During my work with the EDGE Funders Collaborative and the Rethinking Philanthropy Conference in November 2020, I created a methodology and approach to share with funders to encourage thinking in ecosystems or ‘thinking like a forest’. This is a toolkit of questions that allow you to participate and tend to the shift of whole systems. If you scroll down, you can find the full list of questions and also find out how to get in touch about using them with your context, team or organisation.

Notes from the field of sensemaking and tips on how you and your team can improve yours. My work at The National Lottery Community Fund and beyond involves hosting people in sensemaking processes. Good sensemaking is important for any group or team who are trying to make sense of the world and orient their work and position in it. It can help uncover new insights and surface learning that otherwise would not have become visible or possible to work with.

The DGOV community is growing in a unique context and moment of history. Awareness of our precarity as a species and the existence of real existential risks sits alongside massive, fast accelerating technological innovation.

Machines may hand us back our humanity in the workplace. Horizontal practices could make organisations amazing.

Fellow Enspiral Member Silvia and I were invited to the Youth Initiative Programme as programme contributors on April 2018 - while I was also working as a Course Organiser on the core team. The theme of our immersive, experiential course was “Enspiral” - which translated into social entrepreneurship, freelance, social impact, mission and launching a business.

Two weeks ago, on July 29th, we kicked off the first in a series of free monthly webinars we are hosting at Capra Course.

One of the things that make us unique among our Earth-dwelling family members is our inherent need for stories. By “story” I don’t just mean those that are fictional — I mean the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, why we are here, what we are doing, and what is important to us. They situate us in the world in a way that gives a fundamental meaning and an orientation and direction. Storytelling is sense-making.

There is what I have come to call a human operating layer (HOL), or system, to everything we do. It is the layer of human interaction that exists over our physical infrastructures. It is our operating system: how we interact in our workplaces, how we make use of technology, how we collaborate on projects, how we communicate and hold each other accountable.

During one of our programmes empowering youth and giving them the skills to find direction and meaning, one of the images we equip our participants with is that of an 'internal compass'. For times of change, transition and sometimes lack of clarity, strengthening our inner compass can be an invaluable thing to guide us through to the other side, and help us make good decisions.

This is the question I was asked recently in applying for a residency which would encompass marrying holistic science, deep ecology, transitional economics, transformational learning and building community. The following is the creative output that emerged from creating space to 'sense' my personal answer.

Sunday saw our first ever collaboration as Future Farm Lab at a Crossmodalism meet up. Our workshops went down a storm! Three "curious nerdy ladies" re-defining 'scientists'; teaching and learning about the food chain; exploring some interesting proteins; debuting our jazzy refractometer and leaning into the unknown of our future food system - while stimulating questions and challenging attitudes along the way.