A week in the Netherlands learning facilitation through immediate practice, field research in Amsterdam that grounded theory in reality, and why failing in front of peers from eight countries accelerates learning faster than comfortable preparation ever will.

Core insights:

I arrived at Olde Vechte in Ommen, Netherlands on October 17th, 2022 for the Upstream facilitation training. The programme brought together youth workers from Italy, Croatia, Poland, France, Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Latvia, and Macedonia for six intensive days.

The format appeared simple. Mornings for theory. Afternoons for practice. But the practice was not simulated. Each afternoon, we designed and led actual workshops for each other, applying concepts introduced hours earlier. The gap between learning something and teaching it had never been shorter.

This meant we held two roles simultaneously. Participant in someone else's workshop. Facilitator of our own. The dual perspective taught faster than either role alone could have. You notice different things when you know you will be standing where they stand tomorrow.

The first workshop I led fell apart within fifteen minutes.

My instructions had seemed clear when I planned them the night before. When eight people from different countries tried to follow them, the clarity disappeared entirely. Language barriers exposed every assumption I had not stated explicitly. What I thought was obvious turned out to be obvious only to me.

This immediate failure taught what theory could not. Creating inclusive environments requires more than good intentions. It requires noticing who has not spoken and creating specific openings for them. Setting guidelines means testing whether someone unfamiliar with your context can actually follow them without asking clarifying questions.

By day three, I learned to give instructions visually and verbally. To check understanding by asking participants to repeat the task back in their own words. To build in flexibility for unexpected directions while maintaining boundaries clear enough to be useful.

The most valuable skill was improvisation when things broke. Technology failed. Timing collapsed. Participants resisted activities I had been certain would work. Daily practice built adaptive capacity that preparation alone never could. You cannot prepare for everything. But you can practise recovering from anything.

Each evening ended with GPS group assemblies. Five participants reflecting on the day's activities, sharing what worked and what did not. These discussions taught me more about active listening than any workshop on communication skills. You cannot fake understanding when someone from a different culture is explaining why your facilitation approach did not land. You have to actually hear them.

On the final day, we left Olde Vechte for Amsterdam. Our task was concrete: investigate a real social problem, ground it in data, and design five youth work interventions using the Kolb learning methodology we had studied all week.

Our group identified Amsterdam's housing crisis and integration challenges as primary issues. Immigration had increased significantly, creating competition for limited affordable housing. Young people and recent immigrants faced the worst impact. The problem was visible on the streets if you knew what you were looking at.

The research requirement forced rigour. We could not design solutions for imagined problems. We had to find actual statistics on immigration rates, housing shortages, waiting times, demographic shifts. This grounded our intervention design in reality rather than the assumptions that feel true until you check them.

We designed five activities using Amsterdam's urban context. Each had to apply facilitation methods from the training to specific local conditions. The exercise revealed the distance between understanding methodology and applying it to constrained real-world situations where resources are limited and problems are older than your solutions.

We documented everything in a video presentation, practising how to communicate youth work to audiences unfamiliar with the field. The presentation mattered less than the discipline of having to explain ourselves clearly to people who had no reason to assume we knew what we were talking about.

The training's value showed immediately. After returning from the Netherlands, I started leading international projects with teams from Greece, Slovakia, and Germany through the Not Too Young NGO.

The facilitation skills transferred directly. Coordinating across countries and time zones required the same competencies practised in Ommen. Clear instruction-giving across language barriers. Understanding when to facilitate decisions versus facilitate learning. Managing conflicts that arise when people from different working cultures collaborate and discover their assumptions do not match.

I also spent subsequent years mentoring participants doing year-long projects through UWC Deutschland. The reflection models learned in Ommen structured my one-on-one guidance conversations and group feedback sessions. I had a framework now. It made everything clearer.

What surprised me most was realising that facilitation is distinct from expertise. You do not need to be the most knowledgeable person to effectively facilitate learning. The facilitator creates conditions where participants learn from each other and from structured experience. Your job is not to know everything. Your job is to design the container.

Before Ommen, we completed two preparation assignments. The first required detailed description of facilitation methods I had used previously, categorised by context and outcome. The second focused on impact evaluation from past projects.

I resented these assignments initially. They felt like administrative busywork before the real training began. I completed them with the minimum effort required.

During the programme, these assignments became our baseline. We revisited initial descriptions, comparing them against new methodologies. This created clear markers for what had changed in our thinking. The busywork turned out to be the foundation.

The evaluation assignment taught me how to assess facilitation beyond participant satisfaction. Impact measurement requires different methods depending on goals. Behaviour change indicators for some projects. Knowledge retention for others. Long-term outcomes for the most ambitious. Understanding which metrics matter for which goals improved how I designed subsequent projects.

The training succeeded because it forced immediate application under real conditions with instant feedback. Comfortable learning environments do not build competence as fast as slightly uncomfortable ones where you have to perform before you feel ready.

Leading workshops for people from eight countries means you cannot hide behind familiar cultural references or shared assumptions. Every instruction gets tested against different contexts simultaneously. This builds clarity faster than any amount of preparation with familiar groups who will forgive your vagueness because they already know what you mean.

The Amsterdam research component worked because we had to defend our intervention designs with actual data to people who knew the city better than we did. This accountability forced rigour that hypothetical exercises never would.

What I took from Ommen was not a certification or networking contacts, though both existed. It was the practical ability to design and lead workshops that work across cultural contexts. And the immediate application after returning proved whether those skills actually transferred or whether I had merely collected another credential.

They transferred. That was the test that mattered.

Until next time,