Outdoor as a place to learn Green leadership

Over the last half a year I have had the pleasure of becoming an outdoor leadership trainer via the Train the Trainer program by Buitendoor and the YMCA Germany.

Together with participants from all over Europe we acquired skills on how to make positive and highly effective teams out of groups via outdoor activities, theory and adventures. A great experience in the green leadership toolkit.

We spent a winter week in Ommen laying the groundwork via various exercises and classes. The most fun of all for me was building our own raft and crossing the ice cold river at night after a long and exhausting day of hiking and biking from checkpoint to checkpoint completing tasks along the way. Also it was so nice that many of the participants joined me early in the morning to bake cake for my birthday. Such great people 😊

During the second training we  survived a week in the forests of Kassel where we practiced our leaderships skills on each other and on groups of students from schools and the university. Next to leadership skills we learned many ways to make fire, made all our meals over the fire, build our own shelters, sauna, and oven. Also we watched the night sky and discovered an luminous tree. It was absolutely wonderful.

After this we had an extra theory day on the Scale of Cooperation.
In the months that followed I put my new skill into practice by organizing a leadership teambuilding training for my fellow project leaders at the ministry and organized a reunion training weekend in the forest for fellow trainers.

I’m grateful to our trainiers Floor Vullings, Leslie van Loon, Samuel Pohlmann and Tim Wettstein and all the wonderful participants for making this amazing experience possible and to the Project Pool for allowing me to put my newly leranes skills in to practice by letting me facilitate an outdoor leardership training for my fellow project leaders.

I plan to use these new skills to connect teambuilding with green leadership in nature.