ICA Taiwan hosts the ICA Asia Pacific Regional conference in Tainan

.

ICA Asia Pacific came to Tainan in November 2018 for the ICAI Asia Pacific Regional conference, hosted by ICA Taiwan.  It began with an opportunity for research and dialogue, an opportunity to learn from and with Taiwan communities and ended with an opportunity for ICA to explore our purpose, mission and strategies.

The research explorations were hosted in three different parts of Taiwan:

• Tainan Social Impact in Education – 30+ teachers and principals gathered in a school ICA Taiwan and colleagues have been working in for several years. The focus was Social Impact through three explorations: 1) image change; each session, to a certain degree, openly invited participants to bring in life stories and surfaced each other’s life philosophy through a deep listening and dialogue process, This enabled participants, and to experience the value of imaginal learning in a self or professional context. 2) Applying Restorative Practice processes in the educational setting, and ”how do we lead a dialogue in a classroom that deals with despair and loss”? 3) Exploring the challenge of designing ‘inquiry-based’ and experiential learning opportunities, helping to shift images in education with all ages.
• Hualien Community Resilience – This research event focused on connecting Asia to Taiwan community development. We worked with 9 different community and student projects in and around NDHU university in Hualien. In the process we were able to engage the group in facilitation as a method to constructively reflect and plan for future development.
• Taipei NPO Sustainability – The Red Room Taipei hosted a thinking forum on this topic over 3 days. Three days of sharing personal stories of transitioning from passion to sustainability. The groups very quickly identified that this was not too different to what sustains an organization -forward planning, having an exit strategy, what legacy is to be left and how to do that, deep listening, developing leadership teams, not being dependent on any one or two people, the initiators nurturing the new leadership, and moving onto other roles, at the right time. Red Room became a living case study on this topic. Key players shared their story of transitioning from an informal monthly “Spoken Word” gathering to a NPO with a location and paid staff. It was soon clear that the Red Room had already set in place the strategies of moving forward into an unknown future.

CONFERENCE EVENT IN TAINAN

The core event was our conference in Tainan from November 12th to 15th where over 30 colleagues from ICA and ICA Associates worked to share and explore the future. ICA’s represented were India, Japan, Australasia, and Taiwan. ICAI Associate members included ORP from Korea, Leadership Inc. from Shenzhen and ICAA from Philippines. ICA Bangladesh and Nepal were not able to attend.

This post was written for ICAI’s monthly bulletin the Global Buzz, March 2019 – for further details see Reports from the ICA Asia Pacific Regionl Conference
November 2018 in Taiwan.