Vision Mobilisation
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.
Vision
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.
NGL Values
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.
- Trust in life as moving toward flow, togetherness, and choice with all we have and know to do and entrusting the outcome to the mystery of how life unfolds
- Humility as surrendering to the limitations of our individual and collective capacity, opening to the unknown without forcing anything
- Courage as choosing to take action that risks our significance, in alignment with purpose and within care for the whole, even when we are in the grip of patriarchal conditioning
- Truth as rigorously integrating new information about needs, impacts, and resources, embracing every bit of experimentation, even when it brings discomfort, as a pathway of liberation that realigns us with life at all levels
- Love as opening our hearts to everyone’s mattering, leaning into togetherness, orienting to full giving and receiving, and drawing from shared purpose in times of conflict
- Leadership as an orientation of serving life, bringing tenderness to engaging with power differences, and coalescing our collective capacity
NGL Purpose
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:
“ I am not responsible for the movement of the Earth
only what I can handle
what I can take in
is the right amount ”
The Rest of Our VM
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.