Fellow Travellers
When setting out on a journey do not seek advice from someone who never left home.
— Rumi
The kind of work we’re doing through CoLab Dudley benefits from having a keen eye for Fellow Travellers.
Fellow Travellers are pioneers venturing into the wilderness. Our Fellow Travellers have made their way into all kinds of different terrains. They utilise and develop a wide array of tools and tactics. What we have in common are wild hearts (h/t Brene Brown). While we stumble and fall over rocks and roots in the wilderness, it is also the place where we thrive and belong.
We call out to Fellow Travellers, build bonds with them, and sometimes bring a few Fellow Travellers together to share stories.
Below I offer illustrations of experiences with some of our Fellow Travellers and how those connections have helped us on our journey. We’d love to hear about your Fellow Travellers… where did you first cross paths, how do you keep in touch, in what ways does exchanging stories from different journeys provide support?
You may have been travelling companions in the past
Some of CoLab Dudley’s Fellow Travellers are people I’ve shared the highs and lows of challenging journeys with.
Being part of the Impact Hub B'ham Maker Team offered amazing opportunities to stride into the wilderness alongside Imandeep Kaur, Andy Reeve and others. Over 5 years the blazing campfire they have tirelessly tended to has drawn together a diverse community and wider movement for change. Having created a safe space outside the institutions running business as usual, pioneers have pulled together to craft and experiment with new ways of tackling deep and complex challenges. DemoDev, Radical Chilcare and Creative Resistance work are continuing sources of inspiration for CoLab Dudley, as is the related and direly necessary work on Dark Matter.
I draw constantly on learning from this community, and take care to frequently cross paths with these proximate Fellow Travellers, increasing the likelihood of us checking in with each other, sharing updates on change and so on. Do check out ways you can connect, learn, contribute and be inspired through Impact Hub Birmingham’s final and Best Year Ever
“The notion of Best Year Ever came from thinking about how it will feel to walk into Impact Hub Birmingham across the next 12 months — particularly those who do so for the first time — as it will be a site of much change and transition. Some of the qualities that I’d love our final year to have are around generosity, kindness, clarity and composure, and a kind of surprising freshness. I’m interested in what this space hasn’t done or seen yet, what more artists and creative activity in the building would look like, who’d love space to make their ideas happen at Open Project Night and how I can personally trial some useful things around exhibition programming and the role of libraries.”
– Louise Byng
Being invited to help lead a women’s citizenship learning programme in the Black Country by Saffi Price and Sam Axtell 10 years ago threw me headlong into some BIG (and uncomfortable) learning about the world and the invisible structures which shape our lives. Saffi, Sam and I kept up an ongoing conversation and sharing of our work through ad hoc lunches and visits. Recently they’ve been moving intentionally into some in-between spaces, through the convening of Wolverhampton for Everyone
We’ve been exchanging learning and knowledges with them, as Jo Orchard-Webb will be sharing in our lab notes next week.
A Fellow Traveller will make time to share food and stories with you
The generosity of Fellow Travellers is one of their defining features. Often our initial connection with Fellow Travellers is through Twitter, and we seek to take those connections to other places where we can pause and chat a while. That could be through paying attention to and interacting in spaces they are blogging and sharing, arranging an online video call, or simply getting together for coffee.
Last year I spotted that Sam Rye, a Fellow Traveller based in New Zealand we’d identified through twitter, was in London for a few weeks. I asked whether we might meet for coffee. We spent a morning sharing experiences and understandings of social labs… it was hugely informative for me and gave me a sense of things behind what I’ve managed to glean from reading books and blogs and research.
When I first met Clare Wightman at an event we arranged to meet for coffee, and she bought Mel Smith along. That led to a warm welcome into the #CovFlock as I joined in some of thier Innovation Factory sessions to learn about the tactics and thinking behind social movements, an approach which Grapevine are using to tackle isolation.
Last year Jo Orchard-Webb arranged for Mel and Clare to meet with Immy at Impact Hub and the five of us spent a morning over brunch digging into common challenges. Themes emerging included being intentional about where to focus energies, which can help to protect energy levels and mitigate risks of purpose drift… there are powerful pulls to work in the ways that service providers and funders expect. We shared the challenges of slow, generous leadership and the resilience required to live with the uncertainties inherent in our work.
Fellow Travellers are generous and thoughtful sharers and supporters
We created a Fellow Travellers WhatsApp group. Members share links to blog posts, books, talks and podcasts they feel will be useful to each other. It’s also a great place to ask for a bit of help, or simply share feelings about our work and it’s challenges.
As an UnLtd Building Futures cohort member described to our lab team member Jo recently, Fellow Travellers are “people you aren’t working with but have a good degree of idea alignment and idea sharing with”.
We’d love to hear about your experiences of connecting with your Fellow Travellers.
