Jenn Weidman on Building Resilient People, Teams, and Communities

Mayank Singh
May 31, 2025
3 min read

When your work is helping others through their hardest moments, what sustains you? That question sits at the heart of Jenn Weidman’s journey. A peacebuilder by training (with roots in cultural and applied anthropology), Jenn is the CEO of Space Bangkok, where she and her team design facilitation, leadership, and trauma-informed programs that help people get “unstuck”—as individuals, teams, and entire organizations.

From peacebuilding to Space Bangkok

Jenn’s pivot wasn’t a straight line. After years supporting practitioners from conflict zones, she noticed a pattern: they weren’t just seeking new skills; they were fighting burnout, transition, and systems that didn’t exactly nurture wellbeing. The accompaniment she’d been offering informally—listening deeply, reflecting back, co-thinking next steps—became the foundation of Space Bangkok. Nine years on, the organization blends process facilitation, resilience and leadership development, and trauma-informed practice through retreats, workshops, and long-term partnerships.

What the work looks like (and why it works)

Space Bangkok enters when a team, project, or organization feels stuck—on strategy, culture, or cohesion. Everything they do is rooted in facilitation and resilience:

Facilitation with a human center. Whether it’s strategy, visioning, or team alignment, the process incorporates creativity and psychological safety, not just post-its and timelines.
Resilience as a throughline. Even in a standard planning session, Jenn’s team is asking: Is this achievable? How do we safeguard wellbeing while we deliver?

Two snapshots make it tangible:

Cohesion after chronic “storming.” A talented, multicultural team was trapped in conflict. Space Bangkok facilitated sessions that surfaced every pain point (yes, all of them), rebuilt shared norms, and paired the team process with 1:1 coaching for the leader. The result: a functional, high-performing unit doing its best work.
Trauma-informed practice in conflict settings. With groups working in and on Myanmar, Ukraine, and Israel/Palestine, Space Bangkok helps practitioners adapt operations and care for themselves and each other while doing critical work under strain.

Why Bangkok?

Partly history—Jenn has a 30-year relationship with Thailand. But it’s also practical: Bangkok is a travel hub with proximity to the development, peacebuilding, health, university, government, and corporate partners Space Bangkok serves. The work is global; the base is strategic.

WE-Can: community for women entrepreneurs

Jenn has also helped steward WE-Can, a peer-plus-technical support community for women entrepreneurs in Thailand launched with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. Born from a simple gap (“lots of founder programs, fewer truly women-centric ones”), WE-Can runs in cohorts, combining goal-setting, practical learning, and—most importantly—mutual support. It’s currently being re-imagined, but the community is very much alive.

“Lost Your Bounce?”: resilience you can actually use

Jenn’s book, Lost Your Bounce? Composting Your Way Back to Resilience, exists because she couldn’t find the book she needed during her own burnout. It’s conversational, personal, and practical—zero “12-step plans,” plenty of useful reframes and doable practices. Two big ideas:

Resilience is a practice, not a badge. Like fitness, it’s built in small, consistent ways—then maintained.
Tiny beats heroic. The little, repeatable things we do daily matter more than the occasional grand gesture.

(There’s an audiobook too, for those who’d rather listen than read.)

What’s next

Space Bangkok continues its open-enrollment resilience retreats (the next is slated for Phuket in Oct/Nov), along with ongoing work in trauma-informed practice and bespoke facilitation for organizations. Jenn is also contributing chapters to two books this year and drafting two more of her own—one on facilitation, one on peacebuilding and diversity. Growth, yes—but also depth: doing the right things, again and again, with care.

A grounded kind of hope

In a world that can feel like permanent crisis, Jenn offers a stance that’s neither naïve nor nihilistic: a better future is possible. Not inevitable, not easy—possible. Our job is to envision it, name it, and work toward it while taking care of ourselves for the long haul. This is a marathon, not a sprint. The finish line isn’t a quarterly OKR; it’s a life lived in service of something that outlasts us.

If you or your team feel stuck, frayed, or ready to grow with more humanity, that’s exactly the kind of journey Space Bangkok was built to accompany.

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