Let's introduce the Mtiririko trainers

Let us introduce to you .... Mtiririko

Mtiririko is a group of six highly experienced Dutch consultants and trainers organizing a three day seminar in Phutadidjaba, South Africa (April 2014).

The main goal of the seminar will be to inspire people, to support those who work in townships and contribute to the development of their community. 

Geert Kamps fully realizes he will meet in South Africa with an audience that already is highly motivated, inspired, experienced, gifted and passionate about their daily activities. He aims to raise an increased consciousness of these already existing capacities and talents, allowing to put them to work even more actively. He will use various means to explore, discover and use one’s own talents, a first one being to get people moving literally (through sporting activities, games, gumboot dancing, etc.) in order to create both physical and mental energy. Once moving physically, people not only become much more conscious of their own energy, but will also want to control and orient it towards specific directions. During this seminar, you will discover and explore how to transfer this physically created energy to your daily life situations and find new directions for solving old problems. A second thing Geert will explore with the audience is the power of words: he will aim (a) to create an improved consciousness of the impact words have on the emotions of the listener and (b) to show that language has the potential to provoke action.

Gerard Vonk, who has a background as a psychologist, will provide the audience with a series of creative and associative tools allowing people to realize that for any perceived problem they already have one or more solutions at hand. One of Gerard’s convictions is that problems actually don’t exist, only solutions do. Creative and associative techniques are excellent tools to uncover solutions for any issue. Gerard will frequently use music, images, metaphors and theatre play as a means to stimulate your creative and associative power. Creating enthusiasm, making people discover their own passion, discovering the power of groups, exploring one’s own talents and strengths are recurrent themes in his workshops. Another of Gerard’s convictions is that things need to be done together and that we all can and have to learn from one another. Therefore, during his workshop he and the participants are both teachers and learners. At a more global level, he truly believes Western society can learn many things from African society and vice versa.

Marcel van der Pol has many activities, ranging from theatre director/actor, story teller, trainer, coach, consultant and university teacher. All of his activities serve a few common goals, such as replacing traditional perspectives with new ones, creating new patterns of thought (both at the professional and personal level), breaking through set habits, stimulating personal creativity and innovation and exploring concrete, new possibilities one’s own environment already offers. He has developed several means to achieve these goals, among others storytelling and theater performances which he uses to provoke change and growth, and his The Dance of the Hero®, actually a metaphor of twelve heroes, each hero offering a specific perspective on the world and helping you to broaden your own patterns of thought.

Anne Heleen Bijl specializes in creative/lateral thinking as a means to bring about simple but highly effective and immediately applicable solutions to often long existing problems. Her approach favors freer thinking in terms of opportunities and possibilities. She works with creativity tools for developing new ideas and creating true commitment to projects through a common vision and mission. She uses ‘mindmapping’ as a means for information transmission and transparent presentation of ideas, a technique which could be applied by for instance pastors wanting to present information as clearly as possible to illiterate people in their respective communities. How to create an inspiring environment and to recognize, mobilize and put into action each others’ talents is another aspect of Anne Heleen’s workshops. Making people flourish, eliminate obstacles and realize their dreams, desires and wishes always play a central role in het workshops.

Nicole van der Ouw approaches people and organizations from a systemic perspective. She considers systems as a whole, with different layers and connections, both at the personal and the organizational level. This allows her to help people create meaningful breakthroughs and change, in their own lives as well in the organizations or communities they work for. One of her basic principles is that reason and rationality have to be connected to the feelings, passion and inner power of individuals. This method will allow you to create solutions which are both intelligent/rational, and fully supported and vigorously defended by the people who have to adopt them. Her strictly result-oriented approach is not only systemic, but also playful and creative: lighthearted, profound creativity with laughter and a relaxed atmosphere play an important role in bringing about creative change. She provokes curiosity as to how things can be done differently through changes of perspective. Bringing out wisdom in people is a key element of Nicole’s way of working.

Sjoerd de Vries is a systemic consultant working at local, national and international levels. As a creative change manager specializing in systemic constellation work, his principal goals are to find out which dynamic patterns block a specific organization, where those blocks originate from and how we can solve them before starting up something new. Sjoerd uses systemic constellations as a means for achieving innovation, discovering new services, creating new experiences and driving real cultural change. His systemic approach will provide you with a set of empowering tools helping you to recognize repeating patterns, to remove obstacles, to stand out, to win loyalty and to inspire action. Sjoerd sees certain parallels between the Netherlands right after the war (when church financed social academies played an important role in restructuring certain aspects of Dutch society) and the current situation in South-African townships (where many social changes are driven by pastors).