UNDP & HP Foundation Workshop
Design and facilitate the first community get together of HP LIFE's community organizers and master trainers across the world.
Overview
I co-facilitated a 1.5-day intensive workshop for UNDP ICPSD and HP Foundation, bringing together 13 stakeholders from government initiatives, UN organizations, NGOs, and training institutions across multiple countries. As the sole facilitator, I designed and led interactive sessions that transformed isolated stakeholders into aligned working groups with concrete action plans.
Using design thinking and Liberating Structures methodologies, I guided participants from ecosystem mapping through challenge identification to prototype development; resulting in two implementable concepts with established working groups and clear next steps for 2025.
The workshop successfully activated a previously disconnected global community around entrepreneurship training for SDGs, moving towards a close-knit community of changemakers.
Client
UNDP ICPSD
Responsibilities
Workshop Design
Facilitation
Year
2024
Duration
3 weeks | Part-time
Project Partners
HP Foundation
ATÖLYE
Impact
4 working groups with 16 stakeholders from 12 countries formed around product development, resource mobilization, local chapter development, and training networks
9.25/10 High participant satisfaction with interactive workshop design and facilitation quality
"It was a highly professional set up and execution, carefully but result oriented. A true pleasure working with you. And not just because how you did the work itself but also what your values are and what you stand for. Chapeau."
Markus Schwertel, HP Foundation
What an experience! It was epic, from the unusual schedule to the exercises and, most importantly, the experience sharing. Spot on!
Quelita Silves Gonçalves, IOM Cabo Verde
Workshop Design
With only 2 days for preparation, I collaborated with UNDP ICPSD to design a journey balancing relationship-building with concrete outcomes for 13 diverse stakeholders meeting for the first time. I structured the workshop around three progressive phases: Connect (building trust and mapping the ecosystem), Explore (surfacing challenges through collective sense-making), and Create (prototyping collaborative concepts).
Key design decisions included physical ecosystem mapping with wool strings to make relationships tangible, World Café format for challenge deep-dives, and Appreciative Inquiry to surface success stories as inspiration. I designed flexible team configurations allowing concepts to evolve as participants rotated through ideation rounds.
The workshop culminated in detailed concept development using a modified Business Model Canvas, ensuring prototypes addressed financial sustainability, stakeholder mapping, success metrics, and concrete next actions.
Design Challenge
How might we connect and activate a fragmented global ecosystem of entrepreneurship trainers to co-create sustainable solutions for advancing SDG-focused entrepreneurial skills development?
Workshop Experience
Day 1 focused on building relational foundation through Impromptu Networking, where participants paired three times answering progressive questions, followed by physical ecosystem mapping that visualized disconnects using wool strings between actors and challenges. Through World Café methodology, small groups conducted collective sense-making on 9-10 critical challenges, producing "How Might We" questions that reframed problems as opportunities.
Day 2 shifted to generative mode with Appreciative Story Sharing from trainers, followed by team ideation using two rounds of "Shift & Share" where participants rotated tables to build on ideas. Teams prototyped concepts using the Concept Canvas, received structured Feedforward ("What makes this great is..."), and closed with Spiral Journaling + 1-2-4-All methodology—reflecting individually, then in pairs, then quartets—allowing patterns to emerge before final share-out with words like "energized," "hopeful," and "committed."
