How is the Charter a network (and why is that important)?
Traditional organization structures are hierarchical: a leader, sometimes in consultation with a board of directors, determines a goal for an enterprise and directs other people to carry out the steps necessary to reach that goal. At the Charter, we support self-organization: we believe that sustainable change emerges organically from communities. As such, we facilitate connections between resources, individuals, and organizations with the intent of supporting (not controlling) outcomes of increasing compassion. In fact, because we have over 2,000 partners, and those partners support networks as well, it’s really more accurate to describe the Charter as a “network of networks.”
How do networks foster societal change?
Networks are the first, critical step in systemic reorganization of the type we believe is necessary to make compassion an organizing, luminous force. Meg Wheatley and Deborah Frieze describe these steps eloquently in the short article “Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale,” which we’ve republished with permission
