Will You Support Our Mission?

Christiaan Verwijs
The Liberators
Published in
4 min readMay 14, 2020

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Too many teams around the world work in dreary, demotivating environments. Without control over how to do their work, no contact with the people they’re ultimately working for, and no autonomy to change anything, it is not hard to understand why they disengage or burn out.

Our purpose is to liberate teams from dehumanizing and ineffective ways of organizing work by putting them in control of shaping their future. From Scrum Teams to construction squads and from strategic work-groups to management teams. And wherever they are on this planet. And we rely on your support to do this.

Christiaan (the curly guy) and Barry (the guy with the glasses). Picture by Lisanne Lentink

We work towards our purpose by creating data-driven products, thought-provoking content, and an inspiring community. We believe that teams benefit from exercises, materials, apps, and online applications that help them gather data about what is going on, make sense of that data and overcome challenges — together. Without expensive coaches, dominant consultants, and outsiders telling them what to do. We support this process of continuous improvement with our podcast, our scientific research, and our blog posts. To inspire and encourage teams to overcome these challenges, we offer a large community of peers to give and get help in online and in-person meetups.

Examples of our products Scrum Team Starter Kit, the Zombie Scrum Survey, the 52 Challenging Cases for Scrum Masters, and the various card-based exercises we offer in our webshop. Some of these products are entirely free, others are free but with paid add-ons, and others are made available only to our Patrons (see below).

Some of the materials we’ve created over the years to unleash teams. You can find all of them on shop.theliberators.com.

We’d love nothing more than to spend 100% of our time on this. But free content doesn’t pay mortgages and bills. So if you like our content, enjoy our meetups, or just want to encourage us to continue, please consider becoming a patron.

We Are Carried By Our Supporters; Our Patrons

We can’t develop useful products without constant feedback from our stakeholders. So we work closely with our growing community of patrons to invent, develop, test, and distribute new products. These are the people who feel that our mission, and our work, are valuable enough to justify a monthly contribution of whatever they can spare. We appreciate the transparency of Patreon; if we deliver value and are responsive, people join. If we don’t, they leave. And there is a strong community element to Patreon that is essential to our mission: we simply cannot do this alone.

Patrons also have early access to new materials, gain special benefits, and/or receive materials entirely for free. Together with our patrons — our stakeholders — we hope to make a bigger impact on (Scrum) teams and organizations all over the world. Go to patreon.com/liberators to support us too.

Who are we?

We have both been active as Scrum Masters for a variety of organizations for a dozen years. With that practical, hands-on experience in our backpacks, we became Professional Scrum Trainers and Stewards at Scrum.org. With Scrum.org, we developed the Professional Scrum Master II Class to help Scrum Masters build a deeper understanding of the purpose of Scrum.

Aside from Scrum, we are active members of the global Liberating Structures community. We founded the Dutch Liberating Structures User Group (now 2.000+ members), hosted the first Immersion Workshops in the Netherlands. With Liberating Structures, we have facilitated hundreds of small-scale meetups and dozens of large-scale gatherings (up to 200 participants).

Barry lives in Bunschoten with his girlfriend and three kids. He has a background in business administration (B.ba). Christiaan lives in Utrecht, is married to Lisanne Lentink, and has a background in (organizational) psychology (M.sc) and software engineering (B.ec).

Go to patreon.com/liberators for more information

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Christiaan Verwijs
The Liberators

I liberate teams & organizations from de-humanizing, ineffective ways of organizing work. Developer, organizational psychologist, scientist, and Scrum Master.