Navigating Our Turbulent Future
Reworlding draft programme
“We have to move from Resistance to Revolution, starting with reclaiming our hearts, reclaiming our humanity” Marisol García Apagüeño
Our political, economic and social systems are broken and the balanced ecosystems we rely on to survive are tipping. What can we do?
This brokenness needs more than a change of people at the top, or a change of political parties or ideologies. Meaningful, lasting change has been so hard to achieve because the underlying forms of these systems are inherently stacked in favour of power-over as usual.
Rather than trying yet again to revamp this system in favour of the many, maybe we should be asking whether there are better ways to organise ourselves and make our collective decisions, ways which start from more social principles, which support the best of human nature and enable everyone to live fulfilling, abundant lives.
That such systems exist and work well in practice is abundantly clear from enduring practices of collective decision-making used across the world by peoples with unceasingly innovative, unbroken and collaborative traditions, and is clear in emerging models like Sociocracy and deliberative democracy. Living well together within safe ecological limits is always a challenge, but not an impossible one.
If there was ever a time to look for processes that could give us different outcomes, that time is now.
From now on we are living with increasing, huge turbulence in our ecology (meaning drought, flooding, crop failure, and all the economic, social and political turbulence that goes with that). We need to become the emotionally awake and collectively adaptive beings we can be to navigate that emerging future, working on that relational level, which we also put in place ecologically and socially regenerative drawdown and decolonial processes.
We cannot reach and sustain the degree and pace of change now needed by pursuing politics or protest as usual. We cannot demand the dominant system save us from itself, nor can we overthrow it through an oppositional approach that simply strengthens the traumatised dynamics underlying it.
New and relearned ways of organising, of disagreeing, of sharing power are needed. Ones that address injustice without repeating unjust patterns in a new form. Many of the assumptions and habits we have each learned in our own ways, growing up within a system of domination, need the time and space to be recognised and addressed or they will continue to run the show. This isn’t easy or instant work, but it does offer the possibility of a genuinely different - and better (meaning more conscious, less reactive) kind of decision making, in a time when better decisions are needed more than ever.
We need to deeply listen to ourselves and each other and - from there - dare to co-create the small wise steps needed to move us away from a system built on fear, and towards restoring our worlds. We cannot know if we have the time, skill and strength to make the deep changes needed to navigate the turbulence ahead and to stop the ongoing infliction of centuries of patriarchal, racist, colonial and class oppression, but whether or not we succeed, we can recover our humanity as we listen, connect and take collective action.
To this end Grassroots to Global are convening Reworlding an online event on the 1st of October 2022 to ask whether and how the urgency of this moment and a deep listening approach, can bring us together across issues and movements within local and grassroots assembly processes to effect immediate local changes, build alliances to bring pressure on the existing system, and - most importantly - catalyse systemic change?
In Reworlding you will hear stories and reflections from the ground where people are using assembly processes to challenge the existing power structures and begin to re/create a decolonised relationship to power.
We’ll hear from people in:
East Africa - where people from 10 communities across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania are coming together to challenge the colonial conservation approach that is destroying their ways of life.
Chile - where a social outburst led to a constitutional process from street assemblies to a Constitutional Assembly to write a new constitution to be approved on a referendum on 4th September 2022.
Scotland - where we are beginning to use local assembly processes to bring communities together across different emergencies, hopefully towards a citizen-led national assembly in 2024
In a day of online sessions, participants will share their experience of assemblies or community-based decision making processes, explaining:
Why their assembly/ies began - what led to the decision to hold (the first) one?
How do they work, what has been challenging and what has been most successful?
How do they try to notice and prevent colonised habits from taking over in the assemblies?
What have the assemblies led to, what happens next?
We aim for Reworlding to be a space where we can learn and connect with one another, be honest about our mistakes and failures as well as celebrating our successes, and manage the roller-coaster of depression and elation in this work - and in our sharing with one another.
After this we will be inviting people in Scotland who are actively working across a wide range of sectors to an in person meeting/ workshop on the 15th October where we want to propose - for discussion, debate and co-development - a way forward that could catalyse meaningful systemic change in Scotland in the next few years. You can register your interest in the event here.
We’ll be asking:
Can we use local and grassroots assemblies here in Scotland to effect immediate changes locally, build alliances to bring pressure on the existing system, and - most importantly - redesign and replace the existing systems of power with ones that regenerate our human and nonhuman worlds?
Might these assemblies mandate a community and grassroots-led national assembly in 2024 that could model a complete transformation in how politics is done, and offer a manifesto for transforming politics, economics and society at the next Scottish Parliamentary election?