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SAVE THE DATE: 9-11 OCTOBER 2026 | REGISTRATION COMING SOON
AN INVITATION TO THE WORK
What does it mean to hold authority and to be held by it?
What becomes possible when leadership is informed by love?
Love is a force that binds us to one another through care, sacrifice, and unwavering presence. It is not simply felt it is chosen, practiced, and lived out in every relationship and endeavor we pour ourselves into, through both the tenderness and the tension, the devotion and the betrayal, the joy and the grief and yes, even hate, which so often is love’s most wounded expression. At its core, love is a commitment to show up fully for other, for causes worth fighting for, and for the truth, even when it’s hard. This conference explores that same commitment through the lens of Leadership, Opposition, Vulnerability and Empowerment.
eadership is never simply a personal attribute it is a role the group assigns, withdraws, and transforms. To explore leadership is to explore the interplay between self and system, authority and followership, and the hopes, anxieties, and expectations placed on those who step forward.
pposition is not the enemy of authority it is its most honest mirror. Arising from within leaders as much as from those they lead, it surfaces through dissent, conflict, withdrawal, and rebellion, exposing the tensions and contradictions that power alone cannot see. To explore opposition is to understand that authority is never simply held it is always contested, always alive.
ulnerability asks what becomes possible when we engage authentically with uncertainty, difference, and risk. Groups create powerful pressures to appear competent, and aligned yet it is often the moments of genuine not knowing that something new can emerge. Groups defend against vulnerability to manage anxiety, but those same defenses limit reflection, creativity and growth. Here, vulnerability is not a weakness but a threshold, the place where authority becomes honest and real encounters across difference and hierarchy become possible.
mpowerment challenges us to consider how authority can create conditions for growth, agency, and collective flourishing rather than concentrating power in the hands of a few. It asks who gets to speak, whose knowledge counts, and how the structures we inhabit expand or constrain what any of us can do or become. Yet empowerment is not without tension, it requires confronting inequality, privilege, and the ways groups unconsciously maintain dependency.
At a moment when institutions are being questioned, leadership is being reimagined, and communities are searching for new ways to navigate difference and uncertainty, this work feels especially urgent. I trust you will join us as we explore what becomes possible when leadership is grounded in love, opposition is met with inquiry, vulnerability becomes a source of strength, and authority is held together with love.
Journée (Jodi Austin), PhD
Conference Director
THE WORK
This conference is an experiential learning event, which means the primary container for the learning is what happens between us. Rather than studying authority from a distance, members encounter it directly, in groups, roles they take up, and the moments of tensions, connection and surprise that arise in real time. To make that possible, members co-create a temporary organization with its own structure, roles, and authority that comes into being at opening plenary and ceases at closing plenary. The organization exists for no other purpose than to be studied, and because it is built together, what emerges within it belongs to everyone in the room. Because it is temporary, it creates conditions for a quality of attention to authority rarely available in the institutions we inhabit in the rest of our lives.
WHAT EMERGES FROM THIS WORK
Members will have opportunities to:
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Examine how leadership, opposition, vulnerability, and empowerment operate as living forces within groups.
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Explore the relationship between authority and love and discover what becomes possible when leadership is exercised not merely with competence, but with care, courage, and genuine concern.
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Observe, take part in, and analyze both the overt and covert dynamics of group life, studying how conscious intentions and unconscious forces shape what groups do, what they avoid, and what they cannot yet see in themselves.
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Examine your own reactions to well-defined authority and clearly drawn boundaries and explore what those reactions highlight about your relationship to power, structure, and the roles you take up in organizational life.
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Experience firsthand how groups form, establish leadership, and negotiate their relationship to other groups and to the institution as a whole.
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Engage with the ways in which race, class, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, education, and other dimensions of identity are taken up and used by groups.
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