Stephan van de Ven

My name is 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.

I founded the Authentic Connection Institute because the work needed a name that matched its scope. ACI is the umbrella for my work: coaching, training, and consulting for leaders and organisations; facilitation and community design for groups; writing and speaking for the wider conversation. The question driving all of it is the same: how do we build rooms where real things happen between people?

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 in this market. 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.