your learning
for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them
– Aristotle
Learning through experience grounded in the reality of your passionate will
7group provides a wide range of learning experiences from videos to interactive webinars, in-person workshops and seminars, direct participatory experience in our work, opportunities to learn with us from a wide range of perspectives, and guided practicum/cohort practice to enable you to work on anything you are seeking to transform. Our aim is to build your systemic capacity and create co-learning communities that are evolving and expansive beyond current understanding. Learning is always grounded in work we care deeply about. We seek to create affective learning experiences that speak to the intellectual and emotional centers of all participants by addressing multiple learning modes. We gratefully admit to not “knowing” and seek to re-member our place in the world.
The Regenerative Practitioner
7group has been actively participating in this coursework offered by Regenesis Institute. A total of 9 individuals from 7group have taken the course, The Regenerative Practitioner (TRP). We apply this way of thinking to all we do as a company. 7group has also been instrumental in the creation of TRPs in both Pittsburgh (2019) and Philadelphia (2020) as well as the on-going Mid-Atlantic TRP Cohort for continuous learning. This group meets once a week to give people an opportunity to continue to engage with thinking partners in the application of this work. We are actively engaged in working with Regenesis to grow this network and create local communities of practice. Marcus Sheffer is also a TRP Faculty member. Our work with Regenesis goes back many years and this relationship continues to help us to grow and develop ourselves, our company and the affects on the larger systems our clients seek to transform in the world.
Learn more.
Seeing with Nature’s Mind
Patterns are the language of Life, our original mother tongue. By triangulating the perspectives of traditional tracking (pattern reading), living systems thinking (pattern thinking) and regenerative design (pattern design), we can relearn to see with Nature’s Mind and act as essential members of this living world with essential roles. She is dying for us to play. 7group has worked with Joel Glanzberg several times in this immersive, disruptive experience to your normal mode of thinking and doing. Many different practices are explored to help you see the world with a new and different mind.
More information from our Spring 2018 workshop.
Learn more about our Fall 2018 workshop offering.
Change Agent Development Community
For the past several years, 7group partners have been active participants in this living systems-based community focused on personal and professional development. It is a school that is grounded in who we are and what we wish to manifest in the world. It is based on deeply held principles embedded in, and aligned with, regenerative practice. Carol Sanford, consultant, speaker and author most recently of The Regenerative Business, facilitates several groups around the country to help us build our collective will to engage affectively in systemic change. This work helps us to continually evolve our ability to engage others in a process of discovery related to helping you to manifest what it is you seek to transform in the world.
More information at http://seed-communities.com/change-agents/.
Spillian Master Planning
Leigh Melander and 7group partner Tom Keiter went to school together, and over the years, she connected with us at times. Several years ago, she and her husband, Mark, purchased Spillian, and have turned it into an event center. It is a 33-acre historic estate with a museum-quality stick style mansion, built by the Fleischmanns Yeast Family in the 1880s as part of a summer retreat. Their vision for the facility includes having Spillian serve as a center for regenerative thought, a place to gather and learn, to come together in community. 7group partners have been working with Leigh to create a master plan for the property and help think through possible programming of such activities. We have facilitated multiple gatherings as a part of the master planning, including an event open to the public where we invited others to participate directly in the work of 7group. An additional three public sessions are planned starting in Spring 2018. As a result of this work, we have entered into a partnership with Spillian to hold events focused on regenerism (the first is the David Abram retreat mentioned below) so we can begin to envision the path forward through direct experience.
Learn more about April 2018 master planning session.
Our Story: HumanNature
We are continually seeking to include new ideas, perspectives and ways of thinking and knowing into our own learning. This retreat was facilitated by David Abram, a philosopher, naturalist, story teller, author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. He helped us to experience our sense of what it means to be human in and of nature, rather than being forever separate from an animate world. Ultimately our relationship with the other-than-human beings requires a reconnecting and re-membering of our place in the world. This three day retreat was about feeling with the heart and gaining understanding through direct, personal experience with our fellow beings and co-learners.
More information on this previous event.
RE Farm Café
At the beginning of this building design project, when in the earliest stages of aligning around the project’s Purpose, the process called for implementing a co-learning workshop with a larger set of key stakeholders to align around that Purpose and its effects in the Community. The Owners became so fully immersed in the integrative process being used and learning experientially that they wanted to take the leap of facilitating this Alignment Workshop themselves . . . they developed such deep caring through the learning process that they made a promise beyond ableness and took this risk, which turned out quite successfully by generating deeper participation and caring by several other entities and organizations in the Community.
Visit RE Farm Café for more details.