Dialogue recording & synthesis: Reimagining Community – Nurturing New Spaces for Social Change
November 26, 2024
This is a synthesis of the Open Dialogue held on November 26th which you can watch here. You are welcome to participate in any of our OpenDialogues. Follow us on Linkedin for regular updates and invitations.
A World in Transition
Joan Diamond opened the conversation by highlighting a fundamental challenge:
the systems and structures designed for social change no longer match our current reality. In a world shaped by intense social media, widespread disinformation, and climate crisis affecting 85% of the global population, even those most committed to change seem to lack the urgency the situation demands. – Joan
This set the stage for a rich exploration of how we might nurture new spaces for social change in an increasingly complex world.
Mental Health: Deep Sanity in Response to the world
At the opening of the discussion, Ila Malhotra-Gregory, a 22-year-old from YouthxYouth in India, offered a powerful reframing of what many are calling a youth mental health crisis. Her testimony was particularly potent as it came from someone who had direct experience with mental health systems while also working with young people globally through YouthxYouth.
“As someone who has had the experience with the UK’s mental health system… being a part of that statistic, there’s something about this phrase [‘mental health crisis’] that doesn’t sit quite right with me or with what I see, what I experience, [working] within a community of young people who span pretty much the entire globe.” – Ila
At the core, however, is a more significant issue: that the current mental health frameworks locate the problem within individuals rather than systems: “There is a sort of idea of you have depression or you have anxiety, or you have OCD, or you have Bipolar, or, you know, this endless list of diagnoses, and so you don’t function in this society well, and so you need to change so that you can function well in the society.”
Rather than seeking to better “function” in dysfunctional systems, Ila suggested embracing discomfort:
“The older I get, the less I want to function well in this society. In reality, I think that the way things are perceived or working is not something I want to ‘fit’ neatly into. Of course, I want to belong – I am just human and we all want to belong, And yet, I’m happy to fit in a little bit uncomfortably.” – Ila
For Ila and YouthxYouth, “the change really happened when actually we stopped seeing ourselves as an individual being who was sick or who was ill, or who needed some kind of fixing or some kind of treatment.” As a results YouthxYouth’s approach to education has evolved: “We’ve really explored what it means for young people to design the future of education. What do we need to learn? How do we need to be? What do we need to do to create the worlds of our deepest longings?”
“It doesn’t feel like it’s deeply urgent, and oh, I have to fix it. Because actually, you know what? It’s not that things are going to get bad. Things are bad. Things have been bad. People are dying. People have been dying. People are being murdered. So rather than seeing this as a crisis to be solved, it’s an invitation, actually, to reorient ourselves, to position ourselves as human beings differently to one another and to the rest of this magical, living world.” – Ila
The Scale of the Challenge
This personal testimony gained empirical support through Joe Elborn’s research findings. A Eurobarometer survey of 50,000 young Europeans revealed mental health concerns ranking equal with climate change as top priorities. This wasn’t just about general wellbeing – the numbers painted a stark picture of increasing challenges. More tellingly, they show distinct patterns:
“It’s mainly a Western, rich country problem that’s especially present in secular, individualistic nations… We see 140% increase in depression among boys and girls. We see 259% increases in admissions to hospital because of self-harm since 2010”. This observation challenges us to look more deeply at the structural and cultural factors at play. – Joe
The data-driven approach Elborn brought to the conversation helps ground our understanding of youth mental health challenges in concrete realities while pointing toward specific, actionable solutions. As he noted, we already “know what works and needs to be done” in many areas – the challenge lies in finding the political will and capital to implement these solutions at scale. This perspective adds an important practical dimension to the broader conversation about social change and mental health, suggesting that while systemic transformation is necessary, there are steps we can take now to begin addressing these challenges.
The combination of hard data and practical solutions Elborn brought to the conversation reminds us that while we grapple with larger questions of societal transformation, we must also pursue tangible changes that can make a real difference in young people’s lives today. Crucially, Elborn identified community bonds as a key factor:
“The tight bonds of community insulate people against lots and lots of different harms, especially and including mental ones, and those tight, strong bonds of community are fraying.” – Joe
The loose bonds characteristic of modern, wealthy, individualistic lifestyles make young people particularly vulnerable to mental health challenges.
Different Frameworks for Understanding Youth Experience
A fascinating tension emerged in how participants conceptualised young people’s struggles, though it wasn’t fully explored in the dialogue. While both Ila and Joe Elborn addressed similar phenomena, they approached them through distinctly different frameworks that reflect broader questions about how we understand and respond to youth experiences in a changing world.
Ila fundamentally challenged the framing of a “mental health crisis,” arguing that what we’re seeing represents rational, even healthy responses to systemic dysfunction. From this perspective, labelling these responses as illness or crisis risks invalidating what might actually be exceptionally sane reactions to an unsustainable world. Meanwhile, Joe brought forward compelling empirical evidence documenting the scale and severity of young people’s struggles through traditional diagnostic frameworks. While operating within conventional models, his data powerfully demonstrates that something critical is happening that demands attention and response.
This tension might point toward complementary rather than competing insights. Joe’s evidence could be read not just as documentation of individual illness, but as empirical validation of the systemic pressures Ila described. His emphasis on strengthening community bonds acknowledges the need for structural support, even if his proposed solutions like social media regulation work within existing frameworks. Meanwhile, Ila’s call for “fitting in uncomfortably” rather than adapting to dysfunction opens questions about how we might reframe and respond to young people’s struggles in ways that support authentic responses to systemic challenges.
This raises crucial questions about goals and approaches: Should we focus on helping young people better function within current systems, or support them in responding authentically to systemic dysfunction – even when those responses challenge conventional frameworks? How might we use evidence of widespread struggle to catalyse systemic change rather than just individual treatment? Indra Adnan’s analysis of cognitive dissonance and the end of modernity offers a possible bridge, suggesting that what appears as individual mental health challenges might better be understood as collective growing pains as we transition out of unsustainable social arrangements. The dialogue didn’t fully explore these tensions, but they point toward important questions about how we understand and support young people’s experiences during this time of profound social transformation.
The End of Modernity
The most comprehensive framework for understanding our current moment came from Indra Adnan, who suggested we’re witnessing not simply a crisis but the end of an era – specifically, the end of modernity itself.
“The end of modernity marks the end of a settlement with the world that gave us extractivism capitalism patriarchy. This settlement has been maintained through a profound cognitive dissonance. The cognitive dissonance of the world we’ve accepted, which includes the acceptance and tolerance of nuclear bombs, the meat industry, the dairy industry, the acceptance and tolerance of inequality and hierarchy that is inhuman. We live in that cognitive dissonance, and we always have.” – Indra
She points out that throughout our lives we have experienced the manipulation – known as marketing – of linking consumerism to our essential emotional needs. The psychosocial motivation for status, belonging, meaning have been artificially met by products, rather than relationship. Enslaving us to the hamster wheel to meet our addiction, unable to disentangle ourselves from the growth economy. However, as many are beginning to see demonstrated, moving into community can meet those natural emotional needs in new ways, helping us to regain our balance. (ref: https://www.hgi.org.uk/human-givens/introduction/what-are-human-givens).
The digital revolution marked a crucial turning point in this settlement. “Thirty years ago,” Adnan observed, “the digital space actually gave people access to information and relationship, and new forms of intimacy that were never experienced before, especially women experience for the first time in their lives the ability to be in the public space as themselves.” This wasn’t merely adding a new communication channel; it began dissolving the rigid boundaries between public and private spaces that had been crucial to maintaining the old settlement.
Perhaps most significantly, younger generations are responding differently to this inherited settlement.
“We are living with a generation that has woken up to something” – Indra
Yet rather than embracing this awakening, “governments are calling up this wakening as a problem.” The emergence of “anti-woke” politics represents a defensive reaction to this growing awareness, attempting to pathologize the very recognition of systemic contradictions.
Systems Thinking and Relationship
Building on this systemic analysis, Hennie Ras brought a crucial perspective through the concept of fractal behaviour in human ecosystems: “The world in which we live is basically a fractal environment… you must pay attention to the detail of small things, because there’s always course effect relationships between all these different layers and nothing is really insignificant.”
Graham Wood connected this systems thinking to philosophical traditions, particularly Martin Buber’s work:
“When I boil all these crises down. It’s all about relationship, not just between humans, but between humans and animals, and between humans and trees, and between relationships of all sorts.” – Graham
He offered a mathematical metaphor for the scale of change needed: “Maybe 20% of us are sympathetic towards this and understand it and agree. 20% never will. But if each of us the R factor of COVID can hit three people and convince them, we’ll have 80% sympathetic.”
Community in Transformation
These systemic insights find practical expression in how communities are evolving. Vir from Argentina emphasised that
“we need to practice community from where we are, and to really reflect on that practice, to create a new meaning for that work.” – Vir
She highlighted how understanding of community varies across generations: “When I talk to my grandmother, we are talking about different things when we talk about community, and we look for different needs in a community… Communities really are there. It doesn’t matter if we are an active part or not, but with our neighbours, we are community, with our colleagues, we are community.”
A particular concern emerged around changing intergenerational dynamics. “For me, a community is a place where we have elders taking care of us as young people, and that’s something that’s missing for me now. I see older people taking care of themselves and trying to understand how to help but without asking young people what we need.”
Hallima Nyota, speaking from Kenya, deepened this analysis by raising crucial questions about practicing community amid resource constraints: “How do we practice community amidst competing for opportunities for limited resources, and talking with experiences of living in global south?” She highlighted how societal pressures affect mental health:
“The societal tendency of defining success and system outlined roadmap to the very success leaves young people with so much pressure to live up to the standards set by the very society.” – Hallima
Louis Klein explored how communities evolve from mere groups into self-aware entities: “To what extent are we moving into a space where new communities for itself emerge… to what extent are we living into an awareness of being a community in itself and for itself?” This evolution of community consciousness, Klein suggested, might scale to global levels through digital connection.
Gerry Salole added crucial cultural perspective, highlighting how language and cultural frameworks shape our understanding: “Because we’re speaking English in this conversation, we’re not coming at this with a very Anglo Saxon or Northern western perspective.” He illustrated this through personal experience: “When I first came to the UK, I was a 14-year-old kid, and I would hear people talk about, ‘what does your husband do’ as a start to a conversation… And in Italy, they wouldn’t ask what your husband does. They’d ask somebody, ‘how does your husband vote?'”
Educational Transformation and Inner Development
These insights about community and systemic change found concrete expression in educational practice through Shaun McInerney’s experience running a school for 14–19-year-olds. His approach emphasised authentic relationship and presence: “Looking really, really carefully into the eyes of those young people and sort of saying, what is it that you need from this experience… we had 350 kids who were shoring up and creating a set of culture, cultural values around which they could feel seen.”
His “togetherness practice” framework emphasises key elements often missing from conventional education:
“The ability to slow down, to listen, to notice and become increasingly aware of themselves and others, and so having kind of empathy and conscious empathy and compassion, really as a core value and skill set.” – Shaun
Tam Lundy connected this educational practice to deeper questions of inner development: “The me who shows up in a relationship makes all the difference… what was left out in terms of capacity building was the inner the psychosocial quadrant.” This emphasis on inner work connected powerfully with Ila’s reframing of education as an invitation to fundamental reorientation.
Digital Transformation
The role of digital technology emerged as both challenge and opportunity in realising these new forms of community and education. While Joe Elborn warned that “we have unleashed a digital… something into the minds of young people, and it’s absolutely wild for us to have done so,” Ila offered a more nuanced perspective: “At YouthxYouth we really recognise that online community can meet these needs in some ways and also in person, locally rooted communities are needed to really support us.”
Moving Forward: Integration and Practice
The discussion revealed several key pathways forward, each building on the theoretical and practical insights shared. Louis Klein emphasised the importance of conscious community: “If we reflect ourselves as a community, we move from just a group of people to a community for itself, community that is aware of itself.” Shaun McInerney noted how “the learning that we need to do is hidden in the problems that we need to solve,” while Gerry emphasised the importance of imagination and escapism: “We need to understand better how we can trigger escapism, because I think we all need it sometimes, to get out of the context thing we’re in.”
The economic dimension remained crucial, with Joe Elborn noting how housing accessibility connects to mental health: “Housing is a tricky one and, frankly, just very costly… we know what works and needs to be done, it’s simply difficult to find the capital while our tax policies still live in a pre-digital world.”
Conclusion
The rich dialogue suggested that nurturing new spaces for social change requires working simultaneously at multiple levels – personal, interpersonal, communal, and systemic. As Ila powerfully stated: “It’s not a zombie apocalypse… It’s an invitation, actually, to reorient ourselves, to position ourselves as human beings differently to one another and to the rest of this magical, living world.”
Shaun’s closing comment captured the threads of the entire discussion when he said
“I’d like to reflect on the primacy of relationships, because it seems to have been a thread all the way through here. There’s something of a call to action in there because I see how the public and private spaces are collapsing. The danger is that our ability to relate to people who aren’t like us is getting further away. And the challenge for us to do the work we need to do, and to answer Graham’s call in terms of influencing others and having an open conversation is to connect with people who aren’t quite so like us. And that’s a real, challenge, because we have to be intentional and constructive in the way that we do that. It’s not going to happen naturally in the current way that we are being led.” – Shaun
The challenge ahead lies not in “fixing” current systems but in nurturing new ways of being, relating, and organising that better serve human and planetary wellbeing. This requires attention to both inner development and outer transformation, to both local practice and global consciousness, to both traditional wisdom and emerging possibilities.
The discussion demonstrated that while the challenges we face are significant, there are already many emerging practices and insights that can guide us toward more life-affirming ways of organising society. The task is to recognise, nurture, and connect these emerging possibilities while creating conditions for new ones to emerge.
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