NGL’s Vision Mobilization Structure
We have lots of acronyms within NGL (itself an acronym!). One of them is that we refer to the Vision Mobilization framework, as well as the Vision Mobilization structure as “VM.” At this time, our own VM (structure) is incomplete even as our knowledge and learning about the VM (framework and application) has been growing and deepening since it became fully articulated in 2020, and many of us see the entire NGL framework as hanging from within the VM itself.
Here are the parts that we currently have. Below, more about where we are and what comes next.
A large and thriving globally interconnected group of people seeding the path towards a world in which we all value people and life and participate in a flow of generosity; a world where sharing our gifts and the mundane tasks of life are both done with wholehearted willingness, free of coercion; a world where attending to everyone’s needs is the organizing principle
A large and thriving globally interconnected group of people seeding the path towards a world in which we all value people and life and participate in a flow of generosity; a world where sharing our gifts and the mundane tasks of life are both done with wholehearted willingness, free of coercion; a world where attending to everyone’s needs is the organizing principle
In order to close the gap between current global crises and a fully interdependent way of living we start with having the clearest, most radical and far-reaching picture of where we want to go.
Within NGL, our vision has remained the same as it was when we started, though many of us feel the need to update it after all the learning we’ve had and the new capacities we have developed.
The gap we see around us is also within us, internalized in each of us. When any of us, as individuals or groups, want to increase capacity to do our work, we lean on our values to pull us towards vision internally.
Within NGL, we went through an Advice Process (explained here) to discern these values which was completed in November 2021.
Each of the values contains within it several principles which you can see by clicking on the ‘+’ sign.
1. We accept with reverence the depth of unknownness about turning around the patriarchal field and what leadership is needed to meet that challenge in order to grow capacity to hold tenderness and care for us and others as leaders.
2. We integrate the paradox of collaborative leadership (neither telling others what to do nor shying away from taking a stand as leaders) to grow our muscles for conscious choice about leadership and use of power.
3. We shift our orientation to see it as part of our leadership service to pull fields together and catch others’ patterns of disempowerment (such as saying yes when it’s not a full yes), to support our own and others’ capacity for acting from non-reactive discernment.
4. We engage in creating rigorous, visionary, and gentle systemic agreements for how to offer support and orient to leadership in the following three overlapping areas to bring to the table everyone’s power regardless of their social location, structural position, and internalized patriarchal conditioning.
a. Having sufficient support in place for those who have stepped into holding responsibility for something so they can stay within capacity and keep growing in their capacity to care for the whole, including attending to the impacts of their own power
b. Having sufficient support in place for everyone to be able to orient towards leaders, especially emerging leaders, in ways that encourage and challenge leaders with infinite tenderness so as to make leadership sustainable
c. Having sufficient support for those who haven’t yet stepped into leadership – overall or in a specific area – to antidote the depth of internalization we all carry and to find capacity and willingness to take active steps towards initiative and responsibility
5. We orient to maintaining as much flexibility as possible to support flow and creativity and as much structure as necessary to attend to purpose and stay within capacity, to give us room for experimentation with sufficient support and anchoring to increase capacity over time.
6. We connect the what and the why to give us strength to take initiative without waiting for others to figure it out and give us tasks.
7. We lean into shared responsibility for the whole and attend to vital functions as part of our participation in any project to reframe leadership so it includes the material plane which reintegrates the mind/body split and reweaves interdependence.
8. We include ourselves as part of the whole that we care for to help us bring our full humanity into our leadership and to eliminate the either/or between caring for others and caring for ourselves.
9. We orient to and seek feedback about how we are caring for needs, impacts, and shared purpose instead of focusing on goals and outcomes as a way to ground our leadership in care for life.
10. As leaders, we rely on decision-making practices that aim to hold all needs and to integrate dissent within capacity and purpose, to increase trust, creativity, and togetherness within the whole.
To integrate nonviolence into the fabric of human life through ongoing live experiments with truth focused on individual and collective liberation
To integrate nonviolence into the fabric of human life through ongoing live experiments with truth focused on individual and collective liberation
For any of us, individually or within groups, our purpose is what is ours to do in relation to the huge gap that we are perceiving; our own way of contributing to the possibility of a vision coming into reality. We aim to do no more than is ours to do, so we stay within capacity and mourn the rest. We aim to do no less, so that we are fully engaged and mobilized within capacity.
Some of us have found solace through remembering these words by poet and Vietnam veteran Ted Sexauer:
only what I can handle
what I can take in
is the right amount ”
Whatever else exists within our VM is out of date, and some parts of it are very incomplete.
If you want to see what we have, in its incompleteness, click here
And this isn’t a case of the shoemaker’s children going barefoot…
Within our overall evolution, we only began to articulate the VM as one whole framework at the start of 2020. Adopting and adapting it to our own circumstances is a significant change. For a community of several dozen active people and about 200 more at varying levels of engagement aiming to function in a distributed way, such change is slow. It becomes even more complex when we are functioning with a few significant conflicts and divergences, valiantly aiming to find our way through them and continue to attend to our purpose with the most amount of togetherness we can co-create. We’ve simply not yet been able to fully integrate the VM into our own functioning.
When we complete the current process of working on our principles and practices, we have a few options for where to go next. At present, we are engaging in a process of creating a Leadership Council for NGL, and we anticipate the council that emerges through this process to steward these priorities along with many other tasks it will likely have, such as attending to voids and divergences within NGL that we haven’t so far known how to attend to.
The following four sections are intended to initiate the process of alignment between you and NGL. Please take your time reading them. Our intention in communicating with you in this way is to bring clarity to your involvement in NGL as a Friend and for that clarity to live in both your mind and in your body. The more clearly you understand the invitation by which you are welcomed into NGL, the more ease we anticipate having in meeting our purpose together. For us, NGL Friends contributes to our intent to practice openness and build relationships that will mutually support our collaboration towards nonviolent global liberation.
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As we mentioned in the introduction to Join NGL Friends, we have a number of requests of you that we want you to engage with seriously as you decide whether being an NGL Friend is a fit for you.
The overall principle we are asking of you is that you recognize the limits of our collective resources as a community, and adopt the attitude of reverence and “do no harm.” We have worked for a long time with much care to create this space. We want it to be as welcoming as we know how, and we know it’s not perfect.
We want to learn from and with you, and our capacity is limited to engage with you beyond what we offer generally. We ask that you act with awareness of being a guest in our community. We have attempted to offer as much guidance as we can to support your journey into and within NGL, and we may have not given sufficient clarity.
If so, let us know when we ask for feedback, and we will aim to find a way to offer more guidance in new ways. We deeply believe that you will learn and get a sense of belonging from attending calls and we ask that you do this with care for all of our specific requests (which mostly focus on your overall intention and focus, not concrete actions):