Leave your work, bring your curiosity

Become part of a growing community of passionate makers, doers and dreamers for a co-creation-filled camp. Designed to inspire and move, Stone Soup provides a space to experiment and invites participants to share wisdom through workshops, co-design extraordinary experiences, evolve one’s craft, and explore curiosities.

After California and Poland, Stone Soup lands in the Netherlands. Help building the first Dutch Soup by joining 3 days of workshops and experiences at castle Kaldenbroeck!

 

Design the space you want to share

In July we get to call the Castle Kaldenbroeck’s rooms, the large barn and its surrounding meadows and forests our home and use it as our stage. Kaldenbroeck is in its material and architecture the embodiment of Stone Soup. Its oldest record dates 1394 and ever since it has known many occupants and spatial compositions, plastered together by local marl. Right now it serves as a place to find rest, connect with ourselves and find inspiration, based in the Ayurvedic tradition.

 

What will you bring?

You're encouraged to contribute in any way you like.

The first two Stone Soups, in California and Poland, evoked a range of experiences, from storytelling and design workshops to underground nations in the forest and LARPs. What are you curious to create?

Organize a workshop, design an experience, coordinate food logistics or facilitate personal coaching. Feel free to prepare beforehand, but always leave plenty space for ad-hoc prototyping in new collaborative constellations after arriving at Stone Soup.

 

Put the "oo" in food

By making the everyday special, and the special everday, we’ll grab every ritual of our daily lifes to create something extraordinary - starting with the meals. You’ll be offered the opportunity to create an experiential dinner for the entire camp. All meals are vegetarian, will take in dietary restrictions, and utilize ingredients from the surrounding farms.  

 

Practice the principles

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Creating Stone Soup takes vulnerability, trust, and leaps of faith.  All are expected to practice these principles to ensure we're playing by the same rules.

Inclusion
Stone Soup is for people of all identities, backgrounds, beliefs, and abilities. Support differences in opinions, emotions, and feelings. Celebrate diversity, try connect with those you normally wouldn’t.

Enthusiastic Consent
Only do when the doing is rewarding, not because of peer pressure or hope of a future reward. Create space for opting-out, for example when you or others feel uncomfortable or unsafe.

Positive Transformation
Be respectful, compassionate, and honest with yourself and others. Avoid getting drunk/high/?, as it will reduce your ability to engage in positive transformation.

Do-Acracy
Do, or it won't happen. If the doing is too much, arrange a team around it. Don’t ask, propose. Transformation derives from doing.  This entire retreat is yours for the taking. Do-acracy means a fluid hierarchy.

Yes, And
Give confirmation of what’s working well, be inspired by it, and add on to it. Avoid having a negating “No, But” attitude, it’s a creativity killer.

Radical Interdependence
Humans thrive because of collaboration. Feel safe to be dependent of others. Not only do yourself, but do together and create space for the doing of others. Share. Together is more fun than alone.

Reflective Learning
Ideate. Experiment. Fail. Reflect. Improve. Repeat. Learn by doing and embrace failure as your friend and collective reflection as your tool.  Stone Soup is your test site.

 

From previous Soupers

“A wonderful mixture between a friend-group weekend, and an international conference.”

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“Of course all the experiences and workshops we did are standing out in my memory because they were amazing, but I also really appreciated the small and meaningful conversations I had with some people.”

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“It’s amazing how little you need to create something beautiful with enormous impact.”

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“If people sign up for some random, bottom-up improvised event, for its intrinsic value, well, then it is exactly the self-selected crowd I am looking for.”

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“The prep work beforehand seemed intimidating […]. It turned out to not really be an issue since so much of it could be improvised once there. It's a great environment to test out ideas and arrive with half-finished projects.”

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“Imagine a retreat with no agenda— where the programming is brought in parcels by the other attendees to create a flexible, organic weekend with design thinking workshops & chakra balancing meditations on equal footing.”