There is no manual for living through our wildly unpredictable times. How do we imagine, prepare for, and shape an unknown future? Who do we need to be or become?
Instead of a road map, we offer this supplement to illuminate inquiries, capacities, and practices that we believe can open consequential new pathways to a better tomorrow.
In this supplement, we share practices that will help prepare ourselves to usher in a new world.
BY CASSIE ROBINSON & SOPHIA PARKER
“Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble.”
— VÁCLAV HAVEL
In these times of cascading crises, the logic of the world as we know it is crumbling, and yet a new logic has yet to emerge. The educator Zachary Stein calls this a “time between worlds.” It throws up complex feelings, often pulling us in different directions. We hold conflicting accounts of the world in which we find ourselves, but we are wired to resist the possibility that something new is needed. As Frantz Fanon argued in his work on the concept of cognitive dissonance, when we are presented with evidence that works against our sense of what reality “should be,” we rationalize, ignore, or even deny what doesn’t comport with that worldview.
And yet, there is more to these times, even if a sense of hopelessness, powerlessness, and confusion is our day-to-day experience. Rebecca Solnit has written about how crises can become powerful calls to action, offering moments of opportunity and fresh perspective. The therapist and author Prentis Hemphill has spoken about how chaos doesn’t only destabilize norms but also holds possibility. It can be destructive and it can be generative. In a period of disorganization, a space opens for something new to settle in. Crisis and chaos can help us see what was unseeable before, revealing the hidden wiring and patterns in which we’ve been enmeshed and enabling us to disentangle ourselves sufficiently to regard those systems as objects of inquiry and the webs in which we exist.
So while the polycrisis brings fatalism and dissonance, it is also possible in this time between worlds to discern more clearly the blurry outlines of the operating systems and ontologies that have shaped our collective lives, leading us to new forms of inquiry. Crises can help us understand these systems less as the water we swim in and more as things we have constructed and internalized. We believe that across a wide range of human systems, innovators and visionaries are beginning to show us what might lie beyond the logic of modernity, with its focus on “progress” and Western Enlightenment, its dualistic thinking, rationalism, and materialism; and what can exist beyond late-stage capitalism, with its emphasis on growth, consumption, and accumulation.
In this time between worlds, there is “the glint of water through the trees,” as Laura Blakeman and Julian Norris describe in their contribution to this supplement. These glints can be seen in fields as diverse as bioregionalism, transformational investment, renewable energy, regenerative economic thinking, civic education, and innovations in the coding of our organizations, legal and governance practices, tax systems, and models of ownership. Much of this work is in its early stages, representing pockets of change that are not always connected to other activity. It is often made fragile by inhospitable political and economic environments. While difficult to grasp, these glints of change undeniably exist and represent a prefigurative future that lives in the present.
This commitment to exploring the deeper changes needed in human systems and shifts in consciousness that are required was the starting point of the Emerging Futures program at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). It’s been a rare privilege to have the space to ask what’s really needed at this time and have access to resources to explore that question.
In some ways, it is a challenge to nurture this program from “inside” philanthropy, given its embeddedness in extractive economic and financial
systems and the colonial origins of much of its wealth. As we shaped the program, we have held two things very tightly. First, the original vision of Joseph Rowntree, who wrote 120 years ago: “I feel that much of the current philanthropic effort is directed to remedying the more superficial manifestations of weakness or evil, while little thought or effort is directed to search out their underlying causes.” Even the phrase “underlying causes,” which is typically understood as the “root of a problem,” needs a conceptual shift. We’re learning from our work that the greatest “underlying cause” of today’s challenges is the Western worldview.
Second, we felt a deep personal commitment to ensuring that the work holds integrity for our times. While facing economic, ecological, epistemic, and spiritual crises, we see a call to action and new possibilities, not a collapse into fatalism. Even as the cracks begin to show, we want to nurture and sustain the budding moss and lichen, which teems with new life and possibilities. In these times of transition and turmoil, can we see ourselves as the hinge generation linking two eras? Where our job is to use what we can of the old world to build the new, and work to deconstruct and say goodbye to the beliefs, structures, and practices that hold us back?
In every moment, glimmers of alternative futures appear. The present is made up not only of the knowable and measurable, but also of what is latent or hidden: the stuff of our hopes, imaginations, and spiritual existence. What might happen if we treated those as real, too? How might they shape different choices and priorities?
Margaret Mead wrote of “prefigurative cultures” in which the past is no guide to the future. In this context, we love how liberatory artist incubator MAIA frames their work as “a rehearsal of the world we want to be.” What exists that prefigures the futures of which we dream? What might happen if we became better at noticing those glimmers or fragments of hope that offer clues about how we might need to reorder our world? What is already here, hiding in the soil, perhaps only recognizable when we look in new ways? What might we start to notice if we take off the blinkers created by the harmful, extractive logic of our current economic systems?
We focus much more on strategic intentions than strategic planning and ground ourselves in the philosophy so beautifully described in adrienne maree brown’s work: that “what we pay attention to, grows.” In Vanessa Reid’s closing piece for this supplement, we’re invited to pay “exquisite attention” to the guidance hiding in plain view. Our work confronts the uncomfortable truth that the future cannot be predicted, but we believe that the future will be shaped in part by what we choose to pay attention to in the present. If we hope to speed up the transition to more liberatory and flourishing futures, and to mature into a new era, what and who is here in the present that can guide us toward change? What visions can be articulated to compel and propel people to take courageous action in this moment?
Our work at JRF is constantly evolving as we stay alive to the wider context and pay attention to what’s both in front of us and at the edges, on the horizon and in the anomalies. We are respectful of the unknowable. Our work also requires us to be situated in multiple worlds and times—past, present, and future, the status quo and the arising quo, the dominant system and the emerging one—and in the liminal spaces between.
It’s from these places that we’ve conceived of what our work in the present might be. We must pay attention to hospicing what is no longer of this time to seed and steward what needs to emerge—whether new, old, or alternative patterns—and to ensure that resources and wealth move in the right directions.
We have curated this publication to emphasize the practices we pay attention to, as individuals and collectives, and that sustain us in moments of change or during transitions. This issue is divided into four interlinked sections. For each section, we have invited a field perspective and deep dives into the people, places, and initiatives practicing in these fields.
The first section, which explores hospicing and stewarding loss, launches us into a conversation between Vanessa Andreotti and Habiba Nabatu, from Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, and Lankelly Chase. For alternatives and new patterns and systems to emerge, we must recognize what is already dying or needs to die. The ways we collectively steward dying can contribute to healing, but also to the creation of what we call “good compost,” a rich, complex soil from which new futures can emerge.
The second section on collective imagination focuses on how building social imagination can unsettle the status quo and make the current system more implausible while opening us to new possible worlds. It gives us something different to long for and bring into being. Elissa Sloan Perry, who leads Change Elemental’s Prefiguring Futures Lab, invites us into these themes with an important query: Who gets to imagine? What conditions make it possible to take risks, especially for marginalized individuals? How we grow this capacity, the range of practices we have at our disposal, and who gets to practice are critical as we seek a different orientation through imagination.
The third section on capacities and capabilities begins with a provocation from Laura Blakeman and Julian Norris from the Wolf Willow Institute for Systems Learning, in which they define what they call complexity consciousness. How do we equip people to lead through these times? What skills, capabilities, and competencies are needed, and how can they be embodied and enacted?
The fourth section focuses on the Great Wealth Transfer and acknowledges that so much of the work reflected in this supplement is not possible unless we predistribute wealth using different instruments and a different approach. Denise Hearn and Anastasia Mourogova-Millin illuminate how concentrated corporate power and excessive wealth accumulation persist and outline the rewiring work that we need further upstream from philanthropic giving.
Our final piece by Vanessa Reid, the founder of the studio of the extraordinary, asks what we tether to when the navigation systems we’ve relied on begin to unravel. Reid offers a story about unusual guidance and strange waymarkers for these apocalyptic times.
We hope this supplement touches your hearts, calls to your souls, and stretches your sense of what’s possible, but also what these times require of us: how we can bring more of ourselves into the world to answer calls for something different and new. We believe that this supplement also offers ideas that are deeply practical. There are practices to go away with, others to implement, initiatives to resource, and projects and programs to try.
CASSIE ROBINSON is associate director of the Emerging Futures program at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
SOPHIA PARKER is director of the Emerging Futures program at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
We are called to nurture the wisdom and presence required to accompany endings with grace, trusting that from these transitions, new life will find its way into being.
BY VANESSA ANDREOTTI & HABIBA NABATU
As we stand at the precipice of endings—of species, ecosystems, organizations, and systems themselves—the work of hospicing is to move beyond fear and embrace the deep transitions ahead with wisdom. To be stewards of this time, we must develop the practices and capacities to tend to these endings, not with urgency or control, but with a kind of stillness that invites the birth of new ways of being. Endings are not failures; they are part of a cycle that requires presence, reverence, and humility.
Our hyperfocus on growth and expansion has left us ill-prepared to sit with death—whether it be the death of industries or the biosphere—and this discomfort with grief prevents us from being fully alive in the present. How might we allow the crumbling of outdated structures without rushing to rebuild too quickly? How might we hold space for what is irreversibly changing, without rushing to save or fix it?
To envision a good death in this context is to reimagine how we relate to endings, not as catastrophic failures or moments to be avoided, but as natural processes that hold within them the seeds of renewal. A good death invites us to let go of the compulsion to control or extend the life of things that have outlived their purpose—be they industries, systems, or ways of being. Instead, we are asked to companion these endings with the same reverence and care that we might offer to a loved one in their final moments, knowing that the end of one cycle is the beginning of another.
In the following exchange, we discuss the practices and capacities required for hospice work.
VANESSA: We always have death, and we always have birth. I think about the roles that are needed for death and birth, especially supporting processes that are already in place. For example, there are so many organizations and institutions detached from reality that can’t articulate what they are and why they exist in a context that differs from the one in which they were created. They no longer work and now stand on ground that is shaking. The Leaning Tower of Pisa comes to mind! Many organizations and institutions face this predicament right now. If the leaning tower falls, it breaks, wastes resources, and causes harm and grief. But if it falls softly, it can become a nurse log for the ecosystem: A dead tree trunk that nurses new life as it decomposes, releasing the nutrients that once sustained it.
Stewarding and supporting organizations and institutions to fall softly is part of the work and part of the capacities we need. We are learning how to do this work.
HABIBA: We are in the process of closing our organization. We have given ourselves five years to do this, so that we can fall gently, as you say, Vanessa. It’s not finished nor is it linear, and there are different views within the organization of how we do this and should we even do it. It’s messy. With that in mind, we are trying to hold onto the context we are in as humanity. Some people call it polycrisis, some call it climate breakdown, and others call it ecological collapse. It has many names. At its core, the context is about facing our separation from nature, from our beyond-human relatives, from others deemed unworthy, and from our own selves. It’s recognizing the magnitude, depth, and scale of this crisis. This means that we have no choice but to change, to transition, to let go, to face endings, and to end our organization. We are accepting that our organization was created in a different context, and we must now reshape it to tend to this context.
This is not an easy place to be. Even if we all agree on the context, we are still dealing with fears, insecurities, projections, desire for control, for certainty, and for simplistic solutions. There is no blueprint for how we do this. One of our partners often reminds me of the words of Antonio Machado
Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar,” which translates as “Walker, there is no road. The road is made as you walk.”
And who is the “we”? I feel the rage and grief of the “we.” People in the Global South didn’t cause this crisis. At the same time, I can’t escape my complicity. Almost everything I buy, use, and consume comes from exploitation of other people and land, predominately in the Global South.
As we turn toward closure, we are reshaping the organization. We are experimenting with embodied practice. We take inspiration from somatic practitioners Ng’ethe Maina and Staci K. Haines, who are intentional about practicing our commitments. We see the need for practice and capacities in our commitment to conscious closures, hospicing, and making good compost.
VANESSA: Thinking about capacities and practices, we need to move from narrow boundary intelligence, characterized by either/or and linear thinking, and forms of accountability that are defined in terms of single-goal optimization. Instead, we need wide-boundary intelligence that allows us to work with complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity.
There are mindsets that need disrupting, including universalism and logocentrism. In fact, what we need is more like disinvestment than disruption. We need to disinvest from these certainties and invest in our capacities for complexity. Drawing on diffraction, a concept that was coined by the physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad, we mean seeing different layers of a problem. If you diffract reality, you see that different people live in different realities, and yet all of them are present and moving all the time. This is work that requires wisdom, which is not the same as complexity. Wisdom is a commitment to the viability of the matter while retaining a sense of the mystery and movement of the whole existing beyond us. It is a different commitment, a different capacity. Wide-boundary intelligence, combined with wisdom, is the bare minimum we need to move forward with work in hospicing and deep transitions.
HABIBA: I appreciate what you are saying, because cultivating our capacity to see different layers of a problem is a big part of the work. Yet many of us, including myself, don’t have the tools to do this. But we are not doing this alone. We also don’t think that some people know how to do this and others don’t. We are being intentional about creating spaces to be with each other in the inquiry of disinvesting from these certainties and dissolving separations. Currently we are finding this wisdom from some of our elders who have deep roots in social movements, embodied practice, grief tending, and land justice. Some of these elders are at the forefront of communities facing oppression, exploitation, and violence. We are creating space to (re)learn history, politics, and philosophy. The elders remind us of what they have been through and still going through. So, endings and death are a reality for them and their communities. We are trying to practice our way into the kind of wide-boundary intelligence you are talking about. We recognize the privilege of even being able to do this, while we have time and resources.
What is viable today will no longer be viable in the future, especially in the Global North. In the short pieces that follow, we see the emergence
of a field of practice surrounding hospice work for organizations and institutions that confronts the uncomfortable truth that the shaky ground under us is here to stay.
THAT ARE IMPORTANT FOR ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS TO HAVE IN PLACE FOR COMPOSTING AND GRIEF PROCESSES:
1.
The capacity and vocabulary to hold space for complexity. This is a space where people don’t only speak from trauma, a need to prove themselves, or a reified identity. Rather, it’s a capacity that dissolves rigid, reified identities so people can sit with contradictions and see wholeness beyond themselves.
2.
Disinvest from universalizing descriptions and prescriptions, because reality is far beyond anything we can fathom. We need to sit with the heuristic nature of our narratives and see their limited, fragmentary nature. This capacity creates a form of elasticity, preventing people from becoming entrenched in an emotional state for too long.
3.
Prioritizing inquiry over consensus, requiring us to be with one another and come together.
4.
Building capacity to stay with difficulties and painful feelings without the usual response of overwhelm, immobilization, or a desire for rescue.
5.
Finding ways to keep the work moving with compassion and accountability.
Within these processes, there is the idea of intergenerational responsibility: How to invest in a future world where our bodies won’t ever be. We need to be pulled out of personal preferences—that’s the wisdom bit—to enrich our identities. We are part of a larger metabolism and a larger temporality than our own bodies and lives.
This work is important. If we look toward the future, hospicing and composting will leave a landscape to refigure and recreate, and that’s exciting.
VANESSA ANDREOTTI is professor of education and dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, and part of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective.
HABIBA NABATU is director of practice at Lankelly Chase.
WE NEED TO BE PULLED OUT OF PERSONAL PREFERENCES TO ENRICH OUR IDENTITIES. WE ARE PART OF A LARGER METABOLISM AND A LARGER TEMPORALITY THAN OUR OWN BODIES AND LIVES.
Systemic transitions require paying attention to organizations and institutions that need to die—and to do the work of conscious closing with responsibility, kindness, and wisdom.
BY CAMILLE ACEY
What happens when organizations and institutions need to die? And why is this part of the work often overlooked in systems change and social innovation practice? These two questions were at the heart of Stewarding Loss when it began in 2018.
Stewarding Loss is a field-building initiative focused on the process of closure, ending, and dismantling as a journey to be designed. Over the course of several years, Stewarding Loss has engaged in a range of activities, from creating “loss circles” as spaces where people anticipating organizational closures can come to share stories and concerns; to conducting interviews with a range of practitioners involved in end-of-life care, including ritual and ceremonial hosts, grief therapists, and death doulas so we could learn how to translate practices across different contexts; to hosting roundtables with philanthropic foundations and speaking at numerous events to allow us to gather insight and feedback regarding ideas and needs for this work; to prototyping a Farewell Fund to learn what type of invitation and application might encourage organizations to become proactive about closing, and what supports might be needed by people on the journey to closure.
High-quality participation and engagement in these activities helped Stewarding Loss learn about how to prepare for closings in a compassionate and respectful way We gathered insights on how to help people anticipate endings and even rehearse them, how to know what good preparation looks like, when might be the right time to close down an organization, and who gets to decide. We learned about language and framing, and which narratives help, prompt, and honor endings. We made linguistic shifts:
• From “It’s a failure” to “It’s generous.”
• From “It’s shameful” to “It’s courageous.”
• From “It’s giving up” to “It’s creating new life.”
• From “It’s such a waste” to “It’s an opportunity to distribute wisdom elsewhere.”
We also saw the unexpected consequences of endings and discussed how to mitigate the fallout to build a more constructive, hopeful, and creative process of change. This approach required us to consider what happens after closing and to design an intentional process of healing and restoration committed to helping people adjust to, cope with, and make sense of change. We identified how to do this work in ways that are responsible (considerate of all potential consequences), kind (people feel respected, cared for, and valued), and intelligent (drawing on our history, learning, wisdom, and assets).
We distilled this work, together with practical information about costs, legal matters, and how to establish an informal closure hotline, into several toolkits that are available online and used by many people in different contexts of organizational closure.
• Sensing an Ending is a set of seven principles to steward better organizational endings, accompanied by the guidebook Considering Closure
• Staying Close to Loss is an introduction to the idea of continual inquiry in the life of an organization, whereby loss is considered part of an organizational strategy, just like growth. This idea is explored in a series of canvases.
Stewarding Loss continues to develop this work and play a role in supporting the emergence of a field of practice. The Community of Practice is a monthly space where members of an international community gather to spotlight and share practices that are being developed and used in the context of closure. There is an online space to join, and in fall 2024, we will publish new and updated tools and materials, while offering a program on how to lead and what to pay attention to in times of collapse and transition, beginning with wealth distribution and institutional philanthropy.
At Stewarding Loss, we continue to believe that as our ecosystems and human systems evolve, we must pay attention to endings, not only beginnings, and this practice starts upstream, not just in response to a crisis. Space must be created for new alternatives to emerge, which means accepting that some things will need to be abandoned, and others left to die. How exactly this process is achieved is what matters. Designing the end well makes better compost for new life and the shared futures that will emerge from it.
CAMILLE
ACEY is community coordinator and host of Stewarding Loss
Organizational endings are inevitable, but bad endings don’t have to be.
BY IONA LAWRENCE & LOUISE ARMSTRONG
Many civil society organizations struggle under the weight of delayed or uncertain endings, burdened by funding scarcity, human exhaustion, and the stigma of failure. The CEO lies awake at 3 a.m., agonizing over how to cover payroll as funding dries up. The founder wrestles with how to broach the topic of succession with their board. The HR manager worries about attracting talent after multiple failed recruitment rounds and increasing staff turnover. The board chair weighs whether the current legal structure is still the right vehicle for the change their organization seeks.
These factors can result in endings that decimate morale and undermine legacies, learning, and opportunities for renewal and building strength. Imagine an alternative: thoughtful, well-resourced, and timely endings that honor and celebrate achievements while addressing critical questions such as what can or must be carried forward and what should be left behind.
The Decelerator is on a 10-year mission to transform how UK civil society approaches endings. With seed funding from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Pears Foundation, and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, The Decelerator provides information, tools, and hands-on assistance to facilitate better, more regenerative endings including closures, mergers, CEO transitions, and project completions.
At the heart of this work is The Decelerator Hotline: a confidential, non-judgmental place for organizations anticipating, planning, or delivering an ending. The hotline combines active listening, thoughtful questions, and inspiring stories, and is staffed by Decelerator Navigators, people who have their own experiences with endings.
Following more than 200 conversations, The Decelerator is learning how a single conversation can become a turning point in the life of an organization and a milestone on a prolonged journey. Whenever we pause to consider all the available options, our perceptions and expectations shift in ways that allow us to contribute to a more regenerative civil society.
(See “Steering the Conversation” below.)
The Decelerator hopes that by making its practices and learnings open-source (see the Substack and decelerator.org.uk), other organizations will be emboldened and inspired to embrace the transformative potential of a good ending.
Endings are inevitable, but bad endings don’t have to be. How do you—or how might you—make space for these conversations and transformations in your own organization, sector, or system?
IONA LAWRENCE and LOUISE ARMSTRONG are cofounders of The Decelerator.
FROM …
Brain Fog and Confusion … “I’m sorry, I have no idea if that made any sense whatsoever.”
“We Are the Only One” … “I can’t believe we’ve ended up here.”
Disempowerment or Listlessness …
“I have no motivation and see no good options.”
A Sense of Failure and Shame …
“I can’t believe this is happening on my watch. What will others think of me?”
Isolation …
“This is so lonely. No one understands.”
Stuck in an Ending …
“I can’t see a future for myself, this organization’s legacy, or anything at all.”
TOWARD …
a Clearer Head
“I can see how we got here and what our options are.”
… “We Are a Part of Patterns and a Wider Landscape”
“I am reassured that you are hearing this sort of thing from other organisations on a daily basis.”
… Agency and Action
“I see what I need to do tomorrow morning and what success might look like.”
… Courage and Strategy
“I think we might be doing the best thing we can for the people and communities we serve.”
… Connection
“I feel less alone. I’ve found the words to talk about this with others.”
… Seeing Beyond
“I am beginning to see a future where this organization no longer exists in its current form. Green shoots of hope and legacy are pushing through.”
We must relearn the skills and practices of grieving, individually and collectively, to manage loss and renew the circle of life.
BY CAMILLE SAPARA BARTON
Composting is essential in our times. We must compost food and plant waste to nourish the soil and the web of life. We must also compost our grief to come into the right relationship with ourselves, one another, and the beings with whom we share this planet.
I define grief as embodied sensations and emotions that surface when we experience loss, harm, or sudden change. For many people, grief emerges outside the context of bereavement, such as from state violence, forced migration, or environmental degradation.
What does it mean to compost grief? It means creating space with intention to notice what has moved within us, and feeling these shifts to digest the discomfort and loss that are woven into our days. This can take the form of a ritual, a sharing circle, or movement practice, to name a few examples. My book, Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community, offers a selection of supportive individual and group practices. By spending time with our grief and releasing tears, sounds, or intuitive movement, we can begin to absorb the nutrients—or lessons—from our experiences and release the waste: anything that prevents us from living in alignment with our values.
The soil and our bodies and minds have been depleted by the project of Western civilization. Over the last 500 years, many of our ancestral or Indigenous approaches to grief tending have been destroyed. These practices once connected us to the life cycle and gave us soft “containers” in our communities where we could fall apart. My ideas about grief have been shaped by Sobonfu and Malidoma Somé, elders of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso who engage in monthly communal rituals to process grief, which they view as a social good. Unlike the Dagara, for most Westerners grief remains taboo, leading many of us to feel deep isolation and shame when navigating loss. As a result, it’s common to avoid grief or discomfort at any cost by numbing or distracting ourselves. This untended grief often builds up and spills over into our relationships in destructive ways, like the odors from a pile of rotting food that begins affecting the environment around it. But a well-tended compost heap will break down matter in a way that benefits the web of life.
The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed a crisis in mental health, exacerbated by young people around the world feeling a sense of doom due to the climate crisis. Is it strategic to outsource our grief and discomfort to a small group of paid therapists? We need to relearn the skills to resource our communities to create regular, nourishing spaces to sit with grief. Regular grief tending can reduce isolation, build trust, and provide clarity about our priorities so that we can move forward together.
Grief is a great unifier. We will all experience loss, change, and death. It is worth practicing grief tending and peer support so we can prepare for the inevitable losses that are part of the beautiful and painful experience we call life.
CAMILLE SAPARA BARTON is a writer, artist, and somatic practitioner.
Imagining and living into a new world requires freedom, space, and support to dream and take risks.
BY ELISSA SLOAN PERRY
“The possible has been tried and failed. Now it is time to try the impossible.”
— SUN RA
“Today we remember that we come from those who, even in the absence of agency over their bodies, possessed a mysterious freedom in the secret of their interior worlds. An interior liberation that no master can touch. May it survive in us.”
— COLE ARTHUR RILEY
In the last several years, movements for equity and liberation have faced chaos and increasingly complex challenges amid rising authoritarianism, racialized and gendered violence, and impending climate catastrophe. In retrospect, the cyclical nature of these struggles is clear. All of us working in movements in a variety of roles have had to shape-shift in wildly unpredictable ways, adopting different tactics and strategies to confront changing issues and priorities in response to the present moment.
Many groups have managed to cocreate pathways toward a more equitable, love-filled world by doing the necessary work of uncovering enduring harms and creating cultures of care that allow us to cultivate our interdependence with tender, rigorous, and loving accountability. And yet many organizations have at the same time been swimming against the currents caught in age-old riptides, hurting from the disconnection and dis-ease that comes from simultaneously trying to take down harmful systems while living in them and building new ones.
Many movement leaders are speaking out about some of the barriers to transformative change: Maurice Mitchell’s “Building Resilient Organizations” in The Forge, Sayu Bhojwani’s “Women Leaders of Color Are Exhausted: Philanthropy Needs to Step Up” in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and NorthStar Network’s “Long-Term Power Building: A Shared Analysis of Navigating Crises.” At Change Elemental, a movement infrastructure organization and home of the Prefiguring Futures Lab, we engage in these conversations with our clients, partners, and networks, and through it all, we continue to return to the same question: How might we build power with and power within (and appropriate uses of power over) to live the value of interdependent care and well-being? One thing we are certain of is that we need spaces to dream, play, imagine, and practice other worlds while living in our current one.
Freedom dwells in imagination, where the seemingly impossible becomes possible. Many portals can take us there and some of us can more freely access our imaginations, no matter what package we come in, whether racialized, gendered, disabled, and so on. (Mavis Staples even offered to take us there.) However, prioritizing imagination and then making the imagined real requires risk as well as space for failure that can seem, or actually be, treacherous for many people. Direct systemic impacts on marginalized people, and the internalization of those systems and impacts, often distort both the characterization and placement of risk and failure.
If we can only see and sense what is, we will continue to uphold the status quo. Imagination is the only way humans will be able to climb out of the many quagmires we have created: environmental, economic, political, and cultural. We must start to see ourselves differently and have a compelling vision of a different future. We must experience at least a modicum of joy (or relief, relaxation, or feeling seen) to sustain ourselves while moving along an unknown path toward an imagined destination.
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. … If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core— the fountain—of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.
— AUDRE LORDE, “POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY”
As a writer, dancer, and leadership facilitator and coach, the practice of conjuring worlds has always been central and rich soil for me. Recently, I was on a long flight and found myself watching Anthony Bourdain spending two days with Chef Ferran Adrià of the famed and now shuttered El Bulli restaurant near Barcelona, Spain. At the time of filming, Adrià had already announced the closing of his restaurant. When Bourdain asked what was next, Adrià described his desire to create and work in a place for exploration and imagination with other creative people, including artists and architects and other creatives. “You want the people who are going to ask, ‘Do we even need a dining room?’” Bourdain posited. “Exactly!” Adrià responded. I realized that Adrià was describing a laboratory to explore, practice, and play with how we think of, source, prepare, and share food. While thinking about wanting to visit this place, I wondered, “Who gets to imagine, play, take risks, fail, and ask big questions—and how is this funded?” Who gets to play, explore, imagine, and experiment, and who gets to fail? What are the risks and for whom?
Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. ... Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.
— ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
Given our systems of oppression and othering, the very people who are most often resourced to imagine a way out of social problems such as poverty, homelessness, racism, and transphobia are often not the most affected and thus the least likely to imagine a true solution. We often get new ways for the relative few to access settler-colonialist and capitalist “solutions,” instead of true liberation whereby people and the planet can exist in mutually accountable, interdependent well-being.
In a recent conversation with Kaci Patterson of Black Equity Collective, she observed that white men frequently receive money for their ideas on the basis of trust. For Black women, however, money for an idea is typically based on a theory of change, a logic model, and proof of concept, including evidence that makes sense to a potential donor or grant maker. In the nonprofit industrial complex, serving the systems-change missions of our organizations often misses the mark. At worst, we create or exacerbate potentially life-threatening conditions for racialized people and other marginalized peoples. Philanthropy “invests” in ideas, incubators, and dream spaces for white men, based on trust that their idea is good, while the same grant makers “take a risk” on expanding ideas for marginalized (and largely racialized) groups using evidence deemed credible by individuals with financial resources. These investments and risks often translate into different dollar amounts, ranging from six-figure investments to “small
bets” in the range of five figures. Who is taking the real risk? And at a cost to whom? If we reimagine wealth as an abundant, collective resource that nourishes restorative and liberating pathways, we can reimagine risk and failure, and redirect investment to those most impacted by failure.
We know that creating new neural pathways (new ideas) requires long-distance leaps in our brains that are most likely to happen when we are relaxed, at rest, or at play. Who has access to relaxation, rest, and play? New ideas also happen when we are exposed to different ways of thinking, being, and making meaning of the world. Who has access to those exposures?
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
— ALBERT EINSTEIN
It was while singing … the idea of escaping slavery was first suggested to my mind.
— FREDERICK DOUGLASS
In our work at Change Elemental, we use an (imperfect) analogy based on a line I heard from Alexis Pauline Gumbs in a workshop she led. “I hear best with one foot in the water and one foot in the sand,” she said. The analogy is having a “water foot” and a “land foot.” Water, which represents what is imaginative and largely unknown, is where vision lives. Land, or the known world, is our current context. We dwell in the delta, the rich soil where land and water meet. The water foot leads—singing, dancing, seeing, creating—while the land foot is a necessary partner. What if Frederick Douglass never sang?
To reimagine systems and make these visions real in ways that advance mutually accountable and interdependent well-being for people and the planet, we must cultivate the soil of possibility. We must live in the delta with our water foot leading and nurture imagination.
One of many ways that we create space for and support imagination is our Prefiguring Futures Lab, where people in many movement roles, geographies, and identities are invited to play, dream, sing, dance, and draw as we design, conjure, experiment with, facilitate, and reflect on our steps forward to new worlds. It is a place to rest and be nourished together such that we can imagine and grow the fruit that will sustain us aboveground.
There are a great number of people, organizations, networks, communities of practice, collectives, and other groups engaged in the vital work of imagining new worlds. They work the compost, till the soil, plant seeds, and nurture saplings. This is how we’ve made it this far; the soil is not new. In making the soil rich again, we imagine what might be possible.
We imagine what the thing is we want to create. And we create from that vision. Otherwise we keep replicating poorly what we already know and things get worse. Courage and creativity are core. It is a failure of nerve and a failure of imagination that will lead to our failure. Our poetry, music, painting, dance, connections to nature, and the like, are keys. We have to ... be able to imagine. If creativity, cultural ways, our ways of touching joy, don’t survive, nothing else will.
— LARRY WARD
A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind.
— GRACE LEE BOGGS
For more information about our work and resources for your own explorations, visit the Prefiguring Futures Lab at the Change Elemental website.
ELISSA SLOAN PERRY is director of Prefiguring Futures at Change Elemental.
To build new worlds, we need a place and a set of practices to be able to free our imaginations.
BY C h E
“The People remembered the truth of their Being, that they are The People who fly! And they rose up in the air … spiraling up and up in counterclockwise rings shouting all the while. They rode those hot breezes like currents, singin’ and wingin’ their way to Freedom Land!”
— EXCERPT FROM F R E E D O M L A N D ’S ORIGIN FOLQTELLIN, WRITTEN BY C h E
“The possible has been tried and failed. Now it is time to try the impossible.” — SUN RA
“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”
– OCTAVIA E. BUTLER, PARABLE OF THE SOWER
We are F R E E D O M L A N D, and we host a Creatrix Praxis Space led by and for queer, trans, gender-nonconforming, two-spirit+ Black and Indigenous peoples-of-color (QTGNC2-S+ BIPOC) movement artists, creative conjurers, worldbuilders, and makers of all levels of experience. This space holds a circle for those seeking the safe harbor of accompaniment, accountability, and shared practice rooted in the culturally resonant creative pedagogies of our ancestors.
In order to build worlds beyond the normative status quo of systemic colonial violence, we need to be able to imagine something more liberatory. And yet far too often, imagination, dreaming, and creative play are undervalued or left out altogether in strategic planning and organizing. When we cultivate our faculties of radical imagination, we are cultivating our power to shape change.
It can be intimidating to commit to a ritual of consistent creative/artistic practice and conjure. Yet as QTGNC2-S+ BIPOC, we have everything we need to do so. Our ancestors have survived innumerable apocalypses of attempted genocides, colonization, pandemics, and enslavement. Our creation cosmologies and griot folkways are alive with sacred instructions that lay pathways to interdependent freedom. These inherited technologies of dreaming and visioning beyond seemingly impossible circumstances allow us to make a way out of no way. From this ancestral worldview, imagination becomes prophecy.
Regardless of our level of experience as creatrices, we all need and deserve accompaniment as we lean into the vulnerability required in “be[ing] willing to be transformed in service of the work” (Mary Hooks, “The Mandate: A Call and Response from Black Lives Matter Atlanta,” 2016). Transformation is a continuous journey that takes moment-by-moment courage to build intimacy with the unseen—engaging the kindred of past | present | future to heal transgenerational wounds, and (re)shape reality with our chosen medium. This is the calling of any liberatory medicine path. This is the calling of the creatrix.
Creatrix Praxis Space is a monthly circle gathering that emerges and flows from what and who is present. Consistent components of our time include:
• An opening circle that offers: Afro-Indigenous rituals and somatic practices for remembering histories of land, place, and ancestors. Inspiration—such as a reading, listening, artistic or embodied practice that cultivates the Black radical imagination and teaches cultural organizing strategies.
• Time for creative coworking, offering accompaniment in our world-building practice(s).
• Time for culturally affirming critique, offering call-and-response reflection and feedback on what has been created.
• A closing circle woven with Freedom singing, polyrhythm, and gratitude practices that celebrate keeping our commitment to creative praxis and cultivating kinship along the way.
For this praxis series, we evoke the world-building methodologies and rituals of The Creatrix—our gender-expansive Black+Indigenous Feminist Mothxrs of Creation. Emerging from this lineage, our applied transdisciplinary intersectional justice framework, Afro-Indigenous Liberatory Praxis, reminds us that in these bodies—art, healing, and ritual resistance are all one. This approach centers transmuting the wounds of internalized oppression and ongoing colonial violence through:
• process-based participatory facilitation,
• expressive arts therapeutic techniques,
• trauma-informed somatics,
• mindfulness/contemplative praxis,
• studying cultural organizing strategies,
• and cultivating relationships with land and beyond-human relatives. Participants challenge maladaptive habits of self-sabotage, avoidance, and isolation by immersing in a liberatory praxis space that develops cultural organizing excellence, nourishes the creative spirit, and builds trust in an aligned supportive community, as we dare to shape freedom dreams for future generations.
ChE (they/ them) is the founding liberatory consultant of F R E E D O M L A N D.
TRANSFORMATION IS A CONTINUOUS JOURNEY THAT TAKES MOMENT-BY-MOMENT COURAGE TO BUILD INTIMACY WITH THE UNSEEN. THIS IS THE CALLING OF ANY LIBERATORY MEDICINE PATH.
We offer tools and practice communities for those who are working together to build the belief that other worlds are possible.
BY SEPI NOOHI & HANNA THOMAS UOSE
“Freedom is in the gaps, in the nascent and emergent, in the unexamined space between things—but it is there. We can call it down. We call it down when we listen to our dreams. When we let the unconscious and the imaginal show us the way around what it is we see right now. We call it down when our present can be in conversation with what could be. In prayer or meditation, in what we ritualize, our visions become more real the more space we give to them. There are already visions around you that have shaped most everything about our world. If they do not serve us, perhaps it is time to revisit our imaginations, perhaps it is time to dream new dreams.”
— PRENTIS HEMPHILL
It is time to dream new dreams and invest in our imagination in ways that allow us to think about what is not yet present. By building infrastructure for imagination, we nourish the soil from which new perspectives and worldviews emerge. Who gets to imagine? How might the practices of collective imagination open us to the futures our kin might inherit and steward? These questions are at the heart of the field-building work to which the Collective Imagination Practice Community and the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit are committed. Both resources reflect our efforts to disseminate and deepen the practices they cultivate.
An international group of practitioners developed the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit, which is a curated selection of tools and methods designed to foster civic imagination, temporal imagination, ecological imagination, collective and somatic intelligence, and frameworks for taking apart and reframing the systems and challenges of our time. The toolkit is an invitation for anyone hoping to grow their imaginative capacity, try out different practices, or create new ones.
Another field-building effort, the open-access Collective Imagination Practice Community (CIPC) and Fund, hosted by Canopy, Huddlecraft, and the Centre for Public Impact, was conceived to expand imagination and build infrastructure to support collective (un)learning, questioning, experimentation, and reflection. Now in its second year, CIPC has created spaces for peer learning and forging deeper relationships in response to demands by governments, organizations, place-based networks, and communities to share collective imagination practices. CIPC membership has quickly grown, a sign of increasing interest in the promise of collective imagination.
If you are curious to learn more, delve into what happened in year one, read about our plans for year two, learn how to access funding, and sign up for our mailing list. To explore the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit, we offer online learning spaces for folks to share imagination practices. We would love for you to join us.
SEPI NOOHI is a research and partnerships officer for the Emerging Futures program at the
HANNA THOMAS UOSE is a writer, activist, and cofounder and principal consultant at Align.
To create a new world, we need to nurture our ability to foresee it.
BY CHERYL HSU
Sometimes we encounter people who seem to live in the gap between worlds. Their bodies are more transparent—diaphanous, flickering in the liminal fascia between many planes of reality. They see and fall in love with unimaginable potential. They try to whisper to us about it, even if we don’t understand. They are faithful to a different kind of clarity and integrity. When they communicate through silence, strange riddles, and koans, it is with gravity and potency that stirs something deep: a remembrance of the future
To be an oracular being is:
To open your soul-body to the gap; to become a porous channel of temporal streams and currents.
To encounter latent potential; to beckon and connect with furtive futures that impregnate you with vision.
To utter from that unspeakable place of paradox; to declare your visions to the world, transforming your body into a portal of potential.
Oracular beings are profoundly sensitive and porous, weird and wise. But today, there is a demand for oracular beings to enter the public sphere to become guides to this time between worlds, and to assume postures of “visionary leadership” for collective metamorphosis. These oracular beings step up, even when they prefer to be dancing at the edges of the forest. The public gaze can be hard on these bodies. It is a costume that binds them to expectations and projections. Yet these beings work hard, devoting their spirit, soul, sweat, blood, and tears.
Oracular Bodies began as a research/art project exploring the phenomenology of these senseful beings who can be considered visionaries, shamans, mystics, oracles, or prophets in this time between worlds. Historically, an oracle has been someone gifted with clear senses and the capacity to speak and provide visionary insight, counsel, and prophecy. In times desperate for guidance and foresight, oracular beings are being called to become beacons to heal, inspire, and guide others through collective transition.
It is work that arises from tender love and fierce guardianship of the oracular beings in our lives. We want to source the infrastructures of care for oracular beings and protect the intergenerational transmission of this emerging yet ancient capacity. We want to prefigure the vital patterns of oracular culture, a future that sees and provides for a collective capacity that must not be limited to a burdened few. It embodies a living hypothesis that humans are innately porous and interconnected creatures in our radical responsiveness to other living beings and a living world. Oracular bodies help us remember the intimacy that is our collective birthright.
This work is used to design programs that can support these oracular beings and offer practices of transition, a different kind of foresight—a foreseeing that can only come from these particular bodies.
CHERYL HSU is a systemic design researcher and strategist.
A shared ethos of deep connectedness offers the most viable foundation for human and planetary flourishing.
BY LAURA BLAKEMAN & JULIAN NORRIS
The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come.
— TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
We begin with poetry. In these fragmented times, the poetic can invite an expansion of perspective that allows for something of our deeper and shared humanity to enter the conversation. Poetry, like parable or song, can cut through modernity’s incessant clamor. It can gather us to a place where we might sense another way to approach our collective challenges. Visionary author Octavia Butler reminds us in Parable of the Sower that “The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren’t any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water is through the trees.” To be a changemaker is to be enmeshed in or moved by painful stories. But our experience supporting change leaders has taught us that while careful analysis, systemic approaches, fierce commitments, and the development of new skills and capabilities are all vital, they are not enough. This article is an attempt to step back from the urgent and draw our collective attention to the glint of water through the trees. For as our foundational socio-ecological systems grow increasingly unstable, we need to orient toward new patterns of possibility.
Humans have extraordinary capabilities. Our capacity for dreaming and deductive reasoning, flair for collaboration, facility with language and storytelling, tools and technologies, and cunning and curiosity have enabled us to become the preeminent species on the planet. But it appears that we have never been less certain about what it is that makes us truly human and why we are really here. From our perspective, many of the most alarming phenomena unfolding around us—resurgent racial supremacists, belligerent nationalism, religious extremism, entrenched culture wars, creeping authoritarianism, and potentially catastrophic ecological recklessness—are, at their core, crises of relationality. Relationality, according to researchers Wing Shan Kan and Raul Lejano, is “the condition by which individuals (or groups) think and act in coherence with the web of relationships in which they are a part.”1 Through webs of influence and impact, we are “related” to everyone and everything on the planet. Any notion that we are not is an illusion that cannot be sustained if we are to live and flourish together. We’d also expand this definition to include our intimacy (or lack thereof), with our own interiority—which includes the stories we hold about ourselves and
the world. But as the relational fields that sustain authentic community, connection and meaning grow increasingly fragmented, many people find themselves adrift and vulnerable to the woefully limited narratives and maimed myths competing for their attention.
The perspective shift that will allow us to experience greater relationality at scale represents a kind of species-level adaptive challenge An adaptive challenge is a form of systems pressure, often in the form of a new threat, that renders our previously successful strategies ineffective and even counterproductive. Overcoming it requires learning and the development of new capabilities.2 We suggest that supporting such learning represents the most important work of the coming century. Our other efforts—technological and social innovations, political and economic reforms, resistance movements, repair work and regenerative practices—all rest on this foundation. Educating for specific developmental outcomes is important,3 but the opportunity, as we see it, goes beyond individual development. Our work at the Wolf Willow Institute has taught us that any new skill, technology, or capability invariably gets mobilized in service of our existing paradigms and states of consciousness, both individual and collective. We are dedicated to supporting leaders and systems shapers to come to know and inhabit the world from a foundational awareness that we’re calling complexity consciousness
Complexity consciousness describes a particular quality of being that is both poetic and prosaic. It reminds us of our shared humanity and provides insight into what this time is asking us to become. It points to the integration of our multiple ways of knowing, being, and relating—in which the rigors of science and rationality find common ground with the wisdom of the heart and a sense of the sacred.4 Complexity consciousness describes an integral perspective that weaves the gifts of premodernity, postmodernity, and the ever-emerging now.5 We think of it as the critical “internal” correlate that must temper our dazzling “external” powers and world-shaping technologies. Amid the current metacrisis, it gestures to the glint of water through the trees—the urgency and possibility of restoring a sense of reverence and care for the Earth, recognizing that humans are part of a larger community of life, and taking responsibility for the well-being of one another, the planet, and future generations. It might be tempting to dismiss this as mystical, impractical, or even self-indulgent in the face of the metacrisis, but we’d like to emphasize that this way of relating to the world is as practical as it is poetic. We will endeavor to be clear about what we mean.
Consciousness encompasses not only what we know but also how we know, together with who and what we experience ourselves to be. Shaped by our cognition and the ways we are entangled with the world, we might say that our every action is in some way an expression of our state of consciousness. It is the internal condition or storyline that affects the quality of our participation and defines the limits of our world.
Complexity can be understood as a property of any living system or network where multiple elements interact with one another. Those
COMPLEXITY CONSCIOUSNESS DESCRIBES A PARTICULAR QUALITY OF BEING. IT REMINDS US OF OUR SHARED HUMANITY AND PROVIDES INSIGHT INTO WHAT THIS TIME IS ASKING US TO BECOME.
interactions lead to emergent and unpredictable behaviors that cannot be easily understood by analyzing the elements in isolation. The modern world still tends to perceive reality as a substance rather than as a web of relationships, and the language of complexity is one way to describe the relational nature of reality with more precision and accuracy.
Complexity consciousness is not simply a metaphor. A growing body of research explores the nature and quality of consciousness as it relates to neural complexity6 while developmental psychologists suggest that later stages of adult development represent an increase in interior complexity and a corresponding capacity to perceive, think, act, and imagine in more complex ways.7 We find these perspectives valuable, but suggest that complexity consciousness has an additional, more primal quality. It is a state where we directly experience a sense of kinship and connection with the worlds beyond ourselves, a state where we no longer experience ourselves as being separate. From this place, responsibility and reciprocity are not simply moral imperatives or rational choices; they are central operating principles, grounded in the intrinsic value of life on Earth, providing the bedrock for viable ecosystems and sustainable patterns of living. Complexity consciousness is not simply a way of knowing about complexity. Rather, it is a way of being that flows from a greater sense of connectedness.
The spirit of complexity consciousness reflects Indigenous ontologies such as Melanie Goodchild’s relational systems thinking, 8 Gregory Cajete’s original face, 9 and Tyson Yunkaporta’s five minds 10 It echoes Jean Gebser’s concept of integral mind11 and Kathia Laszlo’s idea of systems being 12 Complexity consciousness describes the foundational awareness that Neil Theise identifies in various contemplative traditions including Buddhism, Kabbalah, Vedanta, and Kashmiri Shaivism.13 But however we understand it, the awakening of complexity consciousness represents perspectival expansion and thus a fresh storyline. It is a paradigm shift in the way we see and relate to ourselves, one another, and the more-than-human world.14 From it flow the following:
• A long-term perspective: a sense of consideration for and responsibility to future generations;
• A relational perspective: a capacity for empathy and relational intimacy with all life together with a felt-sense of membership in a single human family and the wider Earth community;
• An ecological or systemic perspective: an understanding and reverence for the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life; and
• A principled perspective: an ethic of self-restraint and right relationship alongside a deep commitment to the flourishing and well-being of others.
Complexity consciousness, then, does not simply refer to leadership development or a sophisticated understanding of systems. Rather, it is an orientation that enables us to participate in and influence the world from a posture of greater relationality. Fundamentally, it is about awareness and connection, expressed and experienced as a kind of love Like Humberto Maturana Romesin, Gerda Verden-Zöller, and Andreas Weber, we are using the term “love” ecologically to describe the act of relating to others as legitimate beings with whom we coexist while allowing them to be authentically themselves without the need to control, erase, or change.15 Such acceptance as the basis of social interactions and cooperation is essential for our evolution and long-term thriving.
It should go without saying, but complexity consciousness isn’t something you can go out and “get” any more than you can simply get the attributes through which it is expressed: qualities such as wisdom, humility, compassion, curiosity, courage, self-awareness, authenticity, and selflessness. It invariably requires unlearning or even sacrifice. Our existing attachments, identities, successes, certainties, and need for control often stand in the way of our development. For, as Christopher Wallis observes, awakening does not entail knowing or having something that others do not but rather “losing something—specifically, your deeply conditioned beliefs about who you are and what the world is.”16 According to Wallis such conditioned beliefs include our socially constructed self, our unconscious mental models through which we perceive reality, and our sense of separation from the world and others. A similar idea is found in the three openings that Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer suggest are required for relational systems transformation that require “letting go of what wants to die in oneself and letting come what is waiting to be born.”17
There is something mysterious and rather beautiful about this kind of awakening. To let go is not only to see reality more clearly but also to open up to a more expansive worldview. Letting go is not easy, given that we often hold tightly to the way things are. But every culture retains wise practices that are precisely designed to help us enter some form of transformative learning crucible in which we are supported as we open ourselves to emergence, to perspectival expansion, and to the mysteries of the human and more-than-human worlds. The heart of our work at Wolf Willow involves learning to build contemporary versions of such crucibles and supporting the leaders called to enter them. When we do, we begin to disidentify with and even “die” to our familiar ways of being in the world. We awaken from the partiality of our old stories, we awaken to new and more complete ones, and we begin to reconfigure our relationships in three critical domains:
Relationship to self | Each one of us, by nature of being human, carries particular sensibilities, capabilities, or gifts that are as much ecological as they are social. We might say that the central task of our lives is to find and nurture those gifts and then to give them away, thereby influencing and shaping the web of relationships around us. Discovering such gifts invites a journey to source: our original nature, psyche, or soul. It’s the deeper truth or greater Self that lies beneath the identity with which we primarily identify. In journeying to it, we encounter what the poet David Whyte calls “your own truth at the center of the image you were born with.”18 In doing so, we ourselves find our true center and become centered in the world. This is the heart of inner work for change.
Relationship to others | Our state of consciousness complex or otherwise is expressed through our relationships: Each shapes the other in a continuous dance between the inner and outer domains of human experience. Recent years have seen a welcome focus on inner work but it would be a dangerous illusion to imagine that inner work alone will lead to a shift in the paradigms, power structures, injustices, displaced costs, unsustainable practices, boundary conditions, resource flows, and relational dynamics that underpin modernity’s flaws. Awakening complexity consciousness is not something we do in isolation. Above all it is a relational practice. For many of the leaders we work with, this involves “re-culturing” human systems as they work across levels to not only address urgent challenges but to shift how such challenges are addressed. Both are critical.
Relationship to the more-than-human world | The systems scholar Peter Senge suggests that our capacity to understand and influence larger
fields for change is enhanced through “direct contact with the generative capacities of nature.”19 We agree; as human beings we have always come to know ourselves and our roles in relationship with the natural world. Cultivating complexity consciousness is a recollective practice that can result in ecological awakening—a direct experience of not only the world’s beauty, sentience, and animacy but a felt sense of kinship and belonging. Such awakening catalyzes a porousness between the self and the wider world that allows for more complex perspectives, softens or challenges anthropocentrism, and increases empathy across species. It provides insight into our own unique way of being and belonging to the world and offers a direct experiential window into the complex relational systems we seek to engage.
What might this mean in practice for those working to resource and support the emergence of a flourishing future? The world of social investment is evolving rapidly from traditional grantmaking toward increasingly collaborative approaches of systems transformation.20 But it isn’t easy to
find and fund the kind of paradigm shift that Donella Meadows famously identified as the deepest leverage point for social and civilizational change.21 We notice several patterns emerging in the work of visionary social investors that invite closer consideration:
1. Let the future find you. A complexity perspective reminds us that things don’t really change; life evolves and adapts through patterns of emergence. Our primary work is not trying to generate and scale “solutions” grown in labs and think tanks but rather looking for the new mindset taking shape in the wild, wherever it is happening and at whatever scale. Where is the future already alive in the system? Sensing, tending, connecting, learning from, and bringing practical support to such living models or patterns of emergence may stretch some of our habits and cherished certainties. It generally requires a new relationship with risk. It invariably stretches not only the boundaries we have drawn around our work but our very capacity to love and trust.
2. Join the dance. Philanthropists tend to fund projects and people that reflect their own ways of knowing, being, and doing. But such ways are largely unconscious and those who deviate from them may be invisible, seem impractical, or appear completely incomprehensible to the well-resourced. This is not to deny the importance of rigorous discernment but social investors seeking to sense the emergent future cannot just support transformative learning for others; they need to engage in it, too. Only those who embody complexity consciousness themselves are likely to be able to notice and nurture the seeds of such consciousness across wider social fields.
3. Take the long view. Changemakers must embrace a paradox: Our resources can often alleviate the symptoms of suffering in the short term, but shifting the dynamics that generate such symptoms may require decades or longer. We all know people who have experienced almost instantaneous worldview shifts but collective worldviews evolve over generations. A complexity perspective invites us to move away from a focus on “problem-solving” and expand the boundaries of time, scale, impact, evaluation, and urgency that shape and constrain our interventions.
4. Invest in learning. Our collective challenges at any scale, from the neighborhood to the planet, require learning and the development of new capabilities if we are to successfully adapt and thrive. The implication is clear: If you are in the change business, then you are primarily in the learning business. We’re not just talking about the critical ways that social investors already uplift education systems through sports teams, early childhood initiatives, scholarships, or research. We’re talking about transformative, whole-person, collective learning and ongoing action inquiry through which the seeds of a more complex consciousness take root. Sustained and strategic investment in learning and long-term development—especially
for community partners and others leading change work—remains surprisingly rare.
5. Inhabit the in-between. Patterns of innovation and the seeds of the future tend to emerge at the edges of living systems. All too often they die there. Mainstream and margin alike habitually reinforce the boundaries that appear to define and separate them. But the most skillful change agents seem to inhabit and work from a larger and more complex perspective; they understand and relate to both as part of one interdependent whole and harness the tension between them creatively. They enable critical parts of that larger system to affect one another in ways that enable adaption and even catalyze cultural evolution.22
We do not pretend to have the answers. But we are certain that deep connectedness offers the only viable foundation for human and planetary flourishing. And we believe that it is possible to intervene effectively and wisely in the swirling currents of cultural adaptation and evolution. The deep connectedness that we’re calling complexity consciousness invites us to inhabit a more generative story—a worldview that promises greater wholeness, intimacy, and skillful participation in times of fragmentation. It points to a possible future where we, as a species, come to know ourselves again as part of the living fabric of the Earth, not just as members of our social, political, or national affiliations. To know we’re not alone. And if we listen, we might catch the very next step, calling out from the dense silence of trees or in the sharp cut of the raven’s wing. How we take that next step and participate in this moment matters. It holds the seeds of a new story.
LAURA BLAKEMAN and JULIAN NORRIS are founding directors and facilitators with the Wolf Willow Institute, a Canada-based social enterprise dedicated to cultivating the leadership capacities required to affect meaningful change in a complex world. Our work includes education, field-building, and applied research.
For footnotes, please see the online version of this article at ssir.org.
The Emerging Futures team, working with colleagues at Joseph Rowntree Foundation, stewards a range of programs, including:
• A Transforming Wealth Lab that is working toward a world where all capital is used for the benefit of people and planet, so that all living things can meet their needs.
• Creating conditions for rewiring our inner worlds: using collective imagination, foresight and foreseeing, and narratives to destabilize dominant systems, shift perceptions, and accelerate the transition.
• Regenerative Futures: an ecosystem of future-building initiatives.
• Capacities, capabilities, and practices for transitions: preparing and equipping us for moving through these times, together—in deep relationship with all life, and with the unseen and unknowable.
• Place-based systemic transitions, with a regional team enacting this work and learning in place through sites of practice.
We know that this work requires many of us, so if you’re interested in working together, please email Cassie Robinson (Cassie.Robinson@jrf.org.uk).
We must turn to the nonhuman intelligence all around us to articulate a framework for ethical and regenerative life
BY JAMES BRIDLE
With rapid advances in artificial intelligence, many of us living in societies dominated by Western science are becoming increasingly aware of other forms of intelligence living alongside us. Animals, plants, and natural systems have revealed their complexity and knowledge, even as our technologies threaten their extinction.
Several movements around the world are working to give legal and political standing to nonhuman beings by recognizing legal personhood and creating “parliaments of things,” for example, whereby nonhumans are granted a voice, albeit a voice ventriloquized by humans. Most of these approaches extend existing systems of human governance without fundamentally changing the system, however. To meet the natural world in all its complexity, we must do more than reformulate the dominant culture’s prejudices using novel language. “Rights of nature” must be acknowledged as already existing.
There are several ways to approach this challenge:
• Using technology to better understand nonhuman lifeways so that we might change our ways to accommodate their ways (e.g., using sensors to apprehend needs and desires, and adjust human patterns of life).
• Embracing nonlinguistic modes of communication: We’re overly focused on language, ignoring the many other ways that nonhumans communicate, including movement, gesture, and spiritual connection.
• Practice cooperation: Instead of focusing on how to communicate or to make decisions in the abstract, we must work together with nonhumans to identify and pursue common goals.
Based on these points and the ideas in my book Ways of Being, I am developing Server Farm to engage with planetary intelligence, new forms of computation, and new forms of law and governance. Server Farm is building a new computer to accommodate the more-than-human intelligence all around us—including animals, plants, and ecosystems—to address some of the thorniest problems we face. The nonhuman world is filled with superhuman abilities: Consider the calculating powers of slime molds, the electrochemical sensibilities of fungi, the subterranean signaling of plants and trees, and the wayfinding abilities of birds and bees. Undoubtedly, there is more waiting to be revealed.
Server Farm seeks to understand and engage with more-than-human intelligence on its own terms through collaboration and cooperation, not domination. Nonhuman beings are not resources to be exploited. This means that a new computer must embody new ways of being and working together. Communication, justice, and equality are key concerns in its operations, and shape the questions we can ask and answer. A system that is not in harmony and geared toward mutual flourishing will cease to function. Server Farm is not just a prototype of a new computer, but also an attempt to articulate a broader framework for ethical and regenerative life.
JAMES BRIDLE is a writer, artist, and technologist.
In times of crisis, artistic praxis should be part of the change we wish to see.
BY LUCIA PIETROIUSTI
There’s no point making work “about” climate change. In times of crisis, the work has to work, it has to do work. Artistic praxis should be part of the change we wish to see: practical, educational, regenerative.
This sentiment, shared by author and artist James Bridle on social media last year, resonated with Arising Quo, a wealth-redistribution initiative that explores where and how to resource work that lifts us out of current systems. Arising Quo had been paying attention to an emerging field of practice at the intersection of arts, culture, ecology, spirituality, and landbased work that addresses the polycrisis.
Sites of… Practice, hosted by E-WERK Luckenwalde, was initiated to support this emerging field and to learn about the conditions that make this work possible and the capacities that evolve from these sites. These are sites where artists, culture-makers, and political and ecological thinkers gather, build, make, and create in specific contexts: experimenting with and demonstrating what’s possible for how we live now and in the future. They are showing what artistry and culture-making work can be of service to, going far beyond making art about the climate or polycrisis, and instead helping prepare for and live through it.
The Sites of… Practice includes the following places where these capacities are being developed:
• Vessel (Greece) is a collective studio and arts and event space with a core interest in ecology, resilience, and coeducation.
• Estudio Nuboso (Panama) is a platform dedicated to restoring the relationship between humans and nature and creating more reciprocity with the planet.
• The Institute for Postnatural Studies (Spain) is a center for artistic experimentation that explores and problematizes postnature as a framework for contemporary creation.
• Cuerpoterritorio (Spain) is a cultural association that promotes artistic expression and eco-social awareness through an ecofeminist perspective by materializing values of care toward human and more-than-human communities.
• ARE (Czech Republic) is a curatorial organization that has purchased a 2.8-hectare plot in the Orlické Mountains to establish a sustainable, biodiverse forest, animal refuge, and garden founded on permaculture principles and outdoor cultural events.
• Mustarinda Association (Finland) is a nonprofit group of artists and researchers whose goal is to promote the ecological rebuilding of society, the diversity of culture and nature, and connections between art and science.
The ellipsis in the project’s title refers to the myriad ways in which these sites are experimenting with different forms of practice. As such, the project is infinitely changeable, as are the possibilities inherent in these new ways of developing creative ecologies: sites of (rooted, situated, reciprocal, reparative, systemic, collective) practice may, and will, emerge, as will our knowledge of the kinds of capacities and conditions needed for these times of great upheaval and transition.
Lucia Pietroiusti is head of ecologies at Serpentine.
Arising Quo is a wealth-redistribution initiative in its early days. It explores where and how to resource work that scaffolds us out of current systems––toward subterranean worlds and liberatory futures—and into new, post-capitalist paradigms.
Our artist collective seeks to rewire our colonial habits of being and nurture more honest, accountable engagement with our complicity in current global challenges.
BY AZUL CAROLINA DUQUE
Our volatile sociopolitical and ecological collapses are symptoms of a deeper fracture: The internalized colonial belief that humans are separate from and superior to the rest of nature. Colonialism has imposed an illusory sense of separation, fracturing our identity and fostering deep insecurity that we long to heal. Instead of working toward repair, most of us try to placate the pain of separability by commodifying, consuming, and accumulating nearly everything: stuff, relationships, knowledge, status, and solutions.
As Chief Ninawa Huni Kuin says: “Since our imagination has become colonized, the possibility of healthier futures depends less on our capacity to imagine them than on our capacity to repair our fractured relationships with the Earth, other species, among ourselves, and within ourselves in the present.”
As our global collapse intensifies, we will more than ever need relational capacities to show up with sobriety, maturity, discernment, and responsibility, or we risk exacerbating the same problems we seek to solve. We will continue to justify genocidal and ecocidal projects as collateral damage while maintaining our delusional desires. Reactivating our relational capacities proves immensely challenging because colonial modernity has rewired our neurophysiology into narrow, transactional
WE WILL NEED RELATIONAL CAPACITIES TO SHOW UP WITH SOBRIETY, MATURITY, DISCERNMENT, AND RESPONSIBILITY, OR WE RISK EXACERBATING THE SAME PROBLEMS WE SEEK TO SOLVE.
ways of sense-making, keeping us addicted to comfort and security that is subsidized by systemic violence while we languish in a chronic state of denial of our own complicity in harm. We are referring to a range of relational sensibilities that have been exiled from our individual, collective, and metaphysical nervous systems because they threaten the modern/ colonial political project built on the illusion of separability.
So we sit with a question: If colonialism has severely limited how we desire, heal, and hope, how can we reactivate our capacity to imagine beyond separation? How can we relearn to tether our sense of belonging to the land, rather than to human constructs of identity and worth?
A group of 12 artists is researching how artistic and somatic practices can interrupt modern colonial psychoaffective loops embedded in our neurophysiology and reactivate relational sensibilities as individuals and as a collective. Titled “Reactivating Exiled Capacities,” the project operates through the University of the Forest under its Global Strategy of Critically Engaged and Complexity-Grounded Climate Education. The cohort of artists includes musicians, clowns, death doulas, poets, directors, actors, choreographers, and performance artists.
Examples of the group’s inquiry include experimenting with rhythm, movement, and diffraction technologies that can reactivate our capacity to be honest and present with complexity: the achingly beautiful, the broken, and the messed up—within and around us. These practices help us interrupt our desires to escape what is difficult, painful, or disgusting, and our attachment to idealized, more comfortable versions of reality and ourselves. Our creative practices draw on humor, hyper self-reflexivity, and humility to strengthen our capacity to act in service to a wider planetary metabolism, while divesting from our desire to be acknowledged for that service. We aim to interrupt narcissistic delusions about our own self-importance and perceived entitlement.
The artistic invitations developed by this research group, alongside the lessons we have learned, inform the design of new “capacity programs” in the hope that they humbly contribute to more responsible political practices of healing and well-being in the fields of decolonization, social innovation, and activism.
AZUL CAROLINA DUQUE is a researcher, death doula, artist, and facilitator at the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective.
The GESTURING TOWARDS DECOLONIAL FUTURES COLLECTIVE is a transdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, activists, and Indigenous knowledge keepers that develops Technologies of Inquiry—a set of practices that combine decolonial and Indigenous critiques, systems complexity analysis, and non-Western psychoanalytic methods—to explore the entanglements of modernity/coloniality and to develop new ways of being, learning, and relating in response to the complex social and ecological crises of our time.
Our work at Joseph Rowntree Foundation has been, and continues to be, inspired by so many people and initiatives.
We are sharing some of them in an additional document so that you might discover their work, too.
Please see the online publication of this supplement at ssir.org or scan this QR code.
We need an alternative vision of capital allocation that invests in and ensures a healthier, happier, and more equitable world.
BY DENISE HEARN & ANASTASIA MOUROGOVA MILLIN
When the philanthropic sector refers to the Great Wealth Transfer, it usually means the transfer of family wealth from the Baby Boomer generation to their children.
Vanguard recently estimated that by 2030, some $10.6 trillion will have been transferred between generations in the United States, $3.5 trillion in Europe, and $2.8 trillion in Asia. These are enormous figures. To put the numbers in context, it is worth noting that globally, the private equity industry had $8.2 trillion of assets under management at the end of 2023.
The impact community is right to focus on this transfer of wealth and consider how these assets can shape the future, for better or worse. But there is another great wealth transfer happening every day that has contributed to this enormous accumulation of wealth: the monopolization of the economy. Industry concentration, whereby a few companies control an industry or many industries, has soared in developed nations in the last few decades, contributing to rising inequality in significant ways. This wealth transfer comes from the pocketbooks of consumers, from workers’ wages, and from the reduced profits of small and independent businesses as wealth flows to powerful companies and their shareholders.
Take workers, for example. The labor share (how much GDP goes to workers versus capital owners), has fallen since its peak in 1970 in the United States. For decades, the labor share was two-thirds of GDP globally, but the labor share began to decline, from 65-66 percent of GDP in 1980 to 58-59 percent today. This decline may not sound dire, but it represents some $6 trillion less going to workers globally each year.
Another way to identify how much of the economic pie is going to workers is to look at the labor share of corporate income. This figure has declined since the 1980s, and since 2000, the rate of decline has accelerated. A 2019 McKinsey Global Institute analysis found that superstar firms and consolidation across industries was the third-most-important source of falling labor shares (behind economic supercycles, boom-bust dynamics, and rising depreciation due to a shift to intangible value, such as intellectual property).
Coupled with flagging unionization and the rise of gig work and contract labor, workers’ bargaining power against powerful companies has eroded. Despite recent wage gains, workers still lag far behind companies and shareholders in receiving their share of the economic pie. In 2022, US corporations counted their highest profit margins since 1950, even amid the pandemic and high levels of inflation. In addition, in the last two decades, corporate profit margins have risen.
This trend toward concentration of market power and capital is the backdrop against which all investment, impact investment, and philanthropic investment conversations take place. Rather than individual investment decisions, the solution to concentration will come from public policy, newly structured investment mechanisms, and a radical scaling of alternative ownership and governance models.
But before we consider new frameworks for wealth, and what we call rewiring wealth, we should acknowledge that the current system of capital origination, intermediation, and allocation works like a Swiss clock. Every component feeds into another with great precision. While we deliberate on how to mend the current system, there is nothing broken about it; the current financial and economic system functions as it was designed. It focuses on achieving the goal of capital growth and preservation, serving a small minority of humans (7.2 billion people now sustain the privileged lifestyles of 800 million, or the top 10 percent). This economic logic also subsumes the value of nature and biodiversity.
This wealth system does not belong to the natural world. Instead, this artificial system was created by humans, which makes it entirely within our capacity to build something different. The current system was created according to values of ownership, extraction, and antisocial competition. But we can construct an alternative system, structuring it around a different value set: regeneration, reciprocity, care, and generosity. This system could encode our symbiotic relationship with one another and with nature. Wealth generated by this alternative system would benefit us all.
To realize this vision, we need a combination of factors to align. First, we need public policy and public investment, and an increasing recognition that “free” markets are incapable of solving the complex problems of economic distribution, climate change, and other collective challenges. This will entail the state asserting its right to structure markets in the public interest, including stronger antitrust enforcement, investment in public innovation, and industrial policy to reshape the terms and conditions of markets. Such policies are predistributive, not redistributive, and address market structure to ensure that markets are fair and competitive, create widely shared ownership and prosperity, and allow the best ideas, products, and services to flourish. Monopolization and the abuse of market power erodes the conditions of the economy in ways that harm us all. Philanthropies, investment advisors, and other ecosystem participants who care about sustainable futures ignore market power issues at their peril.
long-term civic infrastructure bonds to capitalize its portfolio to align with the mission of community benefit. Philanthropies and impact investors should focus on seeding the next generation of disruptive businesses and technologies with different ownership structures.
Second, we need to scale alternative ownership and governance models that can encode different legal rights to different economic stakeholders. Steward ownership is one example, where businesses are owned and operated by employees or other community members to circulate profits and economic gains more widely. A new book, Assets in Common, details historical and current examples of these corporate forms.
In Quebec, Canada, for example, a new legal vehicle has been in place since 2021: Community Benefits Trust/Fiducie d’Utilité Sociale. This instrument enables ownership and governance of a portfolio of community assets, including civic assets and community real estate. It can serve as a trustee for the voices of future generations and biodiversity and nature as it attains legal status. It can issue investment instruments such as
Finally, we need new capital allocation toward transformation (different stewardship of capital and new asset classes). If this sounds too radical, the reality is that these alternative ways of raising, stewarding, and allocating capital already exist. Organizations such as Coralus and Civic Square demonstrate what a system can look like when powered by a multi-capital model that fuses trust, learning, creativity, and relationships. Within these alternative systems, new transformation pathways have emerged, focusing on a common vision for regenerative business models at industry scale. Companies, individuals, communities, and entire ecosystems of organizations are coming together to reimagine sectors such as journalism, clean energy, health care, and plastics. Given these examples across nearly every sector, dreaming up alternative ways of running businesses is no longer necessary. Transformation lies in how capital is pooled, stewarded, and allocated toward regenerative businesses at scale.
This is where rewiring wealth enters the discussion. Rewiring wealth proposes that a new generation of wealth holders allocate capital in radically different ways. First, foundations and private family offices would move capital away from VC funds and other traditional asset managers. Instead, capital could be allocated to organizations and ecosystems that have already established transformation pathways to scale regenerative business models. These organizations and ecosystems would become the new asset managers, albeit with collective governance models and identified transformation pathways at their disposal, enabling them to move funds for the purpose of making the biggest societal and environmental contributions.
Second, existing capital models, including impact investing mechanisms, all require that ventures take on funding to pay an interest rate to compensate for the risk that sits with capital holders, according to the current system. This risk, we believe, lies with those undertaking the transformation work of shifting industries away from extraction and toward regeneration. Organizations and communities taking on transformative capital would therefore receive payment for the labor and risk they assume. That’s right: Instead of being extracted from, these entities and individuals would be compensated through negative interest rates.
Third, anyone who has accepted venture funding can attest to how much reporting capital providers require. Impact funds can often be the most cumbersome when it comes to paperwork. An alternative model would be based on trust, and the only prescribed key performance indicators would take the form of a “hope dividend.” As capital enables transformation, each industry will shift toward regeneration in an act that instills hope in every stakeholder. The only return and reporting required for the entrusted capital would be the narrative of hope.
From the perspective of next generation wealth holders, this represents the smartest investment strategy. At the moment, our wealth is depleted by a deepening social and environmental crisis. Institutional investors now recognize systemic risks that can boomerang back to their portfolios owing to climate change, political division, national security issues, or antimicrobial resistance from large-scale industrial farming. Every asset class and sector, from real estate to agriculture to mining, is negatively affected. In 10 years, wealth that now sits in foundation endowments and private family office assets could amount to much less. The only way this trend might be slowed, or perhaps reversed, is if every industry is transformed toward a regenerative business model, thus decreasing the environmental and societal costs. As such, when private family offices and foundations rewire their capital models in the ways we have articulated above, they gain a significant return as the value of their assets depreciates at a lower rate.
In the meantime, seeding transformation pathways will lead to the emergence of new asset classes, for example, civic assets, regenerative soil, and community real estate. Wealth holders who rapidly shift their models toward new capital propositions would see an increase in the value of these assets and their underlying investments.
As such, the three proposed rewiring pathways to capital allocation and stewardship would lead to an alternative system designed with radically different outcomes. This system would benefit all of us and ensure our mutual thriving.
Coralus demonstrates that better ways of allocating capital are possible.
BY VICKI SAUNDERS
A regenerative economy operates in service to life, building connections between natural and social systems. Nature’s law of reciprocity shows us that nothing can survive in isolation; where nutrients flow, life flourishes. Early Indigenous economies, such as that of the potlatch, exemplified this idea by keeping resources flowing throughout the community, oriented to the best uses for the good of all. There are many possibilities beyond the current system for what an economy can become.
What does a regenerative economy look like? Coralus (formerly SheEO) has operated one for the last nine years. Thousands of people have come together to experiment with allocating capital to individuals pushed to the margins by our current systems, knowing that we neglect most of the planet’s inhabitants due to systemic bias. Coralus combines monetary capital with undervalued forms of capital—care capital, navigational capital, knowledge capital, social capital, and resistant capital—to create rich soil in which new models, mindsets, and solutions can grow.
To create new systems, we must empty ourselves of the stories and narratives that hold the current systems in place, a practice embedded in Coralus’ design. Conditioned by dominant business narratives to look for scale, familiarity, and catchy one-liners, we often overlook the potential of unconventional ideas.
When a diverse set of individuals brings their varied perspectives to the task, our sense of what works begins to shift in dramatic ways. Coralus has seen fledgling businesses, with just weeks of cash flow, transform into thriving hubs of innovation after hundreds of community members decided, “This is amazing!” and rolled up their sleeves to become customers, marketers, advisors, and cheerleaders.
An Indigenous woman who raised venture capital (VC) funds for the venture she founded realizes she is not aligned with the growth-at-all-costs mentality and finds support in the Coralus community. A wealth holder loans her money to unwind an investment so a founder can build her business on her own terms. These stories exemplify the capacity of the regenerative economy to align financial practices with personal and communal values. This community-based approach to building businesses expands possibilities in the economy and the community.
Coralus allocates community capital through collective decision-making each year, inviting all members to vote on what they’d like to see in the world. When individuals ranging in age from 14 to 90+ bring their intuition, interests, and perspectives to the process, a wide range of views emerges, bringing forth new futures. This is not due diligence as usual, and it’s working. Coralus produces exceptionally high payback rates, ventures transform themselves so their businesses can transform their sector, and the community marvels at what’s possible when everyone brings their resources to the table. Ventures gain access to a new community of customers, advisors, marketers, and influencers. Rather than disrupting current power structures, Coralus becomes a source of power.
Valuing all forms of capital and experience creates a sense of inclusion that encourages broad participation. As a regular practice, reciprocity (asking for and giving support) changes the way we think, allowing us to see that we have everything we need around us. Aligning values by practicing radical generosity softens us, creating the conditions for people to share their dreams and opening the door to expanded resources and possibilities.
Instead of extracting from ventures and pushing them to win the market, Coralus focuses on supporting them to transform their space for the benefit of all. For example, Better Packaging Co., which created the world’s first home-compostable courier packaging, has deepened its commitment to a plastic-free world by creating packaging from collected plastic pollution, healing the planet as it scales rather than extracting more raw materials. Indiegraf has developed a platform to empower journalist entrepreneurs to deliver community news, a critical source of information in a healthy democracy.
More than 190 ventures with dreams of doing things differently have been supported, nurtured, and cared for by a community of more than 7,000 individuals across five countries. The path to a regenerative economy is often winding, messy, and mysterious. At every step, there is pain and grief for the way things are. Bearing witness as the system prioritizes money over all else requires us to take notice, let go, and reorient toward the future we want. We must unwind our stories, remain steadfast in our integrity, and trust that there is another path. Building a regenerative economy that results in a thriving society is the work of our times.
VICKI SAUNDERS is founder of Coralus.
Economic inequality is a foundational driver of societal breakdown and collapse. We believe the global system that protects entrenched wealth is ripe for disruption. We seek to transform it and help channel wealth to benefit people and the planet.
BY KATE BARRON-ALICANTE & ASTRID SCHOLZ on behalf of THE WEALTH HACKERS INITIATIVE
“Wealth defense” refers to the structures and strategies that support the accumulation of wealth and the prevention of its democratic redistribution. It is now a multibillion-dollar industry. Like other industries, wealth defense arose in response to demands from the ultrarich (the top 0.01 percent) to reverse the wealth redistribution of the mid-20th century, which benefited the Global North’s working and middle classes. This industry has met its goals in three ways: by shifting, avoiding, and evading taxes (at the expense of the rest of society); by weakening the state’s capacity to collect fair tax; and by entrenching pro-rich tax policy.
The wealth defense industry (WDI) is the mundane world of professional services (accounting, law, and finance). In law, it consists of lawyers
working in trust and estate, private wealth, and tax law. In finance, it’s private banks, family offices, investment advisors, and wealth managers. In philanthropy, it’s donor-advised funds and foundations. These gatekeepers, while not the ultrarich, are handsomely remunerated to prioritize the accumulation of and protection of wealth for the few at the expense of society and the planet.
What might be possible if a group of WDI insiders instead used their knowledge for the benefit of society in this moment defined by polycrisis?
“Hacking” has become a shorthand for subverting existing systems for the purposes of revealing design flaws. We believe the WDI is a system ripe for disruption to transform it with the goal of helping channel wealth to benefit people and the planet. This “white hat” hacking requires deep domain expertise from insiders, the legal plumbers and financial engineers of the “hidden wiring” of the wealth defense industry.
Hacking is tactical and applied, much like the intervention made by a brilliant engineer who attached a tiny rudder to a ship’s large rudder. The little rudder, or the trim tab, initiates the turning of the entire ship, as Buckminster Fuller famously observed:
Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around.
Similarly, we envision hacks as specific, small innovations with the capacity to turn the wealth defense industry toward justice. Specifically, we see a need for hacking in five domains: legal/structural, financial, technical, behavioral, and moral.
• Legal/Structural: We see wealth holders litigating trust documents to align the trust’s purpose with contemporary priorities. Lawyers remind us of integrated definitions of fiduciary beyond the protection of financial interests. We see visionary advisory firms incubating beyond the endless growth mindset of traditional assets under the management business model.
• Financial: Investors and founders are prototyping term sheets that capture what is enough, or a fair return.
• Technical: We see experts crafting financial modeling tools that take planetary limits into account when modeling portfolio returns, and that make conspicuous the system impacts of investments.
• Behavioral: We see people working to transform the sense of fear and scarcity that is deeply entrenched among wealth holders.
• Moral: We see people developing tactics for holistically expressing their values, beyond financial value.
We seek hackers who are working on these and other interventions. Join us: hackingwealth.xyz.
THE WEALTH HACKERS INITIATIVE is a group of disjunct hackers who have each been hacking away at the systems and structures that underpin the wealth defense industry in our work across financial services, wealth management and financial planning, philanthropy, tech cooperatives, solidarity economy investments, and social enterprises.
In alphabetical order by first name, we are: ASTRID SCHOLZ
CASSIE ROBINSON , DANA BEZERRA , EMMA SHAW , EVAN STEINER , KATE BARRON-ALICANTE , and LEO FREEMAN
When the navigation systems we have relied upon are themselves unmooring, what do we tether to?
BY VANESSA REID
“The maples sweat now, out of season. … the birds arrive, not having checked the calendars or clocks. They scramble in the frost for seeds, while underground a sobbing starts in roots and tubers.”
— JAY PARINI, “SOME EFFECTS OF GLOBAL WARMING IN LACKAWANNA COUNTY”
Tonight, as I write, a full moon hangs in a sky of gods and myths. The North Star. The Big Dipper. Cassiopeia. These are practical navigation points used by seekers, seafarers, merchants, and travelers of all kinds over the centuries. We’ve relied on these maps: the cycles of the seasons, the placement of the stars, the direction of ocean currents. But what happens when what we take for granted is no longer available? Even Polaris, the North Star, is shifting its position and will eventually be replaced by another star, Vega. What do we do when our navigation points change, when the internal and external maps we have relied on are no longer available?
In a time between worlds, in a phase shift of massive transition, in what is not so much an era of change but a change of era, what do we do and how should we be? What are the cues and clues, the signals and signs, the ways in and through? What shimmers at the edges asking for attention? What skills and capacities, postures and practices are called for in these times? The confluences of catastrophes, as writers for the Dark Mountain Project aptly put it, have only just begun. We have choices. We have agency. There are many ways of traveling rough seas and unknown landscapes.
“My heart is moved by all I cannot save. So much has been destroyed,” writes Adrienne Rich in her poem “Natural Resources.” “I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”
I imagine that if you are reading this, you may be on a precipice of some kind. It’s possible that you, and the work, people, and places in the world you care about, have questions to which you do not have the answers. And this is important. To not know. This is the moment in the old stories, the wisdom stories, where the seeking of a new or very old way—a deeper truth—begins: with an unanswerable question. These are never easy things, these quests; that is the point. These quests begin with an invitation, a challenge, a sense of confoundment. Something doesn’t make sense. To confound is to bring into disorder, to mix things up, and it suggests a process: to be lost, unraveled, and possibly found, but changed.
“If you have a longing for something, there is a good chance that your longing is to feel the edges of something you’ve never seen,” the author and activist Stephen Jenkinson says in an intergenerational conversation series called Forgotten Pillars. “Each detail has a trail that you can read … and if you really pay attention, you can hear an old song in the broken pieces … You have to drop your authority on the matter.”
What has caught me, and what are the edges of my own understanding? I’ll make an offering here, an invitation to stay in the playground with not knowing. It’s a stance of curiosity, from the Latin root curare: to care, to administer medicines. It’s a suggestion to set aside what is held tightly (certainties, roles, definitions, and identities) for a moment and try on other ideas. To make a move. To try on a new pelt. To open the dragon’s lair of imagination and sit on the gems no longer. If there is a time to take a risk and crack a shell, it would be now.
I want this piece to reflect a dance between the deeply personal and the larger systems, with the knowledge that my personal experiences are fractals of what I work with in larger systems. In the spirit of the adage “how you do one thing is how you do everything,” I must pay exquisite attention to what is right in front of me: Be an inquirer, a querent, an investigative mystery worker, a seeker queering the lines of my own understanding.
So, I will begin closest in, with my closest kin: my father, Tim. He is 88. His once low and gravelly voice that spoke on political campaigns and in public leadership roles and that still speaks of (and to) my mother with great affection a decade after her death, now has the cadence of clouds. He’ll often say he is “floating” when he is confused, sad, or feeling lost. But when I walk through the door to his apartment, he is sheer delight: “Vanessa! Where have you been? I missed you!” Lately, he adds right away, “I love you!” It doesn’t matter that I saw him just the day before. We are here in the now, diving into a conversation that has cycles and spins. It is a washing machine of silence and revelations. He will ask me, “What are your projects? What are your plans?” He’ll ask several times and then he’ll ask again. It’s a teaching from a beginner’s mind: What are my projects, what are my plans? I hear myself answering a fourth time and notice that I say something I hadn’t thought of before.
My father invites me to pay exquisite attention, to go beyond the obvious and find what was hidden all along. It is an ancient form of practice called repetition, used by martial artists to gain mastery, inventors and scientists to iterate experiments, spiritual lineages to reveal the essence of a person, and explorers to find their way in uncharted waters. To sail the same waters over and over is to notice the rock, the flight paths, the scent that was missed the first 10 times. Repetition with exquisite attention is a navigational device for the unknown. A compass for cultivating attention; each detail offers a trail. Spins and cycles, and aha!—the catching of something new.
A recent addition to my relating repertoire with my father is what I call “the joining.” It’s a quantum trick of time travel. I’ll share news of myself or my brother, and he will say, “Oh, I think I was there!” He’ll weave in details from his life: We’re now in the Volkswagen he drove across Europe as a student,
THERE ARE SECRET GUIDES EVERYWHERE. VERY OFTEN THEY CAN BE FOUND ON THE MARGINS, WITH NO EXTRAORDINARY POWER, SHIMMERING AT THE EDGES, DISMISSED, EXILED, OR WORSE.
dent, we’re reliving the moment in 1957 when he offered cigarettes to bandits who helped him in a tight spot on an epic trip from Delhi to Naples. It becomes our story, or an intergenerational cocreation. He, whose radius of physical life has greatly diminished, is actively joining the bigger world with us. We are a confluence of the present, the past, and an emerging future—on an adventure together.
I call this Tim-time. The capacity to be in many places and times simultaneously: a superpositioning where particles of our lives exist in multiple states and places at once. It’s a suspension of one kind of reality and an embrace of other forms of what is “real.” Arnold Mindell, the founder of process-oriented psychology, describes this as “fluidity.” To move congruently between levels of reality, states of consciousness, identities, forms of intelligence, and roles with which we might be overidentified. Keeping up with my father is like the Fluidity Olympics; we access and move between different feeling states, identities, and time zones in the creation of meaning, understanding, and connection.
It’s also improv. By nature, improv is generative, taking the offering of the other and saying, “Yes, and …” In my father’s case, this creativity is a full partnership with degeneration. New synaptic paths are being formed as others dissolve. It is the paradox of holding opposing processes simultaneously: creation and destruction, remembering and forgetting, delight and devastation. In between is an atlas of grief and what the educator and therapist Pauline Boss calls “ambiguous loss,” because the father that I have known is no longer available in the same way. The ways that he was put together are coming apart.
The dignity of degeneration comes with honoring its intelligence and being in a courtship of curiosity with the process. This does not mean setting aside the pain, confusion, violence of change, loss, or the extinction of what we love. Rather, it means enlarging the space of possibility. “What if we stun existence one more time?” asks the poet Ayisha Siddiqa. It is true that my father’s primary identity— man, protector, husband, public figure, a version of generational success—is receding. Emerging from what disappears and from the space between opposites, or from under the bark of what was a great solid tree, is a soft, vulnerable, complex guide we are coming to know only now.
father is modeling apocalyptic postures and practices.
“Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it,” writes the poet Mary Oliver, providing instructions for living a life. And so I do. A brain, a body, a life force is changing form before my eyes. He is my father. He is a feather.
When the navigation systems we’ve relied on are themselves unmooring, what do we tether to?
There are many directions to go from here. I’ve written multiple endings to this piece thinking to tie this all up, give it a clean conclusion, but paying attention to the process, to what I’ve been writing about, means staying with the strangeness. Staying on the quest. If these are apocalyptic times—a time of breakages and breakthroughs, a time of revealing truths, uncovering hidden wirings, accessing the thing behind the thing—then my
I leave my father’s apartment and my shape has shifted. My heart grows and it grieves, and there is gratitude for this unusual practice ground. This dojo of delight and detritus. It would be easy for me to go back to being who I was before this visit. But the trick here is to stay with it, to keep coming back. I am getting worked. And what arises from practice, from its repetition, reverence, and restitution? An ongoing becoming. An ever-evolving quality of being. It is this being—me, you, us—who goes back into the work of this world, to make a new move. What strange guides are right in front of you, already revealing to you the thing you need most?
There are secret guides everywhere. Very often they can be found on the margins, with no extraordinary power, shimmering at the edges, dismissed, viewed as a burden, exiled, or worse. Take a close look and feel their presence. They are right there disguised, perhaps under a shroud, and quite likely a little bit weird.
VANESSA REID is faculty of Wolf Willow Institute for Systems Learning and cofounder of The Living Wholeness Institute.
Our work at Joseph Rowntree Foundation has been, and continues to be, inspired by so many people and initiatives. We are sharing some of them in an additional document so that you might discover their work, too. Please see the online publication of this supplement at ssir.org or scan this QR code.
We leave you with a poem—a last gift from the wonderful Danusha Laméris whose words remind us of a practice for times of trouble and transition. She invites us not to “turn our backs” to the everyday, or the world’s complicated plots, but rather to bring our attention to a focused “turning toward.”
And what am I doing here, in a yurt on the side of a hill at the ragged edge of the tree line, sheltered by conifer and bay, watching the wind lift, softly, the dry leaves of bamboo? I lie on the floor and let the sun fall across my back, as I have been for the past hour, listening to the distant traffic, to the calls of birds I cannot name. Once, I had so much I wanted to accomplish. Now, all I know is that I want to get closer to it—to the rocky slope, the orange petals of the nasturtium adorning the fence, the wind’s sudden breath. Close enough that I can almost feel, at night, the slight pressure of the stars against my skin. Isn’t this what the mystics meant when they spoke of forsaking the world? Not to turn our backs to it, only to its elaborate plots, its complicated pleasures— in favor of the pine’s long shadow, the slow song of the grass. I’m always forgetting, and remembering, and forgetting. I want to leave something here in the rough dirt: a twig, a small stone—perhaps this poem—a reminder to begin, again, by listening carefully with the body’s rapt attention —remember? To this, to this.
— DANUSHA LAMÉRIS
At the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, we work to speed up and support the transition to a future free from poverty, in which people and planet can flourish.
