Inner change, outer action

One of the things that was clear in speaking to Gretchen was that this is work she is living daily. Not only is she heading up the Garrison Institute’s Conscious Collective programme - hoping to find ways to network the consciousness shift community for collective action - towards the end of our conversation she talked about the challenges she faces translating this work into her role as a parent, friend, and neighbour. We mention this because Gretchen’s examples carry an important reminder - this work is hard. It’s hard because it’s not the status quo. Not only does that mean we need to provide ourselves and others with support and care as we embark on this journey, it also means we need new perspectives on how we approach it. We’re generally taught to assess a programme or movement by the yardsticks of: what do they want and how will they do it. But when we’re talking about the messy work of systems change and mindset shifts, these questions do not have easy answers. We have to be okay with not knowing. We’re all philosophers, scientists, field workers, organisers, and activists of the new and that means experimenting, speculating, and learning. 

Seeing

A recurring theme in our conversation with Gretchen was the notion of seeing. How do we see the stories we’ve inherited about ourselves and the systems we are a part of? How do we see others and our Earth at the scale to see the connections and the proximity to value ourselves and our agency?

To this idea of seeing, we might also mention unseeing. How do we recognise what is not there though we believe it to be? The beliefs about the way society has to be, the way the economy works, what is of value?

And crucially, how does this get habituated? How does the learning from the experience of seeing with fresh senses become part of our daily living, thoughts, and behaviours? And how, with this seeing, do we start to build our society so it reflects the kind of world we want to live in and the truth about our existence together on this planet? 

Pausing

One factor that was made especially pertinent about our conversation with Gretchen was the idea of pausing. Initially here we talked about this as being something that we need to make possible for individuals. How does what we do create an island of refuge for people out of the habitual? And how do these refuges grow from short escapes to the defining structures of our lives? What we do not want to do is simply become a pit-stop on people’s continuing journey to adjust their lives to fit the rubric of a system of harm. 

But to do this, we have to recognise that our agency to step away is being influenced by the logic of the modern economy. Capitalism relies on growth - fuelled by the continual expansion of production and consumption - to pay down debt and make profit. This comes to shape our existence: the system needs us to earn and spend money to maintain supply and demand. What does a pause in this system look like? Does it have to mean stopping or can it mean a redirecting of energy? 

Connecting

However we might answer these questions, a key ingredient is going to be connection and community. This has been a repeating theme across all our conversations. It’s connection that many of us are missing, connection that enables the flow of new ideas and the consciousness of new ideas rising, and connection that enables us to pool power. 

And interestingly, it’s also the antithesis of our modern society which celebrates the individual - while at the same time making people feel impotent. The reason for this is quite simple: in isolating people from each other, the system actually denies them their collective agency. Societies and systems are created together - we can either choose to do that consciously for the common good or allow others to define them for us. 

Our job then is about finding ways to support the expansion of community - across localities, workplaces, sectors, and, just as crucially, in the public mindset. Seeing and doing community is going to be just as important as being in community. 

Resourcing

Towards the end of our conversation we turned to the question of resourcing the work we want to do. Gretchen talked about the gradual change taking place in the philanthropy sector as more foundations and donors become alive to new ways of thinking about impact (in short: more long-term, uncertain, experimental) but the pace of change remains slow. 

The problem is, this pace remains slow - in part because philanthropy is a sector like any other that exists under the aegis of our modern economy. This is true in many ways. Wealthy individuals and businesses have made their money under capitalism. This might not only make them reluctant to fund projects that aim at transforming the economy, it can also lead to a reliance on modern economic frameworks to judge where to invest philanthropic funds - i.e. in projects which promise easily quantifiable returns. The problem is that these tend not to be the kind of explorative, culturally deep, experimental work needed for systems change. 

And so, where does our work fit in? We need support from a sector that might need to change in order to offer it - and we want to imagine a future where philanthropy is no longer needed, at least not in order to ensure everyone can live good lives. A few things seem clear at this stage. First, that philanthropic organisations and individuals have resources that could be used differently. They can play a major role in rethinking the purpose of money. Second, therefore, they need to be partners in this work. The relationship cannot be one of recipient and beneficiary but a more engaged process of thinking through how we want to transform resourcing and the use of private and public wealth. And lastly, this might require a new approach to philanthropy that no longer relies on the process of applications and reviews but instead a more alive network of resources that can be made available speedily to fund experiments or, indeed, support people to pause from the capitalist system in order to plant the seeds of systems change.