Earlier this month, I spent a few days with Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship team and network members who are focused on collective action. A team of us co-designed the event. It is just the start of work together.
I went hoping to make progress on this question: How do we make collaborative action irresistible for more people?
Here are some emerging thoughts prompted by the gathering and the work we've continued since.
Power. Collaboratives are where relationships (and then trust, purpose and transformation) grow. In collaboratives, we can pursue opportunities that seemed out of reach before we came together.
Love. Infusing love into how we hold collaboratives makes them more sustainable, inviting places to create systems where all living things thrive.
Some skills might be rather universal. The experiences and practices that nurture collaborative action may be more universal than I once thought. Whether we're in India, Canada or the Amazon, whether we're working in the service of unhoused people, young people, or climate justice, inviting people together for transformation is grounded in a set of skills (which we can name and nurture together).
Bridges. People working in collectives move across worlds from one conversation to the next. This calls for energy, empathy, and openness. Let's acknowledge and support this way of moving.
Process. In our collaboratives, we can model how we want the world to be in how we are with each other. Let's take the space to name the culture we aspire for... the culture that enables the equitable outcomes we seek.
Not "just collaboration". Collaboratives focused on transformation can catalyze a special kind of collaboration - one in which all participants see what makes them essential and then contribute what only they can contribute. (And our most critical contributions are rarely the easy ones.)
Attribution. We do collective work in systems that still incentivize us to name our individual contributions. But no transformation happens without intertwined interactions. Let's make more actors - present and past - visible for their contributions.
Gratitude to the Schwab staff team, the co-design team, and all of the attendees, including my two collaborators from Tamarack Institute, who joined me in the honour of representing the vision, learnings, and approach of our network.
Gratitude to those whose talents meant that we had good and ample food and water, collaboration materials, and space.
Gratitude to the billions of people across the world working for economic, social, and environmental justice.