About Beehive Productions
Beehive Productions is an inter-generational collaboration between participatory practice hosts Rowan Simonsen and Amy Lenzo. Together we offer trainings and learning programs that are designed to build capacity, develop skills, and cultivate the relational field that supports participatory practice.
We know that the way we gather matters
And that we are effected by the environments we work in. Our hosting style reflects that and creates a generative online environment for our highly participatory programs, offering a new level of online engagement.
Most of our offerings are for people with an existing hosting practice, and they benefit from the considerable collective knowledge present in the group, as well as from the diverse set of “special guests” we invite to bring their unique gifts and experience to the programs we offer.
Another unique quality of our programs is that we harvest them in a way that can be useful to both course participants and the public after the course is complete.
What strategic areas are we working with?
We see several areas of practicing participatory leadership that need to be taken into consideration, no matter what methodology we are using, so our courses are focused in these 6 areas:
THE CENTRAL GARDEN
After having collaboratively produced successful advanced trainings for the World Cafe and Art of Hosting communities, we became fascinated by the cross-pollination of knowledge we saw working across practitioner communities. We know that we learn best by working together, so we created Beehive Productions as a way to call out and support the great diversity of methods and hosts that make up the field of participatory practice.
About Us
We have been friends for many years, initially brought together by a number of mutual passions: for life-long learning, for the capacity and potential we see in the online medium, by our belief that conversation is the key to social transformation, and by our deep love for the Earth and the natural world. We have each been pioneers in bringing the heart and energy of the communities we represent (the Art of Hosting for Rowan and the World Cafe for Amy) into the online environment, developing online spaces for community development and online trainings to support hosts of all methodologies in continuing to develop their practice.
Rowan Simonsen
Rowan is the founder and director of Upstream Consulting. He is driven by a fascination with new media and an ongoing commitment to host conversations that matter in order to help people and organizations learn and grow.
Amy Lenzo
Amy founded weDialogue to expand what is possible online, where she delights in creating opportunities for deep engagement, learning, and connection – to ourselves, each other, and the rest of natural world.
Our Collaborators
We are delighted to be collaborating with these amazing practitioners, helping us make our courses both deeply relevant, based on diverse real world experience and very beautiful and engaging at the same time.
Viola Clark
Viola es supporting our learning processes with realtime digital graphic recording. She creates incredible beauty that helps us all learn by seeing a visual synthesis of what we are talking about.
Chris Corrigan
Chris is our thinkning partner key contributor to many of our courses, bringing a special balance of theory and practice to our work, allowing our courses to bring food for both head, heart and work for the hands.
MartÃn Castro
Martín brings his Argentinian passion and many years of experience with participatory processes in Latin America to our work as a key collaborator for our Spanish-language courses.
Zulma Patarroyo
Zulma brings her creativity, energy and beautiful drawings to our signature invitational videos and works with Viola to provide digital graphic recording for many of our online programs.
