Stephan van de Ven

For almost two decades, across five countries, I’ve worked as a facilitator, coach, and community builder. The function has always been the same, even when the job title was different. I call it Chief Connecting Officer.

The job is to guard the space where people do real work together. That means designing the container, holding the temperature, and making sure that when someone takes a risk in a room, the room responds well. I do this for leaders and their teams, for creators and their communities, and for the in-between spaces where both are happening at once.

The question driving all of it is the same one I started with: how do we build rooms where real things happen between people? Coaching, facilitation, community design, writing, speaking — different entry points, one practice.

The combination I bring to that question — dialogue facilitation, community architecture, playfulness as a design principle, and intercultural communication — is not something you’ll find packaged elsewhere. I arrived at it through a Master’s in Intercultural Communication in Dijon, an exchange semester at the University of Helsinki, years of youth work and community building across Europe and South Africa, and a move to Barcelona, where I now live and work.

I speak Dutch and English natively, and live well in French and Spanish. I write here about connection, community, and the craft of holding space for people who want more than surface-level belonging.