Dialogue recording & synthesis: Creating Spaces for Goodness
December 17, 2024
This is a synthesis of the Open Dialogue held on December 17th, a continuing exploration of the ways in which we might nurture new spaces for social change. You can watch the recording here. You are also more than welcome to participate in any of our OpenDialogues. Follow us on Linkedin for regular updates and invitations.
This dialogue revealed a rich tapestry of perspectives on creating spaces for goodness in our complex world. Participants explored how to balance global and local engagement, weave together traditional and modern approaches, and foster both individual and collective transformation. The conversation demonstrated that creating spaces for goodness requires intentional practice, openness to diverse perspectives, and a willingness to imagine and work toward better futures. Through their sharing, participants built a collective understanding of how we might nurture these spaces in times of significant global challenges.
Building a Flow of Ideas
The conversation demonstrated organic development through several key transitions:
- From Individual to Collective: The dialogue began with personal motivations for joining but quickly evolved into exploring collective spaces for transformation. As Sarah Hoey expressed her search for “sources of positivity, sources of intergenerational knowledge,” others built on this to discuss how to create such spaces.
- From Theory to Practice: Marcello Palazzi’s introduction of the Planetary Stewardship Pledge sparked a chain of practical applications:
“We are launching a planetary stewardship pledge together with the university in Barcelona… a sort of Hippocratic oath for professionals who are working in the economy.”
This led to Oren Slozberg to suggest an extension:
“The same kind of initiative for people that graduate from art schools and the humanities, because those are the ones that can actually help link these conversations around consciousness and complexity.”
- From Challenge to Possibility: When Michael Lerner raised concerns about global challenges, participants built on this to explore how awareness of difficulties could coexist with hope:
“In the service of looking for hope, we have to look in a very clear-eyed way at what is actually happening in the world.”
The question was then raised:
“Can we shift our gaze to the things that we have been excluding from what we believe the polycrisis to be?”
Creating Spaces for Dialog and Connection
The conversation centred the importance of creating authentic spaces for meaningful dialogue and connection in both virtual and physical realms. Participants highlighted several key elements that make these spaces effective:
- Safety and Trust: “What creates a good space for goodness” emerged as a central question, with participants noting the primary importance of psychological safety and trust-building.
- Libraries as Community Hubs: Gerry Salole highlighted the potential of libraries as physical spaces for community connection:
“Libraries exist in every community. They are exceptionally important parts of the infrastructure… people feel safe, they get warm, they meet friends, they play games, they read books.”
- Balancing Virtual and Local: Indra Adnan discussed the concept of “cosmo-localism”:
“The miracle of a space like this is that it’s the epitome of cosmo-localism… Here we are in a global gathering… However, our emotions are very personal to us… Even as we’re in this virtual space at a global level, our feet and our bodies are still on the ground where we live.”
Reimagining the Future
A significant portion of the dialogue focused on the importance of imagination and how to envision better futures:
- Active Imagination: Sarah Hoey highlighted the importance of concrete visualisation:
“I think it’s really important that we practice this art of imagining, of actually defining what it is we are specifically aiming to achieve… Otherwise, you’re just annoyed in every direction.”
- Beyond Current Paradigms: Indra Adnan noted the challenge of moving beyond existing frameworks:
“Dropping ideas is just as – maybe more difficult than finding new ones.”
Indigenous Knowledge and Alternative Perspectives
Several participants highlighted the importance of learning from indigenous knowledge systems and diverse cultural perspectives:
- African Indigenous Knowledge: Nhlanhla Ndlovu shared insights about regenerative practices:
“It feels as though, the more research I go into it, Africans were living a regenerative sort of life… So, it’s really a way to say, how do we go back into the future, in a sense, by taking back what is ours as we move into the future in a regenerative way.”
- Different Ways of Seeing: Gerry Salole shared a powerful story about a Morsi man’s perspective, concluding:
“We need to find people who come in from left field and who see different things than we do.”
Youth Engagement and Intergenerational Learning
The dialogue underscored the importance of engaging with younger generations and their perspectives:
- Meeting Youth Where They Are: Indra Adnan emphasised:
“We need to actively listen to younger people rather than try to bring them back into our idea of good.”
- Alternative Engagement: Participants discussed how young people naturally gather and connect:
“What are young people doing with their time that they choose to do without being told… there’s a greater emphasis, more than ever now on music and movement and dance.”
Consciousness and Awareness Evolution
The conversation explored how consciousness and awareness shape our ability to address global challenges:
- Expanding Awareness: Tam Lundy shared:
“What I can see, I can act on, and what I can act on, I can change. But in order to see it, it has to be in my awareness.”
- Universal Consciousness: Michael Lerner offered a perspective on consciousness:
“Whether we succeed in this experiment on this planet… I believe that this impulse toward advanced planetary civilizations is probably universal.”
Art and Creativity in Social Change
Participants explored the role of arts and creativity in facilitating transformation:
- Beyond Traditional Methods: Karolina Iwa shared:
“What happens when somebody just goes through the body… we’re not so old as humanity… and not so long ago, we used to heal and come together through body, through community, through movement.”
- Stories for Change: Geoffrey Holland emphasised:
“Stories that entertain and inspire. Stories that offer a vision of the best kind of future. We need stories that have cross-cultural appeal. That’s a big part of getting everybody on the same page.”
Systemic Change and Education
Karolina Iwa brought insights about systemic transformation:
“In work and my work of trying to mainstream the systemic approach while trying to reinvent the systemic approach, coming together with communities of fellow practitioners is just like the core of our work.”
She later elaborated on the importance of breaking traditional patterns:
“What happens when you invite artists as a facilitator is artists don’t stick to a script… Everything went out of the window. And in the call, I realised I believe in a word so strongly that I don’t even know it, that for me, the healing and the shifts are coming through us being in conversation together.”
Economic Transformation and Leadership
Marcello Palazzi shared concrete initiatives for systemic change, emphasising the need for both systemic and individual change:
“We need to work at the system level, of course, with politics, with government, but also the individual level. And if we don’t get more individuals to commit and to change… It’s not going to be possible just to do it top down.”
Dialogue Patterns and Dynamics
Several notable patterns emerged in how participants built on each other’s contributions:
- Cross-Cultural Bridging: When Nhlanhla Ndlovu shared about African indigenous knowledge, other participants immediately connected this to their own contexts and experiences, creating a web of related insights about traditional wisdom and modern challenges.
- Generational Perspective Building: Multiple participants built on initial comments about youth engagement, each adding a layer of understanding about how to create meaningful intergenerational dialogue.
- Metaphor Development: The conversation about “spaces for goodness” evolved through multiple metaphors – from virtual spaces to libraries to festivals – each participant adding new dimensions to the concept.
- Practice-Theory Integration: Participants regularly moved between theoretical insights and practical applications, with each contribution helping to ground or elevate the discussion as needed.
Emerging pathways to creating spaces for goodness included:
- Seek and support local spaces for community connection while maintaining global dialogue.
- Integrate arts and creativity into change processes.
- Actively seek out and include diverse perspectives, especially from younger generations
- Practice imagination and future visioning while remaining grounded in present realities.
- Build bridges between traditional wisdom and modern challenges.
- Foster spaces that support both individual and collective transformation
The dialogue demonstrated the power of collective meaning-making through careful listening and building on others’ insights. Participants moved fluidly between personal experience, theoretical understanding, and practical application, creating a rich tapestry of perspectives on creating spaces for goodness. The conversation itself became an example of the kind of space it sought to understand – one where diverse viewpoints could be shared, built upon, and transformed into collective wisdom.
The discussion highlighted that while we face significant global challenges, there are multiple pathways forward through intentional space-creation, intergenerational dialogue, and openness to diverse ways of knowing and being. These spaces for goodness, whether physical or virtual, local or global, can serve as catalysts for the kind of transformation needed in our complex world.
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