The Work Beneath the Work
Where meaningful change takes root
What is Perennial Gathering?
The Perennial Gathering is a global, invitation-based convening for leaders exploring the deeper work beneath meaningful change.
Held in Karuizawa, Japan, the Gathering brings together people across sectors, geographies, and disciplines to examine the relationships, practices, stories, structures, and inner capacities that shape what becomes possible.
This is not a conference built around content alone. It is a gathering for leaders who understand that meaningful change does not begin with strategy alone. It begins in the soil, in the unseen conditions of trust, clarity, relationship, and practice.
A Different Kind of Gathering
The Perennial Gathering lives at the intersection of a professional convening, a leadership experience, and a restorative retreat.
It is designed for meaningful relationship, not transactional networking.
It is designed for practice and inquiry, not passive consumption.
It is designed for depth, trust, and connection, not performance or speed.
There are no keynotes, no panels, and no crowded agenda of back-to-back presentations. Instead, participants engage in facilitated Morning Gatherings, peer-hosted Conversations for Change, reflective sessions, shared meals, and immersive experiences that support deeper connection and more generative collaboration.
The Gathering creates the conditions for participants to examine not only the work they do, but the deeper patterns, relationships, and practices that shape how the work happens.
Invitations to explore, question, and reimagine together
Well-Being and Inner Work
This field explores practices, frameworks, and experiences that help leaders sustain themselves while navigating complexity. It centers on reflection, resilience, and the cultivation of inner clarity, enabling participants to show up with presence and authenticity.
Climate and Nature
This field engages with the urgent ecological challenges of our time, while also recognizing the wisdom and cycles of the natural world. Conversations here examine strategies, innovations, and relationships that move us toward climate resilience and a restored relationship with Earth.
Human Systems
This field examines the structures—political, economic, social, and cultural—that shape our collective lives. It invites inquiry into how systems are designed, where they fall short, and what it would take to reconfigure them toward justice and equity.
AI and Technology
This field considers how emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence, are reshaping human experience, relationships, and society. The focus is not just on risks and opportunities, but on how to be in right relationship with technology.
Catalytic Capital
This field explores how capital—philanthropic, investment, and blended—can move in ways that accelerate meaningful change. It highlights new models, risks, and pathways that shift money toward long-term, systemic transformation.
Regenerative Prosperity
This field envisions futures where prosperity is measured not by extraction but by renewal, equity, and abundance. It calls for rethinking economies and livelihoods in ways that sustain both people and planet.
When:
Optional Fallow Day: March 14, 2027
Main Program: March 15–18, 2027
Dates and Program Flow
Optional Fallow Day
Sunday, March 14, 2027
Sunday is offered as an optional Fallow Day for participants who wish to arrive early, settle into Karuizawa, and enter the Gathering with more spaciousness.
This day is intentionally light and unlike the formal days of the Gathering. It will include gentle framing from the Perennial team, but no full program agenda. Participants will be invited to move through the day in a way that supports their own arrival, with space to rest, walk, reflect, connect informally with others, or simply attune to the place.
Karuizawa’s natural surroundings offer a quiet invitation to transition from the pace of everyday life into a different rhythm, one shaped by time, space, and relationship.
There may be informal opportunities for connection, time in nature, optional reflection practices, and simple ways to orient to the land, the community, and the week ahead. The purpose is not to begin the program early, but to create the conditions for fuller arrival, presence, and belonging.
Fallow Day is an invitation to pause before entering the work, to notice what you are carrying, what you are leaving behind, and what kind of presence you want to bring into the Gathering.
Main Program
Monday, March 15–Thursday, March 18, 2027
The formal Gathering program begins Monday morning and concludes Thursday.
These four days include facilitated Soil Building sessions, Morning Gatherings, peer-hosted Conversations for Change, Presencing activities, reflective sessions, shared meals, and collective experiences designed to deepen relationship, inquiry, and practice.
Where:
Karuizawa, Japan
Who:
Invitation-based gathering for global leaders working across sectors, geographies, and disciplines
Who Is This For?
The Perennial Gathering is for leaders who believe meaningful change requires more than strategy alone.
It brings together people working across different fields and forms of responsibility: capital, community, organizations, movements, knowledge, culture, practice, policy, enterprise, and imagination.
Participants are invited not only because of the work they do, but because of the questions they are holding about how change happens, how leadership is practiced, and what deeper conditions are needed for transformation to take root.
Questions We Will Explore
At the Gathering, participants are invited to ask:
- What is shaping how we lead?
- What assumptions are driving our strategies?
- What relationships are strong enough to carry the work forward?
- Where is trust missing?
- How does power move through our organizations, partnerships, and systems?
- What practices help us stay grounded, honest, and responsible?
- What stories are limiting what we believe is possible?
- What does meaningful change require beneath the surface?