BETWEEN GRIEF AND REGENERATION
- The League of Intrapreneurs
- Jul 9
- 10 min read
WHAT EMERGED IN GREECE
In the mountain village of Vamvakou, something unusual unfolded across a week that moved between intimacy and scale.
It began in close cohort formation - a smaller group gathering in rhythm with the land, the pace of the village, and the quiet of shared inquiry. Later, the circle expanded into the wider ecosystem of the World Beautiful Business Forum community, where more voices, perspectives, and tensions entered the space over the weekend.
What held both moments together was a sustained willingness to sit with complexity, without rushing it into resolution.
What emerged was something harder to define and perhaps more necessary for the moment we are living through: a community learning how to stay and live with tension, together.
Perhaps that is because the tensions many intrapreneurs experience are not signs that they are failing, but signals that they are standing where established systems meet emerging possibilities.
That reality was visible throughout the week. There was joy, silliness, and moments of deep grief. Grief for systems that are visibly failing, for ecosystems under strain, for the exhaustion carried by those trying to transform institutions from within.
And somehow, these contradictions did not cancel each other out, but became part of the same field of attention.
“The only way to work through tension is by sitting with it.”
HUGUES SYGNEY JR.
Action Fellowship Facilitator & Senior Program Manager, Racial Equity at B Lab U.S. & Canada
A VILLAGE THAT SLOWS TIME & ENCOURAGES PROXIMITY
There was something significant about gathering in Vamvakou specifically.
Far from the speed and architecture of corporate life, the village created the perfect conditions for another kind of encounter. The group made their way up and down the hills. Conversations stretched across meals and into late evenings. Sessions unfolded outdoors, on lawns and terraces rather than behind conference tables.
The setting itself slowed us down, time almost felt conceptual, if not rythming each of our days.
That slowing down mattered because so much of the week revolved around rhythm: questioning the pace at which institutions operate and whether meaningful regeneration can emerge from systems still driven by urgency, extraction, and perpetual acceleration.
Again and again, participants returned to the idea that regeneration is not simply a new strategy layered onto old operating models. It asks something more fundamental from us: a different relationship to time, leadership, and one another.
Not every conversation needed resolution. Sometimes the value was simply in staying present long enough for complexity to unfold.
THE SPACE BETWEEN HOPE AND COLLAPSE: LIVING INSIDE SYSTEMIC TENSION
The discussions throughout the week rarely avoided the realities shaping the current moment.
Climate instability. Fragile supply systems. The acceleration of AI. Deepening inequality. Institutional distrust. Humanitarian fatigue. Political polarisation. Disinformation. Exhaustion.
Participants spoke openly about the feeling that many existing systems are no longer fit for purpose, and perhaps never fully were. And what was striking was that the space did not collapse into cynicism. Instead, there was a collective willingness to remain with the discomfort of contradiction: to acknowledge both breakdown and possibility at the same time.
One recurring idea throughout the sessions was that tension itself might not be something to eliminate, but something to sit with, work with.
Jolana Amara, CEO of The League of Intrapreneurs, spoke about trust, plurality, and a world that “doesn’t make sense anymore,” pointing to the paradoxes embedded in how institutions now operate - between clarity and ambiguity, urgency and reflection, breakdown and emergence. “Reality may be shared, but our interpretations are not.” she reflected, “It is in that space between perception and meaning that tension emerges.”
This distinction surfaced repeatedly across sessions: the challenge is less about recognising crisis than about how we respond within it.
The intersection between climate, technology, and equity became a recurring lens for this inquiry - not as separate domains competing for attention, but as deeply entangled systems shaping the same future.
Ultimately, the question was not whether to prioritise one over the other, but how to hold them together without reducing them into simplistic binaries. Again and again, the conversation returned to participation, reminding us that while we may not control the systems we inhabit, we always shape them through the quality of our participation.
“I am more than my job… If not me, there would be no representation - that dialogue wouldn’t exist.”
QUEMUEL ARROYO
Action Fellowship Participant
BEYOND PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY
One of the quiet shifts that happened over the week was the movement away from professional performance and toward something more human.
Participants did not speak only as founders, strategists, executives, activists, or facilitators. They spoke as people carrying contradictions.
There were conversations about compromise, burnout, about navigating institutions while disagreeing with the systems those institutions uphold, but also about what it means to create change while still being implicated in structures that produce harm.
Again and again, participants returned to questions of integrity and wholeness.
How do we remain human while operating inside systems that often reward fragmentation?
How do we resist becoming consumed by urgency?
How do we build spaces where people can speak honestly without needing to arrive fully resolved?
At several points, the space felt less like a programme and more like a shared inquiry into what leadership might need to become in this next era. A journey into becoming and evolving.
Not leadership rooted in certainty or control, but leadership capable of staying in relationship with complexity.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SEEN: BELONGING AS A PRACTICE
If there was one element that threaded throughout the week, it was belonging.
Not a belonging built through sameness, but through openness.
Participants consistently made space for cultural differences, personal stories, emotional honesty, and disagreement. Stories of ancestry, migration, identity, and lived experience surfaced naturally throughout the week. There was a recognition that community is not built through alignment alone, but through:
attention and care.
listening carefully enough to notice who is absent from the conversation.
establishing trust that allows for discomfort to be voiced without fear.
inviting everyone to show up beyond their institutional roles.
At times, the emotional honesty in the room was palpable, yet, so was the care. And perhaps that combination - honesty held within community - is what made this space and moment feel meaningful to so many of those who were present.
“The Action Fellowship deepened for me the understanding that trust is not peripheral to systems change, it is the foundation that makes it possible. By treating trust as infrastructure, we become better equipped to navigate complexity, hold tension, and build the regenerative practices our institutions and movements urgently need.”
Kafi A. Martin
Action Fellowship Participant
JOY AS A FORM OF INFRASTRUCTURE & RESISTANCE
For all the seriousness of the conversations, joy remained actively present.
Laughter. Playfulness. Singing and dancing late into the evening. Moments of silliness that seemed to reconnect us, both with ourselves and with each other.
It became increasingly clear that joy was not separate from the work. It was part of the work.
In environments shaped by exhaustion and constant urgency, joy can become a way of reclaiming humanity, and Community. A form of resilience.
The week held space for both, grief and celebration, without forcing either to dominate. That balance may have been one of its most important achievements.
WHAT REMAINS AFTER
By the end of the week, no single narrative had emerged that could contain everything that had been spoken, felt, or surfaced.
The challenges discussed remain immense. The systems many participants are trying to transform remain slow, contradictory, and often resistant to change.
But something else had also taken root during those days together.
A stronger sense of proximity - one that’s possible, and needed.
A deeper capacity to stay with difficult questions.
A reminder that regeneration is not only about redesigning systems, but also about rebuilding relationships, trust, imagination, and community.
What emerged in Vamvakou was not consensus, but connection.
And in a moment where fragmentation increasingly defines public life, that may be one of the most important forms of infrastructure and resistance we can still build.
INSIDE THE ACTION FELLOWSHIP
THROUGH THE EYES OF THE FELLOW
Some things are hard to capture in a program design or a theory of change. What happens between people, the moment something clicks, the conversation that stays with you, the unexpected connection that reframes everything.
Here are some insights from the Action Fellowship participants, in their own words.
WHY WAS BRINGING TOGETHER PEOPLE FROM DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS SO VALUABLE?
Coming together in Greece has given us the space to reflect, identify the ideas we have in common, and explore how we can build ecosystems that catalyze systems change.
Because systems change is shaped by technology, climate, and equity, bringing together people with different perspectives to think, connect, and co-create has been incredibly powerful. And learning from one another throughout this process has been one of the most valuable parts of the experience.”
MARIANA RIOS
Action Fellowship Participant & Senior Consultant
WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS FOR SUCCESSFUL COLLECTIVE ACTION?
I think there are two conditions. One is trust- trusting the people, trusting your community, your organisation, and the systems that hold you together.
The second, which I think is often harder, is making sure everyone involved in collective action has a transparent agenda.
Often we're excited about collaboration, but everyone brings different motivations. Maybe you have a political agenda, maybe you want to advance within your organisation, maybe you're driven by curiosity. None of those motivations are necessarily wrong - but let's put them on the table. It's easier for you, it's easier for everyone, and everyone understands where the other person is coming from.
I think that's the only way true collaboration can emerge - even within organisations and among people you trust, and it's not always easy. Sometimes you don't even have complete clarity about your own motivations.
What's really driving you? Personal gain? Professional growth? Curiosity? Whatever it is, it's important to acknowledge it. And if you don't know, at least ask yourself, because approaching collective action without that self-awareness can ultimately do more harm than good.”
CRISTOBAL ESCALONA
Action Fellowship participant & Managing Director
WHAT STOOD OUT ABOUT THE WAY THE FELLOWSHIP WAS DESIGNED AND FACILITATED?
“By day four, we had separate working groups around distinct themes, each with clarity around a problem statement and a direction to move toward. What had felt like open-ended exploration had quietly, deliberately crystallised into something tangible.
What made this possible, I think, was the quality of the space itself. The League team brought something unexpected into the design: a connection to spirituality, to nature, to the kind of stillness that allows real thinking to happen. One of my fellow Fellows put it best- and I haven't stopped thinking about it since:
‘Usually you'd need an entire first semester of an MBA to build the kind of trust and connection we formed here. The League team created it in less than four days.’
That doesn't happen by accident. It is the result of deliberate, caring design and it showed in every detail throughout the week.
Throughout all of it, the League of Intrapreneurs team, the facilitators, mentors and organisers went above and beyond in ways that were both visible and invisible. There was a genuine effort to create a space where Fellows could open up, take intellectual risks, and collaborate honestly.”
ABHEY BAINS
Action Fellowship participant & Senior Principal, Risk Strategy
HOW DID THE FELLOWSHIP CREATE A GENUINE SENSE OF BELONGING?
“Community did not happen instantly. I arrived with curiosity, but also with some distance, as one is surrounded by strangers, even if we are "like-minded."
There's always that question of where one fits. But community doesn't demand instant belonging. It unfolds. And in Greece, especially in Vamvakou, the space allowed for that unfolding to happen naturally.
When I think back to my time in Greece, what stays with me most is not necessarily a specific workshop or session, but rather the feeling of being held and supported. By people, by a shared purpose, by a quiet understanding that grew stronger with each day. Community stopped being something abstract and became something I could genuinely feel. It showed up in small, simple moments: someone passing sunscreen during a session under the Greek sun, a quiet check-in over breakfast, laughter that came easily around the table.”
EDEN YOHANNES YOSEPH
Action Fellowship participant & Business Transformation Manager
WHAT HAS CHANGED FOR YOU IN YOUR WORK SINCE BEING PART OF THE LEAGUE?
“I think one of the key moments for me was being identified as an intrapreneur. Thirteen years ago when I joined the League, I had no idea what an intrapreneur was. I had no idea that I was one.
It gave me an identity. It gave me a community. And what has changed is that as an individual within an organization, I feel I'm not alone. I feel supported. I feel strengthened. I feel that we're standing on each other's shoulders and that we're all reaching for the sky, reaching for the same common goal to drive impact forward, to bring soul into business, and to try and deliver social sustainable solutions at scale.
And I think if we come together, we can amplify our impact, and that for me is what has changed. It's this feeling of togetherness and tenacity that we all share.”
MAYA MEHTA
Action Fellowship participant & Sustainability Lawyer
WHAT SHIFTS FOR YOU WHEN YOU STEP BACK AND RECOGNIZE HOW CLIMATE, EQUITY, AND TECHNOLOGY ARE DEEPLY INTERCONNECTED WITHIN YOUR WORK?
“I had come to the Action Fellowship thinking of climate, equity, and technology as three separate concerns. I left understanding them as one system.
If you step back far enough, you stop seeing three issues. Instead, you see a single churning mess. In Vamvakou, we tried to untangle it through conversations. What kept surfacing at the centre was not climate, technology, or equity at all; it was human experience, at once deeply familiar and utterly foreign. It left me unsure whether we were even asking the right questions or solving the right problems. At the centre of the mess sits another mess: the one we each carry inside us.
The shift, for me, was realising that untangling requires a radically individual curiosity about each other - meeting people as themselves rather than as representatives - and finding language that builds understanding instead of obscuring it. Only then can collective effort actually do better rather than simply do more.”
KATERINA BOHUSLOVA
Non-Executive Director for ESG, Sustainability and Data Collection
NINE MONTHS, ONE COMMUNITY.
WHAT COMES NEXT
Trust is not peripheral to systems change - it's the foundation that makes everything possible. And what the Fellowship reveals, time and again, is that trust doesn't need months or semesters to take root. It needs the right conditions: a space designed with care, a pace that allows people to slow down, and the simple but radical act of being met as a human being before anything else.
The most valuable shifts often happen between the sessions, not inside them. In a quiet check-in over breakfast. In laughter that came easily around the table. In a conversation that stayed with you long after the gathering ended.
The Action Fellowship was never designed to answer every question or solve every problem the world is facing. What it does instead is perhaps more enduring: it gathers people who care deeply, creates the conditions for them to find each other, and sends them forward - not alone, but as a community asking together, thinking together, and reaching for the same horizon.
Greece was only the first step. The journey continues.
