Boundless Roots Community
Like a shape shifting and boundary pushing octopus that has been navigating this vast landscape

Roots of Transformation: Lessons and Leverage Points for Sustainable Living

The Boundless Roots report is out! You can download it here.

March 21st marked the equinox — we found the first week of spring in the Northern Hemisphere a fitting time for the launch of our report. With the end of our two-year mandate and funding by the KR Foundation we want to share our most juicy takeaways.

Climate change and biodiversity loss is the single biggest threat to life on this planet. Science tells us we only have a few years to implement the radical changes needed to mitigate this crisis. Boundless Roots brought together diverse, sustainable lifestyle practitioners to engage in a shared inquiry around how to bring about the radical changes in society we believe are needed. As change makers, we are witnessing first-hand the personal, organisational and cultural blockers that stand in our way of this change. And we come across and experience the areas of potential, and the internal and external shifts that could allow for substantial transformation of our behaviour and lifestyles.

Over two years we came together to engage in inquiry cycles, a process of sense-making. Together we investigated the most potent, challenging and intimate questions our work and our personal engagement with that work brought up. Our approach allowed us to have deep, sharp and tender conversations across our different backgrounds to which we could bring both our keenest intellectual analysis and their intimate, internal responses. Dive into our Kumu map to learn more about our community and our web of connections of themes and inquiries.

“Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots.” — Rumi

With the aim of sharing our findings and our approach in a condensed, accessible way with other practitioners we created our report. We believe that whether you are an entrepreneur, a designer, a community organiser, an activist, a funder or policy maker, deepening your understanding of the themes we identified will profoundly affect the impact your work can have.

Key takeaways

Over the course of over 40 inquiry conversations with 45 diverse practitioners, three themes emerged that we feel have particular potential for us to both shift and deepen the work of sustainable behaviour change. These themes offer a reframing of the field and highlight where there is opportunity for leverage — when coordinated action can have disproportionately high impact on the system — that is where we need to put more of our energy and attention for change. The themes are cultural frames, power and meaning making. They can be framed as questions we should explore if we want to create the collective changes needed to stay under 1.5 degrees global warming:

• How can we shift our cultural frames?
• How can we contribute to healthy power?
• How can we work with meaning?

Cultural landscapes — shaping the waves of change

There are dominant frames in our culture that lead to us being unintentionally complicit, not aware of our agency and feeling hopeless or in denial. We need to get better at shaping the dominant frames of our culture that allow more of us to act. This can be done by: investing in narrative work and collaborating with narrative practitioners, fostering messaging and frames that centre life and partnership culture, creating collective sensing spaces so that cultural moments can be acted upon and investing in alliances for cultural leaders to support shifts in paradigm.

The dynamic of power — contributing to healthy power

The climate crisis has been created by historical processes of injustice that have created power dynamics that affect our ability to make changes in our own lives. It has left us with structural and relational blockers to radical changes in how we live. We need to name and reframe power in our messaging and embody healthy power in our relationships and invest in process leadership to design and facilitate healthy power. This includes funding shared governance and decision-making processes, embedding healthy power in the education system, investing in learning between funders and practitioners to build healthy relationships especially in relation to money.

The motivating force of meaning — towards rapid and regenerative meaning-making

One of the core tensions in the shift towards sustainable ways of living is between creating rapid, structural change and deep, internal change. We recognised that both can happen at the same time when we tap into what gives life meaning because our ways of seeing the world can shift in an instant. Therefore, we need to support people to deal with the impacts of climate breakdown through: creating space for many different types of knowledge and wisdom, spaces for contemporary rituals, catalyse collaborations between organisations working on meaning-making practices, adapting and disseminating regenerative processes and enhancing education for meaning making. This includes funding the meaning-making approaches and transforming education spaces to include more experiential, self-aware and non-human world elements.

We also identified three potent enablers of our work that are often overlooked:

• The ability to skillfully work with polarities: Increasing polarisation and an unwillingness to understand and work constructively with ‘others’ who hold different perspectives is blocking radical collective change. It is antithetical to social cohesion — we need to work skilfully with polarities to create radical shifts in how we live.
• Trauma and trauma informed approaches: Trauma distorts what we perceive, so until we include it in our maps, what we take to be reality will be affected by it. To overcome this we need to change our relationship with the past and our open wounds, injuries, oppressions and injustices that often haven’t even been acknowledged let alone repaired in our society. Trauma and injustice have to be recognised, and the healing journey prioritised, for communities to shift towards healthier, more sustainable ways of living.
• Process capacity: We need to build capacity in the system to facilitate the process of change — paying attention to how we organise, come together and the practices and processes we use to do this. We need millions of people equipped with capabilities to facilitate lifestyle change that has depth and longevity in terms of impact.

Our report explores each of these themes and enablers, bringing in the voice and experience of Boundless Roots members, examples of inspiring practices of where this is already happening and links to reading, tools and approaches to explore further. It is not an academic paper, but rooted in the experience and conversations of the community and invokes the reader’s curiosity and reflections. In the executive summary, you will find specific advocacy messages that we invite you to explore and share.

Join us for our Report Launch Event Series

As we are ending our two-year journey and launching our report, we want to offer a space to share our learnings, and the opportunity to ask questions and discuss our insights with other practitioners. Over the course of four 90min sessions around the themes of culture, power, meaning and process, we will:

• Present our insights and advocacy areas emerging from the inquiries
• Share about the areas of work emerging
• Openly talk about our process and challenges along the way
• Make space to discuss observations, resonance and connections to your work & opportunities for collaboration

We would love to close this cycle with you and hear your thoughts and feedback. Alongside this, we are working on a practical toolkit that will allow other organisations to apply our approach and findings.

Click here to download our report.

Acknowledgement and gratitude from the Forum for the Future team

We are extremely grateful to the members of Boundless Roots for being part of and shaping this journey and for their commitment to enable and support radical change for a better future.

We also want to acknowledge and appreciate the work of Lewis Akenji and Kate Power in creating the initial space to start the conversation with the Hot or Cool Network.

We would like to thank our funder, the KR Foundation, for their support.

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Boundless Roots — Radically Transforming the Way we Live

You can read more about us on our website or reach out directly if you would like to collaborate.