Almost 15 years ago myself and 2 friends/colleagues formed The Zhaba Collective, a collective helping people be more effective in their actions for nature and environment, social justice, and democracy. We mainly work with citizen initiatives and grassroots organisations.  A facilitator is a person that is not necessarily an expert on a specific issue (though can be), but an expert on process. A facilitator is trained in communication (verbal and non-verbal), working with people, working with resistance, group dynamics, effective meetings, decision-making, workshop-design and implementation, and last but not least, in dealing with crises. A facilitator's specialty is, literally translated from Latin, "to make things work." As facilitators, we promote creativity and effectiveness in projects, campaigns, organisations. Our focus is on process: how to make meetings, discussions, and workplaces work, and be fun as well.  Zhaba has held hundreds of organization and management workshops <!-- pagebreak -->over the years on subjects ranging from gender relations within NGOs, campaign planning, community development, fundraising, working with the media, working with volunteers, project management, etc. These workshops have been held in the rainforest, locked to a nuclear power plant, on the trans-Siberian express, and everywhere between Canada to Japan. We have grown from 3 people to a facilitator pool of 12, including people from Hungary, Macedonia, Serbia, Canada, Netherlands, Romania, Croatia and the Czech Republic. Our website hosts a number of excellent and ever-popular resources on facilitation, as well as a number of other subjects. Last weekend we held our first face-to-face meeting in many years, reviewed what we had accomplished and discussed the future of the organization.

It has been 10-12 years since I was last in Amsterdam, probably when I was working as and anti-GMO campaigner for ASEED Europe. The first thing I did when I arrived was go for some (stop it! Not that!) French fries with sauté sauce. In the evening I made my pilgrimage to one of my favorite restaurants, the Het Karbeel (http://www.hetkarbeel.nl/karbeel/). In between I tooled around on a rented bike from Mac Bikes at the station, but it was very expensive. If you know someone who has a Rail Pass, ask them to get you a bike downstairs in the station next to Mac Bikes (run by the same people). Instead of paying 18 euro a day, you pay 2! I wandered around some of my old haunts, including the fantastic organic market on Saturdays at the Nordemarkt.  The same mushroom guy and cheese guy were there, and the herb woman even after all these years. If you come up Prinsengracht, the café on the left by the market serves the best apple pie on the planet.

On Sunday I joined my colleague Marjolijn to visit her mother in Haarlem where they had recently started working a garden allotment. The Dutch are not perfect, but you know, sometimes, in fact, quite often, they really get things right. The allotment system is one of these things. They have a beautiful plot backing onto a canal, and I happily put up a plastic wall around the pumpkins to protect against slugs. There is a regular seed exchange and plant exchange between the allotment owners, an on-site garden shop, as well as a pub on-site. Another thing Dutchies have gotten right is the “kringloopwinkel,” or recycling shop. Your normal kringloopwinkel takes in donations of secondhand stuff, quite often things in need of repair, fixes them and cleans them up and then resells them cheap like any secondhand store. Marjolijn works at the Kringloopwinkel Emmaus. Emmaus does take in used items, but the workers are refugees, homeless, and people with mental difficulties, who sort, repair, and sell the items. The profits all go to help support the workers who live in rooms/apartments by the shop, and for various projects.

I would love to see these initiatives also begin in Hungary!