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“E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G—is connected. The soil needs rain, organic matter, air, worms and life in order to do what it needs to do to give and receive life. Each element is an essential component. Organizing takes humility and selflessness and patience and rhythm while our ultimate goal of liberation will take many expert components. Some of us build and fight for land, healthy bodies, healthy relationships, clean air, water, homes, safety, dignity, and humanizing education. Others of us fight for food and political prisoners and abolition and environmental justice. Our work is intersectional and multifaceted. Nature teaches us that our work has to be nuanced and steadfast. And more than anything, that we need each other - at our highest natural glory - in order to get free.”
―adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
At the heart of CIVIC SQUARE’s philosophy is that how we organise is just as important as what we organise, and that the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ are feedback loops of each other. Therefore, we seek to embed our principles across every detail of our work, in the most experimental ways possible. This applies to everything from governance to procurement, from language to storytelling, as well as in contracts, projects, and the work we are designing or implementing. In relationship to the ideas of Doughnut Economics, an overlap emerged over the last three years: what happens when the ideas of regenerative and distributive by design principles meet our theory of organising and the learnings across our ecosystem of partners and the field of organising for complex system change? We sought to lay out some key principles that gave us a roadmap of how we hoped to organise between 2020-2022.
“No single actor is able to bring about structural impact in terms of addressing life outcomes, health outcomes, alleviating poverty, or even creating new connected products and services. Whether seen from an interventional perspective or a political and organisational legitimacy perspective, the complex interdependencies at the heart of our largest challenges are not addressable by agents acting in isolation. It is increasingly recognised that impact at these scales requires us to build open, large, diverse, multi-sector coalitions committed to a shared mission, common accountability, allied political intent (small ‘p’ politics), and change at a systems level.”
—Indy Johar, Ten Ingredients for Collective Impact
What started off as an exploration of the ideas in a book in 2017, and of the wider question of the nature of the economic transformation that we need at Impact Hub Birmingham, turned into a deeper portfolio of work at CIVIC SQUARE. This work has now become a much more open question and movement, both in our neighbourhood and in places all across the world. Therefore the story, methodologies and frameworks underpinning the work in this document are deeply interconnected with the journey of CIVIC SQUARE and its partners over the last ten years. In particular, they are rooted in our ongoing work, practice and learnings about what it means for people in their places to organise around deep systemic challenges, and about our own role and stewardship within this.
This work has taken place alongside long term partners 00, Dark Matter Labs and Open Systems Lab, and continually iterated with the support of the open leadership in this space of Indy Johar, Dan Hill, Giulio Quaggiotto, Cassie Robinson, Alastair Parvin, Marco Steinberg, Tessy Britton, Angie Tangarae, Diane Roussin, Joost Beunderman, Sam Rye, Lorna Prescott, Baljeet Sandu, Farzana Khan, Anab Jain, Amahra Spence and Konda Mason. They are all pioneers in the space of collective systemic organising, and in developing the frameworks to help us move collectively in the direction of tackling complex challenges together. We thank them for the open sharing, and their iterative and long term leadership. In particular, we acknowledge the seminal work of Helsinki Design Lab, for open sourcing ‘Recipes for Systemic Change’, which was a foundational set of ideas for our organising at the beginning of Impact Hub Birmingham. There are no doubt thousands of others whose work we build on, connect with, emerge from, learn from and more, but this ecology of open leadership has had a deep and direct influence on our approach.
Our ‣ of strategic documents, and the Medium sites of Dark Matter Labs and Indy Johar, document a long-term, open and iterative journey in this space. Crucial resources for our strategic design include: