Maria is a process consultant, host and social entrepreneur, creating the conditions for citizens, organisations and senior management to have meaningful conversations that changes their mindsets and behaviours and leads to systemic change. She has a specialisation in working with Multi-Stakeholder groups, Social Labs and Organisational Development. Maria offers her natural ability to see patterns, create structure and design processes, especially when new solutions and forms need to be co-created.

Maria has applied this through specialising in Participatory Leadership and Collaboration, working with a wide range of clients from the European Institutions, Municipalities through to social movements/networks and working with activists. She has worked in many parts of the world.  Maria has also been a Corporate Director in the public sector in the UK, where she began her practice of working with citizens and across sectors.  She is a co-initiator of the Art of Participatory Leadership, which is now a global network/community of practice that translates a Systems View of Life into daily practice and is used in all sectors. Maria is a co-founder of AoHAthina in Greece, a social enterprise bringing participative leadership in times of collapse and crisis. Maria is fluent in Greek and English.

www.mariascordialos.com 

Linda is an experienced group process facilitator and host of personal, collective and whole system transformation. With 35 years of organisational development coaching and people experience, Linda designs and hosts strategic consultations and large scale participative public conversations. She also designs and hosts learning journeys and more personal retreat spaces for deeper dives into the ‘why and the how’ of life and purposeful work. She has supported participatory engagement for regional devolution in Kenya, developed leadership programmes for young women for the United Nations in Panama, supported collaborative public health networks for the World Health Organisation and trained social change activists in Spain and the UK in participatory process.   A steward of the Art of Hosting, Linda also practices her stakeholder engagement, participatory hosting and design work within the European Commission, European Council, Parliament and European Economic Social Committee, training in participative leadership and advising on citizen consultation. 

www.lindajoymitchell.org.uk

Valerie has worked for the last 13 years as an independent consultant in the field of dialogue and conversation, providing collaborative structures and frameworks to support strategic and consultative assignments in the UK public and not for profit sectors. She has a solid research background having completed a Doctorate in Business Management. She is fluent in three languages and is accustomed to working across different cultures. Her current work is focused on process evaluation and data collection. She has recently undertaken a research and evaluation process for the Citizens’ Lab and presented a number of recommendations aimed at strengthening and scaling up the network model across Europe. For the European Commission, Valerie undertook the design and delivery of an evaluation of a pilot citizens dialogue project across 8 European countries aimed at assessing the effectiveness and impact of a participatory process.

Odysseas Velentzas facilitates a variety of tools based on organisational learning, systems thinking approach and a range of participatory processes for business, social enterprises and institutions. He had offered his services in the European Commission, and many countries in Europe, Balkans and East Mediterranean. Since 2021 he is working for Ohi Paizoume UrbanDig Project as Community Engagement Specialist  for various local community and artistic projects.

Odysseas holds a BA in Economics and MSc in Organisational Behaviour.

Anton believes in the power of collaboration and unusual connections between people, topics and organisations. His curiosity brought him to study and live in several countries in Europe and Latin America, where in all his roles he explored how groups work and self-organise to achieve meaningful results. He combines experience in management consulting with strong facilitation skills and ability to connect diverse ideas. Anton devoted the past 9 years to introducing the Art of Hosting practice in Bulgaria. He is co-founder, together with Anna Dimitrova, of Open Space Collective that works in Bulgaria and Europe with clients such as the European Commission, the European Parliament, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Joint Research Center, Purpose Climate Lab, Bulgarian Council on Migrants and Refugees, banks, ministries and municipalities.

Anton holds a BA degree in Economics and Masters in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability. 

Anna believes in the power of participation and communities. Over the years, she has worked with social innovators in Paris, London, Cairo and Tunis, where she created and led impactful programs for collaboration between diverse organisations that co-create new solutions. Anna believes that authentic connections between people and good conversations are key to our work and life, yet slightly forgotten these days. This realisation brought her to the international network of Art of Hosting and motivated her to develop the practice in Bulgaria since 2013. 

Anna co-founded Open Space Collective together with Anton Valkov and since then has worked with a variety of public and private organisations on projects requiring broad engagement of stakeholders, facilitation of dialogue and co-creation of new ideas and organisational structures. 

Anna loves cities and public spaces and perceives them as living laboratories for change.

Anna has a BA degree in Political Science and an MA in Social Economy.

Vihra believes that the quality of our conversations defines the quality of our actions. That is why she creates spaces for meaningful conversations - in person, as well as online. Vihra has been an Art of Hosting practitioner since 2015 and applies the methods in regional and international context. Among her clients are Greenpeace Bulgaria, Fraunhofer Germany, European Academy of Nursing Science and others. 

Vihra is also an entrepreneur - in 2018 she co-created Tierra Verde Bulgaria, a conscious business, which offers an alternative to people who want to live without toxins and plastic waste in their homes.

She holds Bachelor degree in International Business and Management from FH Osnabrück, Germany and MSc in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability from the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden.

www.vihra.net

Zlatina is a designer of transformation processes and she supports complex and deeply purposeful projects to engage diverse stakeholders in collaborative journeys that bring learning and transformation on personal, team and systemic level. She applies participatory practices, storytelling, systems thinking, and movement to encourage intentional and wise action towards a shared purpose. In the past four years, she has worked in an experiment for transforming higher education in the Netherlands, called Digital Society School where her role was to design transformative learning experiences for a multicultural, interdisciplinary community of learners who collaborate to address complex sustainability challenges using technologies and design thinking. Currently, she is working with an NGO called Commonland that uses social innovation labs and multi-stakeholder processes to regenerate landscapes and bring back hope, capital, people and biodiversity in landscapes degraded by human activity. 

She brings together an MA in Lifelong Learning, a bachelor in business, several entrepreneurial endeavours and almost 30 years of dancing practice to build bridges between worlds, ideas and people who might not connect otherwise.

Atanas Genkov is devoted to enhancing personal development and participatory leadership both in urban environment and by taking people out in the wild nature. He has more than 10 years of international experience in coaching, designing, and delivering learning experiences, sustainability consulting and outdoor education. Atanas has worked with diverse organisations in Canada, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Kenya, and Bulgaria. He is very passionate about nature and mountains; thus, he created a series of leadership mountain journeys, which he has been leading since 2017. He is a certified mountain guide, an Art of Hosting practitioner since 2014 and holds a Master’s degree in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability (Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden).

More about Atanas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/atanasgenkov/
About the mountain learning experiences in the unknown: https://www.facebook.com/NaturalConnectionBulgaria