The fellowship finale
“There is no beginning or end, just the loops of the infinite spiral.”
The Fellows have been on a wild rollercoaster ride the past few months here at Old Oak. We’ve been giving our all for the Old Oak community, and we learned so much from all of the experiences, encounters and interactions we had with everyone at Old Oak. The last month here as Fellows has been no different, and we went through all kinds of experiences and challenges as we finished up our peer-to-peer learning journey, hosted our final celebratory events, boogied down and sang, laughed, wept and said our last farewells to The Collective and the Old Oak community.
During our last month here, we finished up our last two modules for the peer-to-peer learning journey: Experience and Impact. The learnings from both modules are essential aspects of the co-living experience in order to understand how The Collective can have a more positive impact on its external environment. We finished strongly with these modules. We have been presenting them to The Collective HQ staff and the Old Oak staff and we’ve been sharing our knowledge from the last few months here with the company in order to spark new ideas for change.
Are you experienced?
The Experience module workshop was meant to uncover new ways of creating a strong sense of community experience— whether it be through redesigning the spaces we live and work in, defining shared values during the on-boarding process, highlighting events and rituals that are most successful or analysing user experience to understand how to maintain connection throughout an individual’s journey in a co-living space.
One of the aims of this module was to discover how The Collective Old Oak can instil shared values and responsibilities from the beginning of the integration process. During our workshop, we had the fellows come up with three new on-boarding proposals and share those ideas to come up with new best practices. Also, based on our experience as community facilitators, we wanted to highlight the most successful events and rituals and understand why those worked or not. We believe that after a successful on-boarding process and attending a few events and rituals, members of co-living spaces should be held accountable for respecting the shared values of this space throughout their stay. We wanted to look into how to maintain genuine connections through a sense of responsibility and respect. The fellows finished this module with a grounding experience (Hand to Heart practice) that brought up a sense of respect and ultimately instills a permanent need for responsibility and accountability within a community.
Social impact and ecological sustainability at The Collective
The Impact Module was more about discovering the assets, potentials and weak points of The Collective Old Oak in terms of social impact and ecological sustainability and how to create collaborations and projects for sustainable development within the company and the community at Old Oak. We started off by reflecting back to our personal Impact Journeys and Ecological Worldviews, in order to initiate the right mentality for thinking about sustainability frameworks and applying them to different contexts and spheres of influence. We then went into some Deeper Dives of Sustainability Frameworks such as the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s).
We applied these frameworks to The Collective Old Oak to see the impact of its Spheres of Influence (Individual, The Collective Old Oak, External Community), which is a great way to analyze different systems and their impact on different levels. This model can be applied to a variety of different organisations and structures, in order to see how they are impacting internal dynamics and external relationships with their environments and interconnected systems. Some of the main learnings of this module were that co-living projects and property development projects such as The Collective need to have a strong commitment to sustainable impact and be as regenerative as possible. Understanding that sustainability is possible in the corporate world is also very important, and often large companies and multinationals have the most influence and resources to shift towards more regenerative and sustainable policies.
Some learnings of Community Facilitation at Old Oak
Alongside these crucial modules, the Fellows also hosted some final events and went out with a bang! Our fearless warrior goddess Alisa hosted both an immersive Poetic Experience and Love Symposium, which encapsulated what it meant to live in a community through a sensorial poetry experience and a gifting ceremony. Our mystical and beautiful beans Laura and Ashen hosted Release Spaces to help people embody self care and express their struggles in a safe space. We also held a Community Festival (in large part thanks to the unquestionable leadership skills of Petro, aka FellaNella), where members at Old Oak were invited to contribute their talents through interventions such as talks about CFX, diversity in the modern world and fitness techniques, dance workshops (including swing dancing from two lovely members and Brazilian Forro with our Impact champion Gab Vauteaux), live music shows, organic soap making sessions and a live Senegalese afrobeat band in the lobby! The festival really demonstrated the potential of the residents at Old Oak and what happens when they share their skills with the rest of the community here. This was an example of how members of Old Oak can exchange knowledge and talents amongst themselves and ultimately contribute positively to their local neighbourhoods with these same skills.
Our goal during the fellowship was to encourage members to thrive and contribute their talents and skills to the rest of the Old Oak community. Throughout this fellowship journey, it has been challenging getting members to engage and participate, rather than just being ‘customers’ and us simply just ‘serving’. We learned that attendance numbers were less important than the quality interactions that occurred during events that we experimented with, but that we still thrive to engage as many Old Oak members in these experiences. We hope that the seeds have been planted to flourish new grassroots ideas, projects and experiences, and we are restructuring Old Oak in order to nourish and support these sprouting initiatives. The fellowship has officially ended, but we believe that the journey starts now, as we start to implement our learnings from this journey and invest our time, energy and resources into finding the right pieces to this complex co-living experience puzzle.
