A deep [reframed] sense of belonging
As we observe overlapping meta-poly-perma crises that impact our world — there is an interrelated existential crisis of belonging that cuts across every dimension. At the heart of Unstitution’s commons work, is the recognition that deep collaboration is cultivated and sustained, when people feel a sense of belonging to community and purpose, that is intrinsically experienced as authentic, meaningful and worthwhile.
Engaging with many people around the world — across sectors, disciplines, generations, genders and strata of society — we’re collectively working to reconstitute commonsing toward a reframed sense of belonging, enriched by diversity and inclusion among humanity and the nonhuman living world.
Interdependence
While individually, humans value having agency and being independent adults, we are social beings, interconnected within society and the natural environment. Our thriveability as a species is rooted in our interdependence with each other and all nature.
We are nature.
Our ability to cooperate, collaborate and co-create, pooling the best of our capabilities toward life-affirming ways of being — through simple and innovative alternatives and meaningful enterprise that can meet increasingly complex challenges — is essential to our wellbeing.
Our needs to belong, to be valued and to be loved, are also rooted in our integral interdependence.
We’ve observed the breakdown of healthy interdependence, particularly in and as a result of western industrialized society. As modernity defined, shaped and idealized mechanized civilized ways to live and work — we became increasingly detached, compartmentalized and artificially separated from the living ecosystems that are the sources of life.
This has manifested to varying degrees as loss of family cohesion and close-knit community, disengaged organizations, disconnectedness from the natural environment and escalating societal fragmentation. What we and others describe as a crisis of belonging, a crisis of meaning or purpose and an epidemic of loneliness — are symptoms of larger degenerative societal patterns.
The crisis of belonging, its roots and the cycles of trauma it spawns…also continue to feed the hole in the collective soul of society — pervasive patterns of addiction that contribute to escalating degenerating spirals.
Longing to belong.
Lack of meaningful connection and polarization have eroded our lives and our world.
We all have a need to belong. A felt sense of belonging is a personally embodied experience. While inclusion opens the door, it doesn’t necessarily foster belongingness.
It’s time to reframe and enliven an enriched deeper sense of belonging — honouring and transcending the tribal and affinity groups (and echo chambers) that tend to band together in comfortable homogeneity.
john a. powell, internationally respected expert in the areas of civil rights, racial identity, fair housing, poverty, and democracy and director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, explores belonging and othering in dialogue with Tami Simon: Sounds True Podcast episode: Building Belonging: Being an Ambassador to the Earth
…”belonging says, yes, you’re part of the ‘we,’ and as part of the ‘we,’ you get to define the world that we live in. You get to have a voice, and I accord you human dignity. I accord you respect. I accord you acknowledgement of your humanity and equality, not because you’re smart, not because you have a lot of money, not because of your race, religion, but just because you’re a human being. You’re an expression of life.
And South Africans have a word called Sawubona, which means ‘I see you.’ It also has been interpreted to mean, ‘The God in me, or the Divine in me, sees the Divine in you.’ And the response is, ‘I am here.’ So, that’s a sense of belonging, to be recognized, to be really seen.”
Drawing from the Buddhist wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh, this deeper sense of interconnectedness is often described as interbeing or perhaps interbecoming — which better reflects an emergent developmental process.
“We need the vision of interbeing — we belong to each other; we cannot cut reality into pieces. The well-being of ‘this’ is the well-being of ‘that,’ so we have to do things together. Every side is ‘our side’; there is no evil side.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
The African Ubuntu, translated and interpreted with several nuanced variations, also reflects a deep spiritual embodied sense of interdependence and oneness:
“I am because you are,”…or …“I am because we are.”
Indigenous cultures throughout civilization history are rooted by a deep sense of interconnectedness with all life. Sadly, reductionist western modernity, perpetuated a story of separation, with serious, damaging repercussions.
In another Sounds True episode, Tami Simon talks to Daniel J. Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, founding codirector of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, and author of The Mindful Brain, about his latest book and its significance: “Intraconnected: MWE (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging.
…”we have the reality that you have an inner experience of ‘self,’ and yes your inner experience is differentiated. Then there’s an inter-experience which is the communication we’re having with each other now…when you put the ‘me’ of the inner and the ‘we’ of the inter, together, as MWE”…
… “we don’t have to choose between Oneness and individuality. You actually can have both. In some ways it connects to contemplative teachings, especially in Buddhism, when people talk about relativistic versus universal.
‘Intra-connected’..,there’s a wholeness to it all. So you don’t have to choose. You can integrate — meaning you differentiate the ‘inner,’ and the ‘inter’ and even the wholeness of it all”…
Karen O’Brien’s new book, You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Science for a Thriving World, building from quantum physics, offers “inspiration for action and new understandings of how we may actually solve global environmental issues, and create a thriving and flourishing world for everyone.”
This aligns with the extensive ongoing research of evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, which also builds from the commons-based work of Elinor Ostrom and others — pointing compellingly to humanity’s prosocial needs, inclinations and capacity.
As we reflect on longstanding Indigenous wisdom, diverse spiritual and philosophical teachings across cultures and throughout civilization history, and more recent learning from the fields of neurobiology, the neurosciences, evolutionary science, and advances underway in the quantum social sciences — we recognize the critical and natural need to nurture a deep reframed sense of belonging, that might help humanity meet the challenges we face at this juncture of our evolution.
At the heart of our commons-based work is a collective mission and warm invitation. Together we can be unstitutional, opening up pathways, widening our lens, stretching beyond habitual boundaries and borders, and reframing what it means to belong.
We’re supporting and cultivating a wide variety of ways that [might] help to embrace and restore interdependence — integral to survival and flourishing. A deep reframed sense of belonging is integrally connected to rebalancing society.
Embodying adaptive living systems ways of being, that nurture and reinforce healthy inner development and collaborative interpersonal relationships, behaviour and practises — is an ongoing humbling learning journey for us all.
Navigating the Game Be path, as we sometimes playfully describe it, and really not a game at all — is paradoxically liberating and lonely. Those of us traveling these roads in earnest — however we define it — know how hard it can be.
We are finding each other. Scattered throughout the world, we’re not alone. And there is considerable diversity among us.
We can build new bonds among diverse groups of ordinary citizens, nourishing the deeper quest for belonging, strengthened by and rooted in shared and overlapping purpose, love for humanity and all living beings. Perhaps this can help to dissolve barriers and widen pathways toward a dawning age of denizenship, and pluriversality or omniversality.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead
There are many small groups all over the world, restoring, forging and cultivating healthier pathways rooted in a deeper sense of belonging.
This kind of work — in all its forms — can be very difficult with many setbacks that might cause us to question why we keep going. A disheartening feeling can descend on any of us, sending us into retreat and isolation. Alternatively we might feel a smouldering rage with no outlet, or place to channel our anger for all that is unjust and wrong in the world…
This short film reminds us of why we keep going, as long as we breathe life. It takes us back to our roots — deep roots that often seem so buried and far away from the entangled mess of our world. This is one inspiring way of expressing why many of us are working to restore, forge and cultivate a deep reframed sense of belonging: Breaking the Cycle — Reclaiming Our Humanity with Our Evolved Nest
Facing collective challenges…learning, (re)learning and (un)learning how to find our way — we are retrospectively looking back, facing forward and working through some very deep shift…
A healthy sense of belonging in society
Cultivating a deep sense of belonging among people with different perspectives and lived experience is vitally important. To build deeper understanding and compassion, heal divides and support positive shifts toward common[s] purpose, while fulfilling the deep need to belong, we need to cultivate the connective tissue, social fabric and safe spaces where people [we] can:
🔮 Recontextualize our lives and restore our deeper Indigenous roots — embodied ways and interconnectedness to all life
🔮 Join together in some new or less familiar ways and experiment with novel configurations, practices and rituals
Belonging is something we all yearn for…that we hold deep in our hearts and souls.
And yet, who hasn’t experienced barriers:
🔮 That block a deeply felt sense of belonging?
🔮 To fully step into who we are…who we are becoming…who we might become…on this interconnected journey called life?
If we don’t feel free to just be ourselves…who the hell are we being??
A Dr. Seuss quote captures this simply:
“Today you are you, that is truer than true. there is no one alive who is youer than you.”
Oscar Wilde is credited with saying:
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
When we label (other) people, for whatever reason, we also box ourselves in to narrower chunked down versions of who we are.
In essence, labelling can disable us from (inter)becoming our better selves — a disservice to us all.
Those of us who can be ourselves with relative ease, more often than not, forget or cannot begin to truly know the barriers that so many face…
Just. Be. You.
🔮 JUST — Is it not a basic right for people to just be who they are? How do we define self?
🔮 BE — Does being who we are ever justifiably deny others (human or nonhuman) from also equitably being who they are?
🔮 YOU — When you feel free to just be who you are…does that also make space for others — all living beings — to live joyfully and freely experience their own uniqueness?
If more of us (can) show up just being who we are, won’t that also cultivate our ongoing fluid capacity to zoom in and zoom out — advancing our inner development and collective intelligence?
When we feel (more) free to be ourselves — raw and real more often — maybe we can cut through to the stuff that truly matters and deepen our collective ability to be collaborative and co-creative?
This kind of authenticity might make it easier to let go of bullsh*t posturing — the performative need to measure up, conform and look good.
The ability to be humble and vulnerable together — to acknowledge and accept that we do not have ‘a grip’ on the most complex entangled crises of our times — perhaps paradoxically holds the greatest potential hope.
Our collective ability to surrender some illusory control, might open the pathways to interbecome. Letting go — learning how to live into an unknowable future, we might embody ways to be the change — helping to shape viable life-affirming patterns and conditions for people and the living planet we call home.
“Decolonizing potentially liberates us ALL from myths that dehumanize, degenerate, denigrate and disconnect us from what is sacred about life, in all its wondrous forms.”
“Just be You.”
It can also be a comm-unifying call to discover and uncover our common ground…
Our stories :
🔮 Are portals to so many more intertwining and unfolding stories — ways of learning and understanding
🔮 Celebrate what is special in each of us
🔮 Can open the way to acknowledge and face trauma, grieve, let go and heal
🔮 Connect us in ways that help us transcend the illusion of separation and nurture authentic bonds of interconnectedness
As we reawaken to our interdependence with one another and all life, we realize what we’ve been missing, how much better life and work might become and how much more we can (potentially) accomplish, with gifts differing — together.
When we embrace what it means…what it can mean…to be (more) fully human…integrally connected within a living planet — everyone is potentially uplifted.
Our collective wisdom is cultivated. Progress is reframed. Enoughness becomes the gift of abundance…
In this June 2024 deep dive conversation with Nate Hagens, “A Vision for Betterment” | The Great Simplification Episode 126, Daniel Schmachtenberger shares his deepening understanding of the progress narrative of modernity that continues to accelerate human civilization degeneration. He points a bright light towards deeper integrative understanding that might help us collectively gain the wisdom required to shift the trajectory.
There are many people and cultures who’ve been pointing that bright light and sounding the call for a very long time. People have been ignored. Voices have been silenced. Stories that point toward life-affirming directions and pathways have been crowded out and relegated to the margins of society.
Increasingly now, alarm bells are ringing. The world has grown very noisy. Conflicts are escalating. There are emotional climate crises heating up, in many places — fuelled by and fuelling the meta-poly-perma crises.
Paradoxically, there is growing urgency to take action and to reflect…slow down a bit to discern ways to navigate mindfully…
Any of us will feel inadequate — at any given point in time — in the face of the challenges we experience and observe.
Humbled…kinda sums up how we feel every day…
We are often saddened as well….poignantly reminded (again) of how tiny we are (as individuals) and how much we need one another to face and meet the challenges before us within and beyond our own lifetimes.
Things need to change.
Many of us have understood that for a very long time. The consequences of all that is wrong and made wrong…are not evenly felt and distributed.
Many people across diverse cultures, walks-of-life, ways of being and disciplines (fields of knowledge) have spent their whole lives trying to support life affirming shifts, in a variety of ways.
Many efforts have stalled or failed. Perhaps all part of a much longer unfolding (often painful) journey.
We are bridge builders….We’ve stepped through a doorway…and there is no going back…
We are seeking and supporting deeply collaborative pathways…from the commons space between…which can sometimes feel like ‘nowhere.’
Bridges can open portals to the hard work required…
They are not acquiescence to lukewarm mediocrity or ineffectual compromise. Collaboration to gain competitive advantage is not the driver. We aren’t cashing in on climate or the various meta-poly-perma crises…with book launches, speaker engagements or contracts…
We understand too well. The flawed neoclassical monocapital driving economic model is pathologically rooted in colonizing patterns we seek to shift.
Many of us have been calling out various elephants in the rooms and naked emperors. We’ve been working to support and step up necessary difficult conversations — to excavate to deep truths.
There are (necessarily) many differing ways to catalyze and inspire change…
…big and small…we need it all.
…we won’t like or choose the same ways or pathways — and that’s okay…
We observe variations of win-lose, domination-oppression (apartheid) patterns and cycles. These can presumably continue — until they take humanity down.
🔮 Co-opting and feeding these patterns, and sliding into these cycles is evidently and insidiously easy.
🔮 Breaking them — in light of entanglement, dysfunctional drivers and incentives and limited lived experience — is much harder…
And yet…natural cooperative ecosystem partnership patterns have survived and flourished over the millennia. Those cultures that have lived in harmony with and as nature, exemplify life-affirming ways of belonging, being and learning — inspiring what is possible.
🔮 Colonizing extractive paths/patterns of domination-oppression and misappropriation are life-destroying.
🔮 Deep authentic learning and collaboration can open the way to life-affirming belongingness.
Can we humbly rise to that challenge — hand-in-hand?
BUTs tend to keep the divides…divided…
‘AND’… is still our favourite word.
Navigating between worlds, we live into an unknowable future. We experience the sting of moral injury and injustices without overly attaching ourselves to the narratives that can become reinforcing downward spirals. Guided by a moral compass — we’re relinquishing illusory control, when holding on is likely to yield more (existential) loss than (meaningful) gain.
Zooming in and zooming out, bringing our whole beingness to the intertwined tasks of living and working…observer and participant…ever curious and learning as we go…open to what life is presenting, what it might offer, what we might offer as heart-centred gifts.
We’re reminded that there’s no carefully measured balance…no recipe. Creative sparks flare and dissipate. We muster intentionality and purposeful activation.
Navigating between worlds and words, tender shoots are rising up through the cracks and brokenness. We are leaving domination-oppression patterns in rear-view, as we live into partnering pluriversal possibilities.
A reframed sense of belonging is part of the deeply interconnected cultural shifts needed, whereby we might restore and co-discover life-affirming pathways of meaningful progress that enable us to let go of the degenerative advancement narrative and its unhealthy addictive trauma-inducing spirals.
The shifts required are a call to us all to mindfully navigate. The Three Horizons Framework offers a practical and strategic lens to guide our navigation options and decisions:
🔮 Helping us discern and balance challenging dilemmas and imperatives 🔮 Leveraging opportunities as we live into an unknowable future.
The following reflect just a few of the interconnected themes where we might amplify cross learnings and shape new strategies and initiatives for belonging. Life is messy and while initiatives require focus, they aren’t boxed-in to tidy compartments. Invariably, as we begin in one area, efforts branch out and we touch on them all.
We’re barely scratching the surface of what might become possible as many more of us embark on collective ways and means to live and work, embodying the changes we hold in our heads, hearts and hands:
🔮 Reimagining, restoring and revitalizing places (natural and built environment ecosystems) in ways that cultivate regeneration, true community and democratic practices. (eg. cities, towns, neighbourhoods and rural environs)
🔮 Rethinking and redesigning work systems — fit-for-societal-purpose and human needs for belonging
🔮 Working with and humbly learning from those who are excluded, the outliers at the fringes, marginalized cultures, people and groups — as partners in co-created initiatives toward equitable workable solutions and a true sense of belonging
🔮 Engaging people inter-generationally — working together toward common[s] purpose, while fostering a sense of belonging
🔮 Aging well — whereby elders — rather than shuffled aside as olders — are valued…connected and contributing to community and society
🔮 Supporting and learning from difficult conversations — whereby people with diverse perspectives and lived experience engage to understand colonization and damaging cultural divides, address conflict, face and work through trauma, discover common ground and build a reframed sense of belonging
🔮 Integrating arts, culture and stories into initiatives that naturally build bridges across cultural divides — welcoming diversity, inspiring and mobilizing collective agency and nurturing an enriched spirited sense of belonging
Just. Being. Unstitutional.
To help effect systemic shifts, many of us are stepping outside conventional institutions and boundaries — seeking and finding ways to work together across sectors, disciplines and cultures from the commons space between.
Where possible, we might reform and revitalize institutions toward meaningful purpose in society. We can support some of the necessary letting go, hospicing and grief work during these extended unsettling periods of discontinuity and transition, as we live into ways of being that are healthier and life-giving.
We can apply and adapt new learnings back inside some of the ‘entities’ we serve.
We can help to ‘shape new forms’ of organizations — based on ‘life-affirming adaptive living and organizing principles.’ We can nurture healthy belonging bonds.
We are exploring adaptable alternative commons-based mission critical work and roles from the space between, that can be differentiated from:
🔮 Work carried out within the boundaries of conventionally configured organizations and sectors
🔮 Loose mycelium networked relationships — alliances, communities of practice (CoPs), and networks of networks
We can unlearn, get unstuck and learn — co-creating alternative pathways.
Being unstitutional is a metaphor..a symbol…an alchemical invitation. It can help us let go of patterns that don’t serve. Being unstitutional might help…over time…to restore and support reasonable balance in society — enriched through (bio)diversity and healthy interdependence.
We can commons together…serendipitously and by design — across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and regions and with those engaging at the boundaries and blurred edges.
We can all be ‘unstitutional,’ in a wide variety of ways!
Partnerships
We reach out building and supporting collaborative ecosystem partnerships — diverse constellations of ever-expanding relationships. These include people, organizations and groups focused on context-based and place-sourced social, environmental and economic initiatives.
We collaborate through research, resources and programs related to belonging, othering, social justice, loneliness, conflict resolution, democracy and related issues that affect mental health, peace, wellbeing and healthy collaborative relationships.
In this way, we can honour and amplify the good work underway, and the knowledge and capabilities that widen and pool collective efforts.
Gatherings and events
We build bridges, connecting with people who are being unstitutional — naturally — often already engaged in this kind of work, with or without the defining u term. With people anywhere in the world, we can co-create initiatives that welcome diverse participation and nurture catalytic conversations — activating and spawning deeper collaboration.
Dialogue, gatherings and events can take many forms across a variety of contexts. They include multi-modal, cross-cultural, transdisciplinary and intergenerational learning, and offer mutual support as we navigate forward. They foster cross-pollination and the free flow exchange of ideas and information.
Some are informal and spirited, inviting playful engagement and deepening relationships.
Anyone can initiate and convene events, happenings and living labs that align with a shared spirit of mindful reflection and activation.
Arts, Culture and Joy
While we experience indicators of progress along the way, we recognize that deep rooted systemic social change is a complex, nonlinear confluence of many factors. It will take many years, and the efforts require long term commitment to live into truly regenerative ways of living and working. Attending to human needs for belonging can help us all sustain the effort and build momentum.
Arts and culture honour diversity, enrich our experience and mobilize our creative capacity at work and play. We welcome a variety of multimodal ways and excuses to lighten, brighten and stir things up. These activities inspire joy and creative expression and spark divergent possibilities, tapping our human spirit and creating an uplifting and magnetic effect.
Unstitutional FUNdamentals
Another play on words…we’re serious about having fun, whenever we can. We are all dealing with tough challenges. Lots of hard work ahead and the load can get pretty heavy.
To stay the course and keep the creative juices flowing, we love to mix it up. making room for joyfulness and play, and welcoming a variety of ways to ease and share the load.
spUNk, pUNk AND fUNk!
We bolster our courage and encourage. We laugh at ourselves. Sometimes we commiserate and cry. We can also be downright silly. We share (and sometimes tolerate) our favourite music, exchange stories, hold virtual coffee chats, celebrate with a glass of wine, and more. The possibilities are unlimited — inspired by our collective imaginations.
The reframed sense of belonging we envisage won’t feel like the usual comfort zones or silos of like-minded people. We’re co-cultivating and warming up safe spaces with people who learn together through the experience of being together, increasingly valuing our co-capacity — our collective diversity and gifts differing. We’re igniting (more of) our heart-centredness , embracing our inherent messy humanness , dancing with monsters and paradox — an ongoing, often bumpy, grinding and exhilarating learning journey.
Be-longing serves an important function — a relatively neutral space where we can be together, in various combinations, fulfilling that longing and helping to birth creative alternatives and possibilities.
As we mindfully navigate forward through this extended period of deep shift, a reframed sense of belonging is a vitally important element that:
🔮 Nurtures the felt experience of meaningful belongingness
🔮 Offers mutual support
🔮 Invites playful engagement
🔮 Deepens relationships
🔮 Builds needed resilience
🔮 Supports multimodal, cross-disciplinary and transcontextual learning.
“What if we viewed our participation as open-ended invitations for creative interplay?
Imagine if we offered, received and accepted views as partial input — fractals, nested within something greater. Imagine a world where the generous exchange of knowledge, ideas and stories was treasured as gifts — unpolished, imperfect gems that contributed to something made more whole as a result of humility, grace and reciprocity.
Imagine if we all worked at it.
Would that begin to feel like a reframed sense of belonging, experiencing better relationships and outcomes as we increasingly befriend our mutual vulnerability and cultivate our co-creative potential?”
We peer through different lenses. We experience new ways of seeing. We hear and share new stories. We metaphorically swirl to some new dance moves…
The unstitutional spirit is kind of a portable infectious creative commons, that no one owns and any of us can carry forward in the world as we do what we can — in big and little ways — to help shape a viable future for people and planet.
BYO creative, crazy fun-loving ideas. A reframed sense of belonging makes space for us all.
There are many of us forging collaborative pathways with a focus on bridging and belonging, decolonizing and reimagining and seeding true democracy — work-in-progress, as we observe a world-in-need…in a world-of-trouble.
Attending to our needs for belonging and interdependence, is a healthy part of our human evolutionary maturation. A reframed sense of belonging can help us sense make, navigate and restore trust — whereby we are neither limited by a fearful dystopian mental model of the future, nor by denial of the real escalating dangers of dysfunctional degenerative forces.
We are potentially better able to navigate wisely and well in prosocial, futures literate ways. We can humbly accept that we are not masters or saviours of the universe. And we can accept accountability for the interconnected roles we can play — driven by stronger forces that are rooted in love for life in all its wondrous forms.
This is bigger than all of us. And we sense that there’s much more happening than we can actually see.
The zeitgeist is zeitgeisting!
Online and in-person meetings, events, webinars, special gatherings and initiatives are planned and underway everywhere — beyond anyone’s ability to grasp and track.
We especially value those bridging divides, cultivating belonging, amplifying learning and stories, inspiring ongoing mindful activation and embodying ways of being the change we hold in our heads, hearts and hands.
There are many ways to carry out and support this kind of work. Over time, we hope it is integrated naturally in the context of all kinds of work, across all domains of society — as wellbeing economies of care.
Listed randomly, here are just a few of the organizations we appreciate, whose ongoing work reflects a reframed sense of belonging. There are many other organizations…and even more individuals forging resonant pathways through their work efforts. On a planet of 8+ billion people, we need multitudes of us embracing initiatives that take many forms and widen access— cross-learning, collaborating and manifesting a rich diversity and pluriversity — locally, regionally and globally.
🔮The International Bateson Institute exists to generate and give access to information that offers a wider vision. The focus of inquiry is on the interrelational processes between and among systems. They engage in ongoing transcontextual research and offer warm data labs and training.
🔮The Co-intelligence Institute’s Wise Democracy Project has developed an accessible wise democracy pattern language for citizens, groups and initiatives to engage meaningfully around various dimensions and manifestations of power, participation and wisdom that can be increased and integrated — in democratic systems.
🔮Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) is a multi-layered arts/research collective and a practice that fosters collaborations around different kinds of artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments that aim to identify and de-activate colonial habits of being, and to gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures.
🔮The Othering and Belonging Institute and its Forum for Democracy and Belonging, advance academic research and ignite and host events, education and diverse conversations across cultural, racial, gender and political divides.
🔮ProSocial World fosters collaboration within and between groups at multiple scales. Their science-based approach integrates previously isolated academic disciplines from small groups to large networks and organizations, to the whole.
🔮Ecocivilisation is building and cultivating a diverse community and movement inspired by women all around the world, engaged in a wide range of initiatives who share a vision for planetary collaboration and peace.
🔮The Center for Partnership Studies, based on longstanding research, is dedicated to a partnership model of society where belonging is rooted in the caring economics of Partnerism that values and rewards caring for one another, nature, and our collective future.
🔮Democracy Next is a non-partisan research and action institute with a mission to shift political and legislative power to people. They advocate for, design, embed, and empower Citizens’ Assemblies as defining institutions of a new paradigm of citizen-led democracy.
🔮The Centre for Public Impact stands out for its wide-lensed perspective on the important bridging role of the public sector — its potential for positive societal impact.
🔮Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation conducts and supports action research and shares outstanding resources with principles and practices that build community belonging within the context of systemic change efforts.
🔮The Evolved Nest provides well grounded research, education and resources dedicated to restoring human nature to its original cooperative orientation and connection to our living planet — reflecting a healthy sense of belonging
🔮The Horizons Project organize, convene, facilitate, and sense-make, striving to strengthen relationships and collaboration across the ecosystem of social change in the US, while drawing on international insights and experiences to inform their work.
🔮Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab, Deakin University is an activist, public-facing think tank, rooted in a strong evidence base of research. They use Indigenous Knowledges as a prompt and provocateur for seeing, thinking and doing things differently, applying their thinking and systems to different contexts around the world, towards innovations and solutions for some of the most pressing issues of our time.
🔮Deep Transformation Network is a global community exploring and cultivating pathways to an ecological civilization that reflects a life-affirming sense of belonging
🔮The Human Library® is a global learning platform dedicated to understanding diversity and creating more inclusive and cohesive communities across cultural, religious, social and ethnic divides. It offers training via personal conversations that can help challenge prejudice, prevent conflicts and contribute to greater human cohesion. They create special dialogue rooms, where taboo topics can be discussed openly between people who would otherwise never talk.
This article was updated again June 2024, reflecting additional perspectives, resources and ongoing action research, as we continue to observe, listen, assimilate, curate and adapt.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective creative commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze and support collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life work together on mission critical issues. From readiness through to regenerative progress — moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout this article are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They portray a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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