Learn the Essentials of The Circle Way

A 2-day training of learning to gather, listen, and lead from the wisdom of the whole.

Beginning in January 2027, The Circle Way is offering multiple 2-day trainings in New York City on the essential components of Circle. 

We are calling on all who long for culture change, and for those who know that more inclusive and cooperative futures cannot be built with the same tools that built the old ones.

You may lead a team, an organization, a movement, or a community. You may have watched hierarchy decide who speaks, whose knowledge counts, and whose needs wait. And you may already sense what many cultures have long known: that we are whole only together. A community’s wisdom lives in the relationships between people, not at the top of a chart.

The Circle Way is a pattern and practice for living that understanding. It draws on one of humanity’s oldest forms of gathering and structures it for today’s boardrooms, nonprofits, schools, congregations, government and neighborhoods. Wherever collective wisdom is needed, Circle is available. 

In Circle, leadership rotates, responsibility is shared, and every voice is needed. Imagine power shifting from position to participation, where authority is held by role, not rank.  Imagine decisions that emerge from the whole, so they hold.

Over two days, we’ll learn and practice The Circle Way’s essential components:

• The center and intention: a shared purpose that holds the group together

• Check-in and check-out: opening and closing so each person arrives fully and is seen

• Agreements: Commitments to personal and collective wellbeing

• The three principles: rotating leadership, shared responsibility, and reliance on the wisdom of the whole

• The three practices: speaking with intention, listening with attention, and tending to the well-being of the circle

• The talking piece, the Host, and the Guardian: simple tools that slow us down, interrupt cultures of dominance, and make room for voices too often unheard

Seasoned practitioners will share what they’ve learned from years of hosting circles across sectors and communities. Then we’ll practice together. You’ll sit in circle, take turns as host and guardian, and experience from the inside how shared leadership and deep listening change what a group can imagine and accomplish.

This experience is especially for you if you:

• Are working to shift organizational or community culture toward deeper inclusion and belonging

• Understand community and organizations as living systems, whole and interdependent

• Are ready to move beyond top-down leadership and toward collaboration, cooperation, and collective action

• Want practices that tap into collective intelligence and intuition  

You’ll leave with more than a method. You’ll leave with experience, confidence, and a circle of peers who share your hope - that a life-giving future is cooperative, collaborative, and regenerative. Circle holds the pattern and the practices.

The Circle is waiting. Come and take your seat.

Dates: 

January 18th–19th, 2027

March 8th-9th, 2027

June 7th-8th, 2027

August 5th-8th, 2027  

Costs: 

The Circle Way is committed to affordability and accessibility. Please choose the rate that reflects your and/or your organization’s capacity. Every rate covers the full two-day experience including breakfast, lunch, plus assorted coffee, teas, and soft drinks. 

$399 · Community Supported Rate “I and/or my organization can afford this amount, and I trust the abundance of community to make this training sustainable. 

$499 · Community Rate “I and/or my organization can afford what it costs to make this training sustainable.”

$599 · Community Supporter Rate “I and/or my organization can afford to make this training sustainable and to make it available to others in the community.”

*If none of these rates is within reach, please contact Chantilly Mers at chantilly@whatsnextnow.org

Location: The Balance Arts Center

 151 West 30th Street, 3rd Floor
(between 6th & 7th Avenues)
New York, NY 10001

*Southeast of Penn Station, accessible by major subway lines. The building has ADA-compliant elevator access

*Get Directions via Google Maps.

Your Host & Guide:

Chantilly Mers (she/hers) is an Indigenous Pasifika Circle Keeper, Guide, and Community Steward. Her life’s work is about creating the conditions for communities to imagine, and act toward, a life-giving, liberating future. 

For over 15 years, Chantilly has served faith-based and nonprofit organizations as a pastor, organizer, director, and healing-centered consultant, educator and facilitator. She was first trained in The Circle Way in 2010, and it has shaped her leadership and work ever since.

She is the Founder and Community Steward of The Kin-dom Collective, a spiritual community where Circle is both the grounding practice and operating framework. Through her facilitation practice, What’s Next Now, she integrates Circle as a way of strengthening collaboration and cooperation toward community-led actions and change. 

Circle is an ancient form, but for Chantilly, it's the collectivist spirit contained within Circle’s pattern and practices that holds the power for inner and social transformation.