Community

I’ve struggled a lot with the feeling of belonging in my life. That’s why it’s almost ironic that if someone asked me to name my biggest strength, I’d say: building community.

The wildest community I’ve built is Warm Hearts Sauna— the first floating sauna in Amsterdam where anyone can enter for free in exchange for an act of kindness. What started as a seed of an idea has grown into a city-wide movement, bringing together hundreds of people from over 40 nationalities, from refugees to locals.

Through this journey, I’ve learned how to lead a project that makes people want to be part of it. I learned to get creative with securing funding since I couldn’t invest in the sauna myself. When I started, I was unemployed, didn’t speak the language, had no professional network in the Netherlands, and knew nothing about building a sauna.

Lesson learned? Literally anything is possible.

Naturally, the story of how I made this impossible dream into reality is one of the most requested public speaking topics I get. And damn, how I love to tell this story!