Our Core Values
Connection & Dialogue
We believe lasting change happens through meaningful connection with one another.
Our work is grounded in dialogue: listening with care, and creating spaces where people can meet with curiosity, honesty, and respect. For us, dialogue is more than just a method, it is a way of being that builds trust, strengthens relationships, and leads to shared understanding.
Co-Creation & Participation
We design processes with people, not for them.
We invite shared ownership and active participation, grounded in the belief that wisdom lives within every group. Through participatory practices, we support teams, organisations, schools, and communities to grow ways of listening, speaking, leading, and gathering that nurture belonging, authenticity, and justice – well beyond any single workshop.
Co-Creation & Participation
Radical Imagination & New Possibilities
Our work creates the conditions for new possibilities to emerge.
We support groups to move beyond familiar patterns and imagine what does not yet exist. By nurturing imagination, we help people explore more bold, just, and life-giving ways of living, working and leading together.
Stories & Meaning-Making
We recognise the power of stories in shaping our lives and relationships.
People make sense of their experiences and identities through the stories they hold. Our work supports people to revisit and reshape limiting narratives, uncover new possibilities, and see how personal stories connect to wider social and systemic contexts.
Stories & Meaning-Making
Power Awareness & Justice
We are committed to justice and to holding many perspectives with care.
Our work brings attention to power dynamics, and to how history, identity, and systems shape our experiences and relationships. We aim to create spaces that are equitable, culturally grounded, and attentive to intersectionality, guided by practices that centre dignity, voice, and agency.
Embodiment & Presence
We understand that insight is not only intellectual, but also felt in the body and emotions.
We include trauma-informed and somatic practices that support grounding, awareness, and regulation. This helps create spaces where dialogue can feel safe, open, and transformative.
Embodiment & Presence
Who We Are
Vicky Simpson
Vicky is a facilitator, educator, and dialogue practitioner with a deep commitment to justice, peacebuilding, and social cohesion. She began her career teaching in South Africa and then Cambodia, which laid a strong foundation for designing transformational learning in multicultural contexts. Her work in anti-human trafficking in Cambodia and later as a social cohesion advisor in South Africa deepened her practice of listening and storytelling as tools for justice.
Trained in dialogue facilitation and peacebuilding, Vicky has designed and facilitated training, participatory photography projects, narrative workshops, large gatherings, and retreats – partnering with government, NGOs, schools, companies and community leaders. Since co-founding Open Circles in 2019, she has continued to focus on dialogue facilitation and training, designing and facilitating gatherings, leadership development and building cultures of peace.
Driven by curiosity and care for people and the natural world, she is a bridge-builder across divides. Vicky has volunteered with local initiatives in Durban including Durban Dialogues, Izwe Lethu, Story Sessions, and Red Light, and was selected to take part in a social justice exchange between Durban and Chicago through Sister Cities International. Vicky is passionate about exploring ways in which social cohesion, justice and peace are built through storytelling, the creative arts and dialogue.
Jana Niehaus
Jana is passionate about creating and facilitating spaces where people can have the necessary, though sometimes uncomfortable, conversations that can lead to transformation in individuals, organisations, and society. She believes in the humanising capacity of storytelling and the transformative power of deep listening. These commitments have drawn her to practise dialogue not only as a profession, but as a posture toward life itself. Through this, she has grown increasingly curious about how we become more courageous, imaginative, and compassionate as individuals – and more just, inclusive, and resilient as communities.
Her career began as a clinical psychologist in 2003 in the public health sector. Over the past 20 years she has worked across diverse settings, including public and private healthcare, faith-based and non-profit spaces, and since 2016 within organisational contexts through the Appletree Group. In 2019 she co-founded Open Circles, focusing on dialogue-based leadership development, inclusive culture-building, and the design and facilitation of transformational experiences. She is energised by working with diverse groups and navigating complexity with sensitivity. She cares deeply about curating spaces where people feel heard, rediscover their shared humanity, and find the courage to shift how they think, believe, and act. Training facilitators and nurturing communities of practice gives her hope for the world.
She holds a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology (cum laude) and a Master’s Degree in Vocational Practice. She is registered with the HPCSA and is a member of the Psychological Society of South Africa.
She enjoys walking, hiking, and birding in nature, and is drawn to thoughtful conversations on justice, books, and spirituality. A keen marathon runner, she lives in Cape Town and is interested in better understanding spatial justice, exploring cities on foot, and the realities and possibilities of public transport in South Africa.
Liesel Scott
She is a certified facilitator of Dare to Lead™, and was personally trained by Dr. Brené Brown. Courage, vulnerability, values-based leadership, and grounded confidence are woven through everything she does. Liesel holds a Master’s degree in Applied Ethics from the University of Stellenbosch. She is an accredited ICF coach and a licensed Enneagram practitioner.
Liesel is drawn to moments where people are asked to lead without clear answers – when how we show up matters as much as what we decide. She has been trusted to journey with leaders and teams through change – helping them find their footing, strengthen relationships, and move forward with integrity.
Liesel’s facilitation practice spans boardrooms, retreats in wild spaces, and online sessions. She works with executives carrying strategic accountability, and with indigenous and local community leaders holding land, culture, and collective memory, and she is able to move fluidly across these contexts with the same presence, respect, and attention.
Liesel is based in Durban, South Africa and is kept on her toes as a mother of two spirited and adventurous teenage girls.
liesel@opencircles.co.za
082 878 3334
www.lieseljoeyscott.com
