Reaching for the Sky
Co-creating  a vibrant community.

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Share your story, an image and your dreams with the community!

Begeistring Community - the European Network around Appreciative Inquiry and Strength Based Change has
celebrated 5 years in May this year.  We have grown from 12 persons meeting in Vinkeveen, Netherlands to 530 people across Europe and the world.  11 European network meetings from north to south, and east  to west has gathered more than 400 partiicpants.

During the coming  year, exciting development is happening.   

• The EU funded Grundtvig project will ask for projects, methods and tools 
  during three conferences and then spread the result of the project in national
  workshops around Europe in 2012
• In April 2012 it is time for Europe to host the 5th World Appreciative Inquiry Conference
• New networks and initiatives are forming across Europe, becoming visible preparing to invoke positive change for society, organizations and individuals.

It is now time to upgrade the environment that supports the growth of a European landscape around appreciative inquiry and strength based change. Therefore we are launching an inquiry to build a foundation for how to develop support for this growth, may it be the web environment, the operational model or other ways to grow the community

Clicking on the link below allows you to participate in an online inquiry to harvest your stories from the network, to collect images and metaphors for a visual profile and to allow you to dream about the future.

We hope you want to participate.  After you have submitted your answers you will be taken to a page where you can see the stories and images from others.

Before you start:  There are some words we use that might need som explanation to understand context and meaning.  Look at the bottom of this page to explore the words "Begeistring Community" and "Landscape"

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Click here to read the stories of others

Begeistring Community: The word "Begeistring" exist in different forms in many European languages, but in order to translate it into English we'd have to create a new English word "inspirited".  As we are a network where we communicate in English but most of us are not native English speaking we found it a good idea to add this word to the English language, and we became "Begeistring Community - The European Network around Appreciative Inquiry and Strength Based Change" 
Read more here

Landscape: This became the theme for the network meeting in Reggio Emilia, October 2008.  The metaphor of landscape immediately became meaningful for the community as a word with many meanings.  Below is how one group in that meeting described their meaning of the word.  What is yours?

• Landscapes of living practices in relation
• Landscapes of systemic understandings: e.g. european, ai, ecological (sustaining, supporting, growing), ecological
• Landscapes of visible and invisible memories as pathways to honouring and being with difference
• Landscapes of cultures, histories, traditions—the mentality of a people and yet as symbolic of something that is always changing
• Landscape as a metaphor that allows different points of connection; that evokes differnt stories and different forms of re-searching
• Óur different meanings and metahpors for landscape will include more than we can ever imagine!
• The metaphor invites us also to remain concrete, located,  contextualised