What we do

In the context of decision making, we are aiming to make collaborative decisions that integrate as much information as possible about all needs, all impacts, and all resources to come up with decisions that work for all. Because of how atrophied the collaboration muscles of modern people are, we usually need very rigorous tools that are designed to support integration, such as Convergent Facilitation or the modified version of the Advice Process that we use for almost all of our non-routine decisions.

In addition to specific processes for collaborative decision making, a decision-making system makes explicit elements such as how a decision-making process gets initiated, how we know who participates in which decision, and how we support the level of empowerment that will make it possible for people to initiate rather than rebel and to entrust rather than submit.

In early 2025, when this is being written, our decision-making system is mostly implicit, something we feel quite concerned about and have not had the capacity to attend to given that we are managing to make decisions and also seeing more and more people becoming empowered to run advice processes as well as to give serious feedback to others’ advice processes.

Co-creation within led fields. The association of leadership with the use of structural power over others is so pervasive that many communities and movements strive to do away with leadership altogether. We have been choosing another path which recognizes the significance of natural authority as the organic source of why people would want to entrust this or that area to specific people to lead based on their experience and other capacities. We are inspired by what little we know about pre-patriarchal societies and slowly take steps towards full empowerment to co-create within led fields so that led, collective discernment can coalesce into the full wisdom within a group. This is what collaborative, distributed leadership can look like: continually empowering more and more people to trust themselves, to take initiative, to deepen their integration of nonviolence, to be supported to liberate themselves from patriarchal conditioning, and over time to take on more and more responsibility in care for the whole.

Decision-making matrices. One of our simple tools that supports us immensely is the decision-making matrix. This tool is a way of tracking how different people within a team or community orient to each type of decision. When used in the context of distributed leadership, this tool supports the subversion of having static “decision makers” by inviting each person and team into conscious reflection about which decisions make sense for whom to participate in based on how impacted a person might be by such a decision, how much experience or capacity a person has in that area, and how much intuitive passion they have within that area. So, for example, someone within a home pod might choose “5” in relation to decisions about planning meals (staying entirely outside the loop of decision making) while choosing “3” in relation to organizing the weekly schedule (input giving without active participation) and “2” in relation to making requests of NGL’s Financial Gift Hubs (active participation in the decision making). The more we know about each other in these areas, the more we also know who to include in an Advice Process and the less likely we are to include someone in a process they prefer to be out of or to make a decision without input from someone who wants to actively participate.

This is our deepest area of experimentation because it challenges what we see as the root of the patriarchal mindset, which is loss of trust in life. As we look around us, we see that much of what is now produced in most contexts isn’t necessary for human wellbeing and that much work currently done is gatekeeping work to limit access to resources. We also believe that much now happens only to compensate us for the losses of scarcity, separation, and powerlessness. We wonder sometimes whether any of us truly knows that we matter. This is motivating us to keep exploring more and more deeply what might happen when we integrate a simple and radical principle: flowing resources from where they exist to where they are needed, based on willingness, capacity, and purpose, with the least unwanted impacts possible.

We have experimented enough to have learned that when we take our own and each other’s capacity limits at face value and honor them, the habits of over-mobilization and under-mobilization soften and we can base our choices more accurately on staying within capacity and willingness. We are also seeing that willingness grows when we see how we are contributing to needs and to purpose, know we matter, collectively honor capacity limits, and trust the mystery of collective capacity. At this point, we have gone far enough on this path that we no longer look to incentives to get done what it takes to sustain ourselves and the entire project that NGL is.

Financial Gift Hub (FGH). This is the most comprehensive experiment within NGL, unfolding iteratively since NGL started. As we are aiming to prototype a global maternal gift economy, how we ask for, receive, and distribute money is an endless and astonishing experience of baby steps that have brought us to very radical outcomes.

In our interactions with the outside world, we uncouple giving from receiving as much as external constraints make possible. We aim to minimize, though we can’t eliminate, depending on individuals and organizations where there’s no relationship. We invite individuals who offer us services to ask for money based on need and not “value” to minimize using money for non-material needs.

Our offerings, online resources, and joining NGL exist without paywalls: all money comes into our community through gifting. We ask for financial gifts to be given without overstretching or resentment. More than half of those engaging with NGL give neither money nor life energy and the others sustain all we do.

Internally, we distribute money every four months based on material needs, independent of contribution. Teams (mostly) self-assess if they are sufficiently functional and sufficiently vital to NGL’s viability and purpose for their members to be invited to make requests.

We join “liberation pods,” where we share our financial situation, uncouple our needs from what we have given to NGL, release any so-called “objective” criteria for needs, and name our request at three levels (minimum, restrained, and full) and anticipated impacts on us from receiving less.

Some people request as much as $5,000 per month, some don’t ask for money, and some give money in addition to their life energy – all based on material needs. Caring for appreciation and being valued is done relationally. We all know what everyone asks for or gives, including our entire mailing list of several thousand who are invited to cover the difference between the need and what we already have from previous gifts, and only if it’s within capacity and willingness. We have never received enough for everyone’s full request, only once enough for everyone’s restrained request, and always enough for everyone’s minimum request.

In December 2024, we distributed $173,234 to thirty of us (as well as partners and children who are not part of NGL), nine of whom are fully dependent on this money for our sustainability. Initially, we all participated in deciding the distribution. As we grew, we entrusted to a small group the careful, meticulous artistry of distributing money without devastating anyone. Now, after the necessary individual interviews outstripped capacity, representatives from liberation pods come together to decide what each of us will receive, and we have access to recordings of the process. Each cycle, we invite and integrate feedback within capacity.

One unexpected gift of receiving less than what we have been requesting has been a reduction in our collective consumption which aligns us with necessary planetary adaptation. Many of us experience growing trust in life as we witness repeated miracles of unexpected financial gifts filling gaps. With growing awareness of being a single shared-risk group, we spontaneously orient to each other’s needs as our own.

Human Capacity Gift Hub. We function as a collection of individuals, without any organizational legal or coercive structures: no employees, bosses, board, nor a legal existence. All the gifting of our effort, attention, ideas, skills, and actions is based on willingness and capacity to respond to needs within purpose. We co-discern with others what is needed and where each of us has capacity and passion, while also shifting patriarchal patterns of who does what to support everyone to do vital function tasks and to have no one do only those.

All of these shifts, and many others, are challenging deep-seated patterns of either locating choice purely within individuals or having someone in a position of authority decide for people what they do and how much money they will receive. This is destabilizing for most and is one of the reasons for having liberation pods.

We would rather leave things undone than overstretch, and see our many “voids” as an accurate reflection of our collective capacity and as leadership opportunities. We untwist patriarchal patterning in how we function by noticing the edges of our capacity, discerning when to stretch and when to ask others to stretch, asking for support, and growing capacity to be present with complexity.

No one has any particular role, because we all pick up and set down this or that function. We aim to have no one hold anything alone. We function in teams, co-hold almost everything we do, and often co-work virtually when doing individual tasks. Teams come together for specific purposes, so that there is flexibility and distribution of weight and responsibility. Where we have non-redundant capacities, we form support teams and coach others to increase capacity around us.

Many of us still often don’t think things through for ourselves, act in disempowered ways, don’t mobilize in response to needs, or don’t follow through on commitments. Still, little by little, iteratively, we are growing capacity to respond from willingness instead of obligation, to take initiative to attend to needs instead of waiting for others to do it or tell us what to do, to respond from care for the whole instead of individual preference, and to ask for support instead of absorbing impacts and continuing until we collapse.

To restore actual flow, we need to unclog information channels and make visible information that makes possible matching resources to needs with the least unwanted impacts. Although already existing technology could easily make actual needs, impacts, and available resources known for decision-making and resource flow to be accurate, most existing information technology is primarily oriented to control. This includes technologies such as Google and Zoom that we depend on. We recognize that until technological platforms are built for contexts of trust and togetherness we will not be able to create an information flow system that is as radically aligned with vision as the rest of how we function. Towards that end, we have been engaging in extremely preliminary explorations of such possibilities with very few people who are themselves excited about developing such tools. So far, we have no specific outputs that we can point to, only conversations.

With all these limitations, we have still been experimenting in whatever way we can, which is in two areas. One is about who manages the data. More and more, we are basing such decisions on self-selection based on technical skill and commitment rather than on anything remotely resembling “role”. The other is more comprehensive and radical. From the very beginning in 2017, we have been inviting observers to and recording meetings, with very rare exceptions. We also make all our financial information visible, including all the reasons for why people make their financial requests, when we ask our community for money.

We also puzzle a lot over how we can stay connected given that we are an online global community spread over five continents, with dozens of very active people contributing to several dozen teams and a few hundred who are connected to us, some of whom support us occasionally or in small ways. We see this as only a small fraction of our picture of what it would actually take for NGL to function optimally and tend to the very large purpose we have taken on. Most of the teams that are in our constantly evolving picture of our optimal structure are currently a void, which also serves to let people who want to join us know what sorely needs support. One of the ways we connect and share information is through periodic community calls, scheduled and held, as needed, by whichever team wants to share information with others within NGL.

Feedback is life’s organic method of learning. It’s built into living systems in ways that have kept the mystery of life going for as far back as we know. One of the ways that patriarchal societies, and especially the modern, capitalist version of them, have controlled life is by interfering with natural feedback loops that would otherwise support organic learning and capacity increase and by making the links between action and impact less and less visible on the material plane.

Simultaneously, in the human field, the deep drive to control has led to feedback being reduced to “performance evaluation” which is steeped within reward and punishment and isn’t oriented to learning. Instead of the free flow of vital feedback about what does and what doesn’t work, most of us have been trained to withhold from each other information about impacts on us resulting from others’ action. We believe that this is why families, teams, and communities so often gradually lose intimacy instead of it growing indefinitely.

Within NGL, our intention is to restore capacity to both and give feedback, so we can continually learn from what works and what doesn’t. This is one of the areas in which capacity is still lagging behind our commitment, especially in areas usually reserved for “bosses”, such as feedback related to purpose and to values. It’s still the case, in early 2025 when this is written, that many people within NGL are still caught in the either/or of not giving feedback at all or giving it from a place of mistrust and separation. We are on a steep learning curve about how to break out of such patterned behavior and how to embed impact sharing and purpose-related feedback in how we function, within and between teams. Some of the questions we are grappling with are how to support people who take on significant responsibility, so they are not constantly inundated with feedback and how to support those whose actions led to impacts so they remain focused on learning and connection without spiraling into shame and self-judgment.

Impact sharing for increased intimacy and capacity. We have developed practices and processes for supporting all of us to share impacts with others with as much care and self-responsibility as possible, so we get to know each other more deeply and to co-hold with each other and mourn without blaming anyone all the ways that patriarchal systems and conditioning result in impacts, sometimes even serious impacts. Within such co-holding, we can then learn together where change may be needed, where more systemic support could increase capacity and reduce impacts, and, overall, how we can function more in line with life’s principles. Most of the experimentation in this area has happened within community living experiments, about which we talk a little further below in this section.

Within patriarchal societies, conflict unfolds within a context of separation, mistrust, and a win/lose mindset. Interpersonally, between groups, and between states, as conflict escalates, some form of physical violence, including killing, is the ultimate response. Within NGL, we see conflict as a symptom of reduced capacity: when capacity increases, bigger challenges can be handled without resulting in conflict and when capacity decreases, smaller challenges result in conflict. Accordingly, we are exploring how to systematize embedding responses to conflict that are oriented to increasing capacity, within and around a conflict field, so that the loss of trust and the information that are within the conflict can be attended to without further escalation. In this way, people can participate in caring for a conflict field even if they have no specific capacities for conflict facilitation. For example, within the context of community living, conflict often depletes energy by keeping people engaged in hours of conversations which leaves little energy for anything else. In such a context, even stepping in to wash more dishes is a way of supporting the community in engaging with the conflict more effectively. As of early 2025, we are slowly piloting this approach, which was created in the context of community living, to adapt it to the online context of NGL.

Capitalism became the prevailing social order primarily through coercive actions including massive physical violence. Prior to capitalism, even within patriarchal societies, extraction was capped by the power of communities to sustain themselves directly in relationship with each other and land that is known as the commons. Despite popular misperceptions and the myth called “the tragedy of the commons”, the commons functioned and continue to function where they still exist, in a form that is neither privately owned property nor free-for-all. The commons is a set of relationships in which people collectively steward the resources that are necessary for them to survive and thrive. The stability of the commons has made it a threat to capitalism which depends on isolated individuals fending for themselves in competition with everyone else. This is the deep layer of the massive “enclosures” which swept Europe starting in the 17th century to the point where land held in common is almost entirely absent in Europe. Europeans also brought the decimation of the commons everywhere they colonized and the process is still unfolding, always to the detriment of the people living on the land.

We are quite early in our experimentation in this area, though our passion and vision are immense. Since the early days of NGL, it has been clear to us that in order to restore our collective human capacity to live in flow, togetherness, and choice, we will need to restore the commons in a new form. This is a difficult path both because there is no legal existence for the commons and land is controlled by states and because most modern people have been conditioned to value individual autonomy to the point that they have difficulty in collaborating when differences in preferred strategies show up.

As we are moving closer to having our first on-land community begin to set root – hopefully in the first half of 2025 – we are exploring legal options to circumvent the limitations that private property creates for those who want to live in full shared risk. Simultaneously, even before settling on land, we have been exploring for some years the relational and purpose elements of living together, both in ongoing pods and in dozens of short-term community living experiments.

Within such settings, since 2019, we have been experimenting with deprioritizing individual autonomy and couple exclusivity and creating desexualized intimacy in small groups. Where it is not practical or possible, couples or nuclear families find temporary reprieve when people join them or they join others for time-bound community living experiments.

After some years of peeling away layers of conditioning within pockets of high trust, we are witnessing and experiencing choice and freedom where previously disempowerment reigned, intimacy and togetherness we never knew were possible, and, sometimes, an actual felt sense of living in the flow of life and rediscovering what the biology of love actually feels like. Some of us now live much of the time in choice within togetherness, thereby healing a key either/or within modern patriarchal narratives: choice or togetherness, truth or care, freedom or belonging.

Deprivatizing decision making. We consistently walk towards discerning together decisions usually made by individuals or couples: what to do with our life energy, bringing a new child to the world or not, or what liberation edge to focus on. We have learned much from seeing the impacts of not doing this and some of us no longer want to make our own decisions.

Impact sharing. The context of living together is where we have experimented most consistently with impact sharing. Several of us who have been living in such settings for years now know at a deep level that bringing to each other’s attention impacts from each other’s actions indeed sustains and deepens intimacy and supports collective learning about what works. We are less and less caught in sharing impacts from the intention of changing anyone’s behavior. We also are continually learning how much trust and skill are needed to engage with complex questions such as who does the bridging when the impact is significant, what to do when the impact generates judgments, how to include systemic dimensions of impacts to deepen our understanding of the influence of power differences and social divisions, and what to do when encountering defensiveness.

And the experimentation is far from over, as the questions are still many: How much structure do we put around the practice before it becomes rigid? Under what conditions does it make sense to do impact digestion before impact sharing? What thresholds of impacts does it make sense to have relative to purpose? In addition, as our experimentation continues, we want to feed what we learn into the gradually emerging new online feedback flow system.

Attending to material needs. Living together means attending to many material needs together. As in our online functioning, the answer to the many questions this raises – who does the dishes? Who goes to the market? Who calls the bank? Who cooks dinner when we get off a complex and demanding Zoom call? – is always simple: whoever has capacity and willingness. We learned quickly that simple doesn’t mean easy. Without a systemic lens, we tend to reproduce societal patterns of task distribution. Indeed, the working-class woman in one of our home pods was much more likely than the middle-class man to track and attend to emergent needs, because of systemic sex- and class-based training and the mind/body split that makes material needs and vital functions less important than design or coaching. Courageous impact sharing and loving co-holding of liberation edges have now dramatically shifted the outcomes. Over time, we have established sufficient patterns and agreements that we now function in flow more and more of the time, and are constantly learning more as we shed previous habits of individual function.

Desexualizing intimacy. One of the areas of complex questioning and experimentation we are engaging with is the way that capitalist-patriarchal societies are organized around dyadic rather than communal relationships, and the role that we believe that male/female training and sexualization play in creating these structures. Slowly, some of us who are in early stages of forming NGL physical communities, are beginning to look into the tangling up of intimacy with sexuality. One aspect of this exploration is about looking into increasing intimacy without bringing sexuality into it and seeing, already, that we are reaching intimacy within our pods that is deep and free in the absence of the tangles that coupling creates with its intense attachment to one person meeting all our needs. Another aspect of the experimentation is to pause sexual activity until we untwist patriarchal conditioning enough to trust desire itself to be free of patriarchal narratives that structure our consciousness. This is deep and unsettling work and we don’t yet have much that we can say with confidence, though Emma is slowly writing a book on the topic of desexualizing intimacy.

In all that we do, we are constantly bumping into the capacity gap. Our primary ways of engaging with the gap are, on the one hand, by increasing capacity through our focus on consciousness transformation and, on the other, by creating systems that are progressively more aligned with vision and so create collective ways of functioning that make it easier for all of us to function in line with our commitments.

In this transitional phase, particular attention is necessary in two areas where our experience indicates that we could easily be constantly attending to conflict that drains our energy from attending to purpose.

Power, privilege, and liberation for all. Our understanding of the long and painful history that has resulted in humanity’s current condition includes a significant focus on the social divisions that are inherent in the functioning of patriarchal societies. The depth of such divisions requires loving effort and rigor to disentangle two equally significant coexisting aspects of life under patriarchy. One is that we are all affected by patriarchal systems and the other is that the impacts differ according to social location. This means that if we don’t attend specifically to power differences, what we do might result in impacts that reproduce long-standing societal patterns in relation to racial divisions, colonization, religious persecution, or access to material resources.

We orient to this project from the understanding of liberation that was framed by Erica Sherover-Marcuse: “the undoing of the effects and the elimination of the causes of social oppression”. We follow the lead of Victor Lee Lewis in understanding liberation for all as resting on unconditional, unilateral, and universal solidarity. We take on a phenomenological and systemic approach to understanding patterns of power and privilege which supports us in bringing compassion and tenderness to the patterns, on both ends of any division, inviting everyone into full responsibility and agency, and engaging in significant impact sharing across differences in support of everyone’s liberation. We are moving slowly, taking baby steps and sometimes leaps, as we develop an approach to the topic that we believe might support people to bridge gaps, divergences, impacts, and deep systemic patterns and come together to shape our collective future.

Within this focus, one of our ongoing experiments is the “Global Sisterhood from the Ground up” program, which is now in its second iteration. The focus of the program is to support the leadership of women from marginalized communities and contexts. In the first iteration the program focused on accompanying a small cohort of Palestinian women with the hope that the increased focus and support would make it possible to bridge the capacity gaps and bring their wisdom and life experience into NGL. We learned that, at least at this time, we don’t have the capacity to bridge such gaps when the women we are supporting focus only on some of the many activities that were part of the program. We say this with immense mourning, given the context within which we were trying to support them was one of an active war, which was completely beyond our capacity and purpose at the time. In the current iteration, we are putting the resources into women who are already active within NGL to counter whatever inner or outer obstacles may exist to their flourishing and leadership within and beyond NGL.

Baseline capacity and “proclusion”. We have learned over the years that our collective capacity in this phase of our work is not sufficient to welcome everyone who wants to be part of NGL as a whole or of some specific groups or teams within the community. The example of the Global Sisterhood experience is one example of this significant and painful lesson. For our way of functioning to be sustainable, we need to have people who have enough of certain capacities in the areas of liberation, leadership, nonviolence, and sometimes in additional areas as well. This, we have learned, is what it takes for others to be able to function in collaboration with us without requiring the rest of us to mobilize our limited capacity to care for their wellbeing, to integrate what they bring, and to attend to conflicts that then arise. This means working out what such baseline capacities are and how to make them sufficiently clear and observational so that people can self-assess accurately. This is an ongoing project that is likely to take some years before it is settled. In early 2025, we are now working out baseline capacities for different kinds of relationship with NGL, so that the journey of coming closer to NGL is supported through a series of capacity assessments that support everyone in sensing into what level of closeness makes sense for each person.

We have invented a new word – proclusion – to point to this approach that aims to subvert the either/or of inclusion or exclusion. Proclusion, which can be in or out, is about participation being based on sufficient alignment of both purpose and capacity.

When we created our leadership council in 2022, everyone was invited to nominate people, including themselves. Subsequently, we used a collective process for reflecting and deciding who would ultimately make up the council rather than having anyone, not even Miki as the seed founder, decide for anyone else whether they would or wouldn’t be part of the emerging council. The process was often intense and even painful, and it was still, fundamentally, a collective discernment in which each person gave and received feedback about each person before the decisions were reached. In early 2025, more than two years later, there is finally coherence within the Leadership Council. We lean on the trust and honesty that brought the group to this capacity to make difficult decisions about priorities related to resources, complex conflicts, and the integrity of the NGL framework without losing togetherness.