From July 6–12, the Global Solvers Co-Lab 2025 brought together 20 participants from over 15 countries in Gotha, Germany, for an intensive, practice-driven residency. Far from a conference or showcase, the Co-Lab functioned as an applied learning space where systems leadership was not just discussed it was lived.
Throughout the week, participants engaged in deep intention-setting, cultural immersion, storytelling grounded in lived experience, and collaborative systems thinking sessions. They worked through real-time project challenges, reflected on barriers to impact, and visited grassroots organizations in Erfurt to connect global insights with local action. The Co-Lab offered a rare opportunity to translate theory into practice, where learning emerged not just from content, but from relationships, contradictions, and the shared process of doing the work together.
Co-Lab Opening: Setting Intentions Together
The Co-Lab didn’t start with problem-solving or introductions, it started with reflection. Participants were asked two questions: What am I here to give? What am I willing to receive? These questions set the tone for the week, not just as a team-building exercise, but as a way to frame the experience around mutual learning and honest contribution.
By naming intentions from the outset, people were able to show up more fully not just as professionals or project leads, but as individuals navigating change, complexity, and uncertainty. This early moment shaped the energy of the Co-Lab. It helped build trust, made room for discomfort, and encouraged participants to engage beyond their roles or expertise.
Throughout the week, this mindset kept showing up in how people gave feedback, asked questions, or supported each other through difficult reflections. In that way, the opening wasn’t just the start of the program. It was a quiet signal: this space would be different. And the work ahead would ask for presence, not performance.
Gotha Cultural Immersion with Dr. Benjamin Steiner
The city of Gotha wasn’t just the setting of the Co-Lab, it became part of the learning. In a guided walk led by Dr. Benjamin Steiner of Universität Erfurt and joined by Kirstin Wenzel, participants explored Gotha not as tourists, but as observers of how public space reflects deeper social values. From the city’s layered history to its architecture and urban layout, each stop prompted reflection on how places are shaped by and continue to shape, questions of equity, belonging, and memory.
The session introduced participants to place-based learning as a method: using the city as a text, a site of power, and a living archive. It raised critical questions who is remembered in public space? Who is left out? What do we notice when we slow down and pay attention to what surrounds us?
More than a cultural excursion, the walk became an entry point to bigger conversations about justice and inclusion. It grounded the rest of the week in a real-world context, reminding participants that change doesn’t just happen in institutions or policies, but also in the spaces we inhabit, reclaim, and reimagine.
Storytelling Evening: Sharing What Matters
Across two evenings at the Co-Lab, the room shifted. What had been a space for project work and systems thinking became something quieter, more vulnerable. The Storytelling Sessions invited participants to set aside roles and resumes and instead speak from personal truth about where they come from, what shaped them, and why their work matters.
More than 15 participants stepped forward to share, covering themes like forced migration, queerness and faith, gender identity, living with disabilities, mental health, and what it means to hold on to hope in fractured systems. The format was simple, but the impact was anything but. Stories weren’t polished speeches they were raw, sometimes messy, always human. What made the evening powerful wasn’t just the content, but the listening. The room held silence when needed. There were tears, laughter, and a sense of collective care that’s rare in fast-paced changemaking spaces. Many participants later reflected that this was the moment they felt most connected not just to others, but to their own reasons for being here.
By sharing lived experiences, participants didn’t just invite empathy, they made visible how global issues land in real lives. Storytelling became a method for understanding intersectionality, for honoring complexity, and for creating the kind of trust that fuels deeper collaboration. For a program rooted in systems and strategy, this space reminded everyone: the personal is political, and the work always begins with who we are.
The Co-Lab Clinic: A Laboratory for Navigating Complexity
The Co-Lab Clinics were not about solving hypothetical problems or rehearsing neat solutions they were about sitting with discomfort, experimenting with collaboration under pressure, and learning what it truly takes to navigate complexity. Over multiple sessions, participants were challenged to recognize how uncertainty, stress, and ambiguity affect decision-making, leadership, and collective impact.
In one exercise, shifting rules in a team-based task created moments of confusion and tension. But it was precisely in these moments that participants began to notice the underlying patterns, how assumptions are made under pressure, how voices get lost in the noise, and how quickly group dynamics shift when the ground beneath you keeps moving. The learning was not about “winning” the task, but about observing how people respond to the unpredictable something every changemaker must grapple with in real-world systems work.
Another clinic used clay to externalize invisible thresholds such as personal limits, project bottlenecks, emotional resistance. Participants shaped physical representations of barriers they’re facing in their own work, then collectively reflected on what it takes to move past them. The process wasn’t about aesthetics, it was about making the intangible visible, and finding language for the often-unspoken blocks that stall progress.
What emerged across all clinics was a shared understanding: that leading change is not only about strategy, but about self-awareness. Participants learned that resilience isn’t just bouncing back, it’s adapting with intention. That collaboration isn’t just about working together it’s about listening under pressure, holding multiple truths, and making room for uncertainty without rushing to closure.
The Co-Lab Clinic gave participants tools to reflect, reframe, and reset, skills that will serve them far beyond the week in Gotha.
Real-World Impact: Project Visits in Erfurt
As part of the Co-Lab experience, participants visited three local organizations in Erfurt that are making a tangible difference in the realms of inclusion, education, and empowerment. These visits offered grounded, real-world examples of the ideas explored during the Co-Lab, showcasing how values like equity and participation play out in practice.
LIGA Selbstvertretung Thüringen e.V.: Disability Advocacy and Self-Representation
At LIGA, participants explored how people with disabilities are advocating for their rights through political engagement and lived experience storytelling. The visit sparked deep reflections on power, accessibility, and the difference between representation and genuine participation. Read the full blog on the LIGA visit
IWM and ZLG e.V.: Integration Through Community and Skills Development
From language and career training to cooking and theater workshops, the visit to IWM and ZLG highlighted how migrant integration is about much more than employment, it’s about belonging. Participants saw firsthand how community-led spaces nurture dignity, inclusion, and opportunity. Explore the full blog on IWM & ZLG
Spawnpoint Institute for Game and Media Culture: Gaming as a Tool for Social Consciousness
Spawnpoint challenged assumptions about digital culture, revealing how gaming can be a powerful vehicle for education, identity work, and social justice. Participants engaged in meaningful dialogue on ethics, design, and the politics of play. Dive into the full blog on the Spawnpoint visit
Bridging Conversations: Co-Lab Connects Erfurt & Gotha
One of the standout moments of the Global Solvers Co-Lab 2025 was the intentional effort to connect global learning with local dialogue. In Erfurt, over 40 participants including community organizers, youth leaders, and civil society actors came together at Café Nerly for a World Café-style gathering. Through rotating conversations, the group explored four urgent global themes: Inclusive Education, Economic Empowerment, Social Justice, and Climate Action. These dialogues not only highlighted shared challenges across contexts but also surfaced grassroots innovations and culturally rooted approaches to global problems.
Later in the week, in Gotha, this spirit of exchange continued during a community reception hosted by Mayor Knut Kreuch. Local youth groups, cultural practitioners, and civic leaders met with Global Solvers participants in an evening of mutual sharing blending lived experience with global perspective. These interactions reinforced a central lesson of the Co-Lab: that transformative change is built through relationships, across borders, sectors, and lived realities.
At its core, the Global Solvers Accelerator is powered by connection where cross-cultural dialogue and collective imagination meet to drive solutions that are both locally relevant and globally resonant.
The Global Solvers Co-Lab in Gotha served as a space for regeneration, a container for leadership in transition, and a living lab where global citizenship was practiced in real time. Our heartfelt thanks to the inspiring Senior Fellow Coaches of the Global Solvers Accelerator, Bridget Sisney, Kunal Kanase, Nat Isaza Ibarra, Saumya Aggarwal and Pedro Poblete Their dedication to guiding the 2025 cohort, and their active presence at the Gotha Co-Lab, helped create a space for deep learning, connection, and collaboration. Their mentorship is an anchor for our journey toward local impact and global change.
Gratitude to Our Partners
The 2025 Global Solvers Co-Lab in Gotha would not have been possible without the incredible support and collaboration of our local and global partners. From co-designing immersive experiences to opening up spaces for meaningful dialogue and action, your contributions helped bring this vision to life.
To each organization, institution, and individual who walked alongside us, thank you for being co-creators of connection, learning, and systems-level impact.
As part of the broader Global Solvers Accelerator, this experience gave participants the clarity, tools, and community to keep advancing their work, long after the Co-Lab ends. We’re deeply grateful for the continued support of our co-sponsor Ernst Abbe Stiftung, all collaborating organizations, and you, our community. Thank you for following along. The work continues, and so does the journey. Learn more about the program here!
Explore the Global Solvers Co-Lab 2025 photo album on Flickr to catch a glimpse of the learning, laughter, and connections that made this week in Gotha unforgettable.