What is the problem we want to address?

We face a global polycrisis that requires innovative and socially just solutions. We can be in no doubt of the urgent need to do things differently. Imaginative, collaborative, liberatory practice must be enabled to flourish across disciplines and sectors - but is constrained and held back by inherited governance structures. The greatest risk lies in maintaining the status quo.

Governance encompasses all the things that are put in place for people to work together. The current, dominant models of governance were designed by and for patriarchal, white supremacist, colonial, capitalist institutions. They often work on the basis of separation, competition and control. Instead, we need to recognise and enhance interdependence, co-operation and systemic responses to complex problems.

It will be impossible to identify or deliver adequate responses to the polycrisis without transformational forms of governance that redistribute power - enabling meaningful, equitable participation for all who are impacted.

So we want to thoughtfully disrupt and transform the governance status quo.  We believe transformational governance can unlock life-affirming ways of organising and improve the quality of all our interactions and work.

Transforming governance - enabling care filled interconnections to flourish between people, disciplines, and more than human systems - will build new frameworks for regenerative practice to meet the needs of all beings, within the means of the planet.

What’s the background and context we’ll be working with?

(For a deeper read on the context for this work and what we’re thinking about in our theory for making change, click the arrow)

So what will this collective do? - interventions and activities:

Transformation sounds good in theory, and in practice, it’s not always straightforward and needs to be embedded in the complex stories of the people who are trying it out. In the short to mid term, this transformation will also begin with a foot still in the old paradigms we are trying to change.  So we must take care and time, and a relational, person-centred approach to this work.

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Our work is rooted in three complementary hypotheses:

1. If we want to start to shift the status quo of governance, we need to actively transform the ways we relate and work together.
2. Supporting pockets of change, and sharing learning and stories about them, is the place we can realistically begin this shift, as a collective of weavers and storytellers within the wider ecosystem.
3. Transforming the ways we relate and work together will enable ways of organising that feel good, and do good, for people and planet. And ultimately, liberate more progressive, equitable responses to the polycrisis. </aside>

We will support people to re-imagine ways of organising - that invite change, redistribute power and enable liberatory, life-affirming governance practice.  In particular, we will:

• Co-design and facilitate space for people who are ready to unlearn and relearn their relationships with governance - and to do the individual work required, as well as the collective, systemic work.
• Organise ourselves as a collective in relationship with a growing field of practitioners, organisations and collaborators who are doing similar work - to lightly weave connections, and to actively support each other in this challenging liminal space as we shift from old paradigms to the society we envision.
• Contribute to a commons of knowledge and practice in transformational governance - we’ll gather evidence for what helps people the most in shifting power and governance. This will come from us practicing and testing out transformational governance in the way we organise our own work as a stewarding group, as well as from participants and collaborators committing to actively contribute to the knowledge commons.
• As weavers and storytellers, we will share learning and experience for inspiration and advocacy - through storytelling we’ll inspire and resource others who are interested and want to know more. We’ll also use storytelling to partner and connect with others to proactively influence gatekeepers of old models of governance.
• Actively attract resources to flow into the ecosystem, to where this will have most impact - we want to support a flow of financial resource alongside all types of value exchange in the system. In particular, to find resource for longer term, more in-depth experiments and sustained transitions.