- Active and engaged citizens who’d like to be more conscious of their intuitive practices
- Activists, social and ecological practitioners wanting to deepen their dialogue and reflection capabilities
- ‘…This fellowship protected by soul during covid’
- ‘…the course helped me be in touch with my aliveness, and lean into the balance of freedom and responsibility’
- ‘… I’ve learned to step back, slow down, observe and be reflective, so my action is more potent’
- ‘…. I’ve reconnected with my senses and heart, and have a much clearer intention’