Andres Marquez-Lara is the Founder and CEO of UFacilitate, a global facilitation company that works with foundations, NGOs, and multilateral (inter-governmental) organizations to help their leaders deal with what he calls the “messy human stuff”—egos, cultural differences, miscommunication, conflict—that put their missions at risk. UFacilitate has worked in 40 countries with groups such as the World Food Program, The Nature Conservancy, Easter Seals, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and many others.

Marquez-Lara, an East Side Institute Associate, attributes his successful approach to leadership development to social therapeutics. “The world today is not predictable, and rigid hierarchical leadership no longer works very well. ... No one person can figure it out. It must be figured out together. We think the best lead

ers lead from behind. They are those who can create social environments that help people to perform differently, try different things and figure out together where they want to go.” In this conversation with host Desire Wandan, Martiquez-Lara talks about his approach to leadership and facilitation, his ideas for the decentralization of A.I. and his newly released book, Ritual 2.0.

In addition to leading UFacilitate, Marquez-Lara teaches leadership development in various executive programs at Georgetown University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Excellence in Public Leadership (CEPL) at George Washington University. He is also an Advisor at the Emergence Project for Purposeful Entrepreneurship at Stanford University. He and his work have been recognized by Ashoka and the American Academy of Certified Public Managers.

LINK to Purchase of Ritual 2.0 - - - - - - Here is the link to purchase it and get a free excerpt: https://linktr.ee/Rituals2.0

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Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for social change efforts that reinitiate human and community development. We support, connect, and partner with committed and creative activists, scholars, artists, helpers, and healers all over the world. In 2003, Institute co-founders Lois Holzman and the late Fred Newman had a paper published with the title “All Power to the Developing.” This phrase captures how vital it is for all people—no matter their age, circumstance, status, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—to grow, develop and transform emotionally, socially and intellectually if we are to have a shot at creating something positive out of the intense crises we’re all experiencing. We hope that this podcast series will show you that, far more than a slogan, “all power to the developing” is a loving activity, a pulsing heart in an all too cruel world.

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Hector Aristizabal—one of the pioneers of performance activism—was born and raised in Medellín, Colombia, when it was the most dangerous city in the world, and his country was suffering through a bloody fifty-year civil war. Educated as both a psychologist and a theatre artist, as a young man, he was arrested and tortured by the military and later forced to flee into exile in the U.S., where he worked as a therapist, primarily with the marginalized and traumatized. In 2000, Aristizabal founded ImaginAction, an international network of artists and facilitators using performance and imagination as tools for social justice and community healing. It has worked with communities across the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

When the torture at Abu Ghraib, Iraq was exposed, he created Nightwinds, in which he reenacts his arrest and torture. His performance then flows into a participatory workshop in which the audience, turned participants/performers, engage the traumas in their lives and communities. Aristizabal has brought Nightwinds to 50 countries, including many war zones from Afghanistan to Rwanda, Northern Ireland to Palestine, Ukraine to India. As he puts it, “We can heal only in community. We can’t heal on our own.”

The civil war in Colombia ended in 2017 and after 28 years in exile, Aristizabal returned home to use performance to help ex-combatants on both sides of the war and their victims find “the medicine in the wound.” He founded Re-conectando which creates healing rituals and brings participants deep into the forest—“the womb of Mother Nature,” as he puts it—to reconnect with life, human and other-than-human. In this beautiful conversation with host Desire Wandan, Aristizabal shares his life story, focusing on his current work on social healing in Colombia.

www.Imaginaction.org

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Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for social change efforts that reinitiate human and community development. We support, connect, and partner with committed and creative activists, scholars, artists, helpers, and healers all over the world. In 2003, Institute co-founders Lois Holzman and the late Fred Newman had a paper published with the title “All Power to the Developing.” This phrase captures how vital it is for all people—no matter their age, circumstance, status, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—to grow, develop and transform emotionally, socially and intellectually if we are to have a shot at creating something positive out of the intense crises we’re all experiencing. We hope that this podcast series will show you that, far more than a slogan, “all power to the developing” is a loving activity, a pulsing heart in an all too cruel world.

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Performer, Playwright, Poet, Painter, and Photographer Jose Tama Torres began his passionate work as a political artist on the stage he built onto the back of his taco truck. Born in Ecuador, raised in Washington Heights in New York City and based for decades in New Orléans, he currently tours the United States with his very funny, very angry and very powerful docu-performances pieces—Aliens, Immigrants and Other Evil Doers and United States of Amnesia: Dare to Remember—which are based on hundreds of interviews with “undocumented” immigrants living and working in the U.S.A. Join Tama-Torres as he takes host Desire Wandan (and all of us) on a righteous rant and militant meander through the mess we find ourselves in. To order one of his famous “No Guacamole for Immigrant Haters” tee-shirts, click here: https://torrestama.com/index.html

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Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for social change efforts that reinitiate human and community development. We support, connect, and partner with committed and creative activists, scholars, artists, helpers, and healers all over the world. In 2003, Institute co-founders Lois Holzman and the late Fred Newman had a paper published with the title “All Power to the Developing.” This phrase captures how vital it is for all people—no matter their age, circumstance, status, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—to grow, develop and transform emotionally, socially and intellectually if we are to have a shot at creating something positive out of the intense crises we’re all experiencing. We hope that this podcast series will show you that, far more than a slogan, “all power to the developing” is a loving activity, a pulsing heart in an all too cruel world.

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