Community weaver

So you want to want to build an online community to embody new ways of being and doing, as a way to prefigure/embody the change that should happen more widely in the world?

Here are three quick insights I can share with you from this research project:

1. Consider carefully how to work on important enabling aspects of social learning within your community, including: trust and belonging; conflict transformation; critical discernment; and distributed leadership.
2. Encourage and facilitate critical, reflexive conversations in your community (and especially among the most active leaders/participants), to discuss to what extent your ways of being, knowing, and doing may be reproducing the culture you seek to change... And consider how your community participants might start to unlearn these ways.
3. To what extent are you perpetuating the four constitutive denials of modernity-coloniality? To what extent are you taking them seriously enough for radical change to become possible?

To read more about my approach to radical collective change, and to enabling and embodying it within a community, see this summary. You can also read the full Chapter 6 of my thesis for more details. See also this other summary, on the different ways of being and doing that have been practised within the Deep Adaptation Forum community.

Some other resources you may want to check out:

• The description of the 4 constitutive denials of modernity-coloniality, as mapped out by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective;
• This video recording of an event on the topic of "unlearning and radical collective change" by the DAF research team, and this other one, introducing important elements of the "enabling soil" of social learning within an online community.