Join the 2026/27 cohort!
An Invitation to Founders & Funders, Grassroots Leaders, Community Builders, Educators, Helpers & Healers, Dreamers:
“I’m interested in helping people connect in new ways — beyond sharing skills and practices. I want to help people come together to create something other than what any of them came to the table with. It’s that magical moment I’m interested in, when you see people creating something that didn’t exist before – something which they invented together, out of their joint activity. That kind of creativity and growth is what the world is starved for.”
Lois Holzman, Director
The International Class is a nine-month, online unique leadership development program dedicated to creating such magic and equipping and empowering magic-makers. Participants learn by building an environment for discovery– exploring collectively how and what it means to lead at a time of both great peril and promise for our species and our planet. Each cohort of 10-20 participants from countries worldwide is supported to build their learning environment – to engage in ensemble, developmental learning activity. Thus, the “leadership mindset” becomes an “environment-building mindset.”
Since 2004, and led by the Institute’s director Lois Holzman, the program continues to evolve as an imaginative, philosophical and improvisational maker-space for new performances of leadership. Read that story HERE.
The hundreds who have gone through the program are a diverse cross-section of change agents, including, NGO leaders, performance activists, coaches, therapists, youth workers, educators, scholars, founders, funders, and more – some with academic degrees and experience, others who are on-the-ground community builders. Read their bios HERE.
The online program immerses them in the collective exploration of real-world issues they will continue to face in their careers and as world citizens, including:
- How do we need to develop – politically, relationally, emotionally – to meet the moment — to help our communities grow?
- What new conceptual, ethical, methodological tools must we hone?
- What new performances of leadership must we create?
- Within and beyond the academy, how do we develop ourselves as instigators, as catalysts of social change – as creators of community growth and re-initiators of human creativity?
Holzman, the activist scholar and Performing the World movement-builder, introduces the class to her faculty of “developmentalists” (i.e., people who support others to create their emotional-social-intellectual growth). Performing as “development directors,” they draw on the Institute’s core tenets —social therapeutics and performance activism — practices that support the group’s creativity.
The group’s task and challenge: Lead! Perform as environment builders! Learn to appreciate and create with the astonishing diversity of experience your faculty and colleagues bring! Create your group’s learning!
What participants practice here—”the environment building mindset”—becomes a durable methodology they carry into their work, enabling them, over time, to cultivate powerful ensembles within their organizations, communities and movements.
Using tools of improvisation and the theatre — playing philosophically – querying ways of seeing and modes of understanding (e.g., explanation, causation, quantitative forecasting, etc.) – meeting and learning from the community-building experiences of social-change disruptors hailing from across the Institute’s broad development community, the class shapes and reshapes its understandings and practices of leadership.
Welcome!
International Class Alumni Stories
Testimonials
Here’s some of what graduates say about their International Class experience:
“During the International Class, I found an international family and community with whom to change the world. The most important thing I came to understand is we human beings are who we are and who we are becoming, at the same time. Being in the world is a continuous and infinite process, we are never finished. I have learned to embrace uncertainty and accept growth opportunities — not as tasks to be solved, but as ways to explore. I am currently working to bring the social therapeutic approach into Latin American and Spanish speaking contexts.”
“I’ve been a school principal for 25 years and now work with teachers from four different countries and students representing six different nationalities. The International Class helped me find a path toward creating relational and emotional activities which keep me developing — independent of ideology, truth, labels and programmatics. I am immensely grateful to Lois Holzman, who gave me back the pleasure of learning and teaching in the classroom.”
“The International Class has made me learn to challenge some of my old beliefs and to peel away the rigid self-image that we all try to portray. The cultural and economic differences of students in the program gave us an even broader viewpoint on all the topics that were discussed.”
“For the last 11 years, I have worked as a CEO of a Brazilian subsidiary focusing on corporate goals and stakeholders’ desires. After a tough year, I decided to take a sabbatical and join the International Class. In the program, I studied with classmates from a variety of social-historical-cultural backgrounds. We explored new performance approaches, tool-and-result methodology, the concept of being and becoming, the magic of play, and the limitations of knowing. I have successfully incorporated these revolutionary ideas into my life, deconstructing and reconstructing myself and my work. It’s been so joyful!”
Please contact: Melissa Meyer mmeyer@eastsideinstitute.org, Associate Director, for more details on the schedule, registration, tuition and scholarship availability.