Who we are
In NGL we distribute leadership widely and practice co-creation within a led field. We have no board, leadership team, or employees. Instead, we organise participation and contribution around how people relate to NGL. On this page, we list people who are collaborating within NGL and people who are stewarding NGL, including those who tend to the integrity of the NGL framework, whom we recognise as lineage carriers. As there are many different ways people support us, our community is far wider than the small number of individuals currently listed on this page. Together we are a community of people passionate about closing the gap between current global crises and fully interdependent living.
Those of us who engage with and hold offerings for groups, projects, and individuals beyond NGL – through system building, facilitation, or teaching – can be identified through a purple halo around our profile picture.
Lineage Carriers
Lineage Carriers
Miki Kashtan (Miki founded NGL)
Miki Kashtan is a practical visionary pursuing a world that works for all, exploring the application of the principles and tools of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to social transformation. She dreams of local and global systems based on care for the needs of all life. In her work with individuals, she focuses on supporting movement towards rapid empowerment in service of the whole. In her work with organizations, she focuses on creating and supporting collaborative systems and processes. In her work with multi-stakeholder groups, she focuses on transcending polarization and advocating for solutions that work for everyone. Inner freedom, nonviolence, dialogue, collaboration, interdependence, leadership, conscious use of power, and a commitment to structural change are the lenses through which she looks at every moment and interaction. Some of her deepest sources of inspiration are many feminist theoreticians, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Marshall Rosenberg, Mary Parker Follett, radical economics, and the commons movement. Miki strives to bring together theory and practice, spiritual commitment and conceptual clarity, radical vision and practical applications, heart and mind, self and other, personal change and social transformation.
Miki is the seed founder of the Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL) Community and now focuses all her energy here. She is also the author of The Highest Common Denominator: Using Convergent Facilitation to Create Breakthrough Solutions (2021), Reweaving Our Human Fabric: Working together to Create a Nonviolent Future (2015), Spinning Threads of Radical Aliveness: Transcending the Legacy of Separation in Our Individual Lives, and The Little Book of Courageous Living (both 2014). Miki writes all the time, mostly at The Fearless Heart where she blogs and shares learning packets about the NGL framework and other resources. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Tikkun, Waging Nonviolence, Peace and Conflict, Shareable, and elsewhere.
Miki is an Israeli native with significant roots in Mexico and New York City, she lived in California for three decades before choosing to vagabond in search of learning about liberation and community. She is currently based in Catalunya and is part of a home pod and in the slow process of setting up an NGL community on land. She is inspired by the role of visionary leadership in shaping a livable future, and works toward that vision by living, applying, and sharing the principles and practices of Nonviolent Communication as they are expressed within the NGL framework. Miki holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley.
Emma Quayle
I am originally from Cornwall, UK, where I grew up in a working-class family on the rugged windswept coasts of West Penwith. My parents brought a necessary and contagious resourcefulness to the ration-book-like bare-bones of my upbringing. It presented me with a rich environment in which to nurture my affinity for creatively utilising my surroundings. I learned to build systems and structures that enabled me to do what I wanted to do and express what was important to me, regardless of the circumstances in which I found myself.
I grew up quite wild and with a deep and very physical connection to the earth. I have vivid memories of the beginnings of my conscious awareness of the horrors that I saw happening within this world that I know as home and love so dearly; destruction of the earth, war, and a deeply disturbing desensitisation to violence. I became avid in my search for the essence of what was needed for us to be able to build our world together from a place of connection to joy for life.
This journey of enquiry has led me through various fields of focus and development including acoustic ecology and urban design, psychoacoustics, vipassana meditation, nonviolent communication, restorative practices, working with children to develop listening and communication skills, and working with individuals and groups developing collaborative team working practices and systems design.
Over the last years my attention has been wholly on mapping and making accessible context-specific pathways for exiting patriarchal functioning and realigning with vision (within NGL). One primary focus within this has been my engagement in the development of the Vision Mobilisation Framework.
The Vision Mobilisation work sits at the nexus of collective/structural change and inner/personal transformation; a merger of the work of Arnina, and Miki Kashtan. Vision Mobilisation supports the development of internal capacity, connection with vision, and provides a framework within which to build structures that support living towards that vision moment by moment in ways that are within capacity; this is important to be able to create something that is sustainable.
Verene Nicolas
I’ve been forever passionate about the question of how to create conditions for humans and the rest of the living world to live in harmony with each other. How to tackle the roots of suffering and violence has also been at the forefront of my mind and informed many of my life choices. In my 20s, I was mainly preoccupied with finding ways to support women to find their voice and contribute more fully to societal and political change. I left France where I am originally from in 1996 and first landed in Ireland. There I discovered the “Training for Transformation (TfT)”, an approach to community development and structural change inspired by Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire. Later, I trained with the creators of TfT, Anne Hope and Sally Timmel, in South Africa.
I discovered Nonviolent Communication (NVC) in 2004 and started to work closely with Miki around 2010 whilst supporting local communities and organisations to embody a collaborative ethos in Scotland where I now live. I participated in the birth of NGL in 2019 and have stayed fully engaged since then.
I love supporting individuals and groups to nurture liberation, community bonds and collaborative, vision-inspired systems and skills.
My main focus in NGL is to facilitate some of our offerings (such as Convergent Facilitation and NVC courses), develop training materials, teach courses and facilitate internal or ‘outward facing’ collaborative decision making processes, participate in the ongoing experiment of working efficiently in teams, and attend to the ongoing design of new structures. I am part of the Convergent Facilitation (CF) holding and the Structural Changes Teams. I am also part of “the Lineage Carriers group” who amongst other functions within ‘lineage carrying’, attend to many integrity voids within NGL.
At home in Scotland, I am involved in a local community garden where I do a lot of the growing. I also support the group of us volunteers to be an oasis of collaborative working in the midst of often competitive dynamics between community groups and big institutions. I volunteer at the Galgael trust nearby as part of the cooking team for our weekly Thursday community dinner. There again, I occasionally bring the NGL framework when we need to make collaborative decisions, or nurture a warm team spirit. I am part of a vibrant dance community in Glasgow (including Biodanza and 5 Rhythms). I have a practice of meditation and am physically quite active (hillwalking, swimming, canoeing, feldenkrais etc) to support my wellbeing and sleep. A deep connection with nature is also very important to me and I am learning Permaculture.
Selene Aswell
Selene grew up mixed race, longing to belong to a place and a people, splitting her time between the deep South in Savannah, Georgia, and the Pacific Northwest, in the United States. She likes to joke that she is very good at culture shock. This paired with simultaneously being the baby of the family, the oldest sibling, and the middle child depending on who is in the room, has prepared Selene for a life of stepping into whatever leadership function is needed.
After 7 years teaching and sharing gifts as a spiritual guide and healer, Selene paused this offering, due to the exhaustion of attempting to empower people and “change the world” without a systemic approach or a community cohold her and the work. When she asked to be shown what was her purpose, if not this offering, she had the following vision:
I am living in a community. We are a vertical column of light connecting the current reality on one side and the most vibrant possible future on the other. Our way of life functions to shrink the distance between the two, drawing this possible future closer and closer to life as it is now. We are not alone in this work. The vision zooms out to show a network of such communities around the world. Each community is a column holding a different aspect of the vision future, drawing it closer.
Not knowing how to find this community, Selene took a permaculture design course and started studying NVC. She discovered NGL unintentionally, by attending an NGL retreat in Poland, while seeking affordable NVC training and experience as part of her certification journey. Selene was shocked to hear Miki’s vision for NGL in the world was almost exactly her own that she had 3 years before! Though she was a retreat participant, not a coholder, Miki had an intuition to invite her into the Financial Gift Hub (FGH) of that retreat, saying that Selene belonged with NGL. About 6 months after that, Selene was supporting Emma on an NGL team, about 2 months after that she joined NGL as a full member. She had found “home”. NGL is the closest approximation of her vision and felt sense of a gift-based society that she has experienced so far.
Gift economy comes naturally to Selene. In the early years after graduating from college, many people coached her to “value herself” by charging for services. Her spirit rebelled against this capitalist programing, her very soul did not allow her to charge for spiritual guidance. She has been experimenting in gift economy in different forms off and on for 16 years. Selene has a BA in Community Building, is an NVC trainer certified by the Center for Nonviolent Communication, with 17 years teaching and coaching experience on a range of topics.
Life is now calling Selene back to renew her spiritual work, now informed and languaged by NVC, the NGL framework and her experience applying gift economy. There is a spiritual quality to her work expressing through her articulation and application of the maternal gift economy, influenced by her personal relationship with the Primordial Mother. Selene draws on this relationship to bring insights into dilemmas in her work or coaching.
Currently within NGL, Selene coholds Resource Flow and the Financial Gift Hub Design and Implementation Team. She holds the functions of FGH Entrusted Decision Maker and Gift Economy Coaching. Outside NGL, Selene offers public speaking, training, coaching, and modelling on the topics of gift economy, community living, NVC and the NGL framework.
Selene is currently exploring community living in Maine. She is deeping her understanding of herbalism as an empowerment liberation journey and as an anchoring into her body the experience of directly receiving the gifts of the Earth, while giving the Earth the gift of engagement. Selene very much wants to try a game of Dungeons and Dragons for play and imagination.
People stewarding NGL
People stewarding NGL
Alper Süzer
As I journey towards liberation and nonviolence with the tools NGL is offering, I am gradually becoming more aware how the systems of patriarchy have caused significant separation within the bodies and souls of all human beings, including me. The most prominent tools of patriarchy are shaming, comparing, and suppressing. And patriarchy doesn’t make space for mourning or give access to soft qualities.
I am on this journey together with a community of high degree of shared risk. The support I receive from my community has allowed me to experiment with agreements that subvert patriarchy and offer us all the chance to live our vision in the present moment. Such a community of practice that shares a vision, committed to nonviolence and liberation in a full shared risk setup is an exact example of a stronger force field that Miki refers to.
To strengthen the force field that drives us towards our vision, two elements seem pivotal to me: purpose is one and agreements that are aligned with that purpose are the other. I am on a learning journey to integrate purpose into all aspects of my life.
The driving purpose for me as an individual is “to take an unshakable lead in sourcing from vision to be in complete and total service to life”
For my relationship “sensing and identifying the patriarchal grooves of family, parenting, dyadic couple field and take whatever baby steps possible to untwist them gently”
and finally in my role as designing and implementing the resource flow systems in NGL, “To design practical pathways for engaging with financial resources, making it possible to incrementally materialize the vision of resources flowing to needs as a lived reality within the NGL community”
I was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1982, in a working class family during a time of fear and oppression following the 1980 coup d’état. I studied Aeronautical Engineering and did extensive work for Airbus. However, after becoming a parent in 2011, my priorities and orientation to life shifted. I realized that I wanted to accompany my children on their life’s journey, so I stepped into the unknown territory of parenthood. Now, I live with my four children Ayaz, Alin, Ateş, Maya Mey and with my partner Yaren in Ankara. I explore, together with 10-15 people from NGL community, in the context of Mycelium Community Living experiment the exciting topic of moving towards full shared risk: “What would be the conditions under which we could live together?”
I am also a member of Turkish speaking Nonviolent Communication and CNVC Certified Trainers group.
*“Even the most luminous vision isn’t enough energy, by itself, to pull us out of the patriarchal “trance” with its many “grooves.” We need a stronger force field than the very gentle invitation that vision sends our way”
**Practical Aspects of Restoring Flow Packet, Miki Kashtan 2023-03-18***
A. Yaren Kose
I was born and raised in Turkey, and lived most of my youth in Istanbul, a busy hectic city carrying the rich history of a politically troubled region. My search for another way of living in the world started with permaculture — working on farms and learning not only about alternative ways of living, but also about being in relationship with the land and the more-than-human world. This path eventually took me to Tamera, where I encountered for the first time a practical experiment in creating a different way of living together.
I later trained in Expressive Arts Therapy, with a focus on group processes, conflict resolution, and collective healing. It was through this work that I found myself on the Turkish coast, supporting a self-organized grassroots shelter close to where people were crossing from Turkey to Greece at the height of the refugee crisis. Later I went to Greece to work in the largest refugee camp in Europe, and it was shortly afterwards that I came across a video of Miki talking about social change. Something immediately clicked.
I’m also a videographer and filmmaker — skills I developed in part by documenting grassroots organizations in the camps to help them secure funding.
For me, NGL is a practice ground — a place where liberation work and purpose are held together. I’m involved in several teams, as well as the Mycelium Project, which reflects my longing to live in an in-person NGL community. Over the years, I’ve also taken part in small experiments in community living, exploring what happens when people intentionally bring these practices into everyday shared life. Being a mother has deepened my longing for intergenerational community and for alternatives to the isolation of the nuclear family — and my conviction that another way of being together is genuinely possible.
Aurélia
I have mixed heritage and this brought me a lot of sensitivity to and interest in systemic dynamics and cultural differences, how societies function and what this does to humans in them. I have worked for seven years in the humanitarian sector in different parts of the world (Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia). Working there, my focus was on the dynamics that exist within the communities that received support and with the humanitarian workers and how this can be an opportunity but also create risk, and the question of how we tend to that very concretely. I also started a big study in the Democratic Republic of Congo around menstrual hygiene and the impact it has on girls’ education and social dynamics, which created some shift in policies there. I also developed feedback systems in the humanitarian sector.
After a few years, I realized that while the humanitarian sector is very much needed, it’s part of the system as it works currently, and addresses effects and not causes. This made me change my focus on the layer of the causes – how we can shift the system itself so it doesn’t create the same effect. So I joined a community in France that looked at creating alternative systems and structures (universal income, local currency, creating networks of local producers,…) that promote collaboration and working together to care for locality and its people and beings. From this I realized that I wanted to go another layer deeper around, and explore: individual and collective functioning. What are the individual beliefs, ways of doing, and patterns that we have that lead us to do certain things and not others ; and to organize in certain ways? The layer of our beliefs around resources, how do we connect to these and how do we share these? How does this relate to trust in life? In others?
That’s where I encountered NGL in 2022 and discovered and mainly started focusing on ‘Power and Privilege’ (now ‘Liberation for all’) but also discovering all the different explorations like the weaving togetherness lab, being part of Financial Gift Hub and how it functions to care for our material needs, organizing gatherings, and a number of other things
Eddy Quinn
Eddy is passionate about supporting the skill and system building needed for people to manifest life-aligned intentions tangibly, practically and efficiently. In his work with communities he focuses on the building of life-aligned structures and systems which support the full thriving, trust and coherence of living in choice, togetherness and flow. In his work with individuals he focuses on coaching for liberation and accompanying others with their empowerment and to live in alignment with their deepest purpose, values and vision.
Eddy is Irish and grew up in Dublin. In university he was first exposed to spiritual practice through S.N. Goenka’s Vipassana tradition and after finishing university he spent 18 months in Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery which embedded him in the San Francisco Zen Centre’s culture of the Soto Zen Buddhist tradition. During his time in Tassajara he was exposed to Non-Violent Communication which deeply resonated and complemented a lot of what he found so meaningful in the spiritual teachings he was being exposed to in monastic life. After returning to Ireland he began to be engaged with the local Irish NVC and Buddhist communities, during this time he was expose to the work of NGL. After this he moved to vagabonding with Emma and Miki them for the past 2 year period travelling to various places across the world and deepening into living, applying and sharing the NGL framework in various contexts.
His work with NVC is informed by a variety of NVC trainers approaches, most notably Arnina Kashtan, Yoram Mosenzon, Sarah Peyton and particularly Miki’s work. He is passionate about the principles and practices of Nonviolent Communication, the NGL framework and the Vision Mobilisation Framework generally and at present particularly in how they can be applied within visionary feedback flow and conflict engagement systems. He continues to be deeply informed by the Soto Zen lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and is under the ongoing mentorship of Kosen Gregory Snyder, Laura O’Laughlin and Djinn Gallagher.
Carimar Barrientos
While preparing for a social project I did in Venezuela (my country of origin) to support communities growing organic food, I wanted to learn about the relationship between inner change and social change, and that exploration led me to discover the work of Miki Kashtan. Through reading one of her books I discovered the potential of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) in the field of social change and how we can create collaborative systems that work for everyone based on its principles; systems that could support projects like the one I started so they could flourish and increase their potential to have a greater impact in their respective areas of social change.
Finding Miki’s work led me to a journey of learning NVC at the same time that I was doing the project in Venezuela, and years later after having had more immersion in NVC I decided to come closer to NGL (in 2023).
Now I see myself as one of those co-holding NGL and preparing to carry the lineage into the future. I’m part of the Feedback Flow Design Team and the Lineage Experiment Project Stewardship Team. I’m also engaged in the design of the NGL Conflict Engagement System, I’m part of the Lineage Carrying Track as well as other small projects.
Part of my vision is to support communities, organizations, and groups working to transform the social and environmental challenges of our time, those who wish to contribute to creating a world that works for all. I envision supporting them by co-creating collaborative systems and through processes that lead them to find collaborative solutions and transcend polarization. One way of preparing myself to get closer to that vision is by being part of different apprenticing projects in NGL with the focus of increasing capacity in Weaving Togetherness and Convergent Facilitation.
Isa Ortega Caro
After realizing the immense impact on the planet of the climate and ecological crisis, as well as the systemic violence throughout the world, I decided to leave my career as a pianist and put my energy in co-creating concrete actions to contribute to a transformation of our ways of living.
While participating in feminist movements I was introduced to NVC in 2019. NVC supported me in understanding why even if I was fully aligned with the feminist movements in their intentions, there was something in their way of functioning that for me maintained the separation and violence of the patriarchal societies. From there, my curiosity was piqued about how to continue moving from the same intentions, aligning means with ends: acting and communicating in alignment with the vision of the world we would like to create.
Therefore, I joined the nonviolent activism movement Extinction Rebellion where I deepened my knowledge and an embodied experience of nonviolence. This inspired me to drastically change my life by co-founding an eco-village project in Italy where I lived for 3 years, in which I started to apply NVC for making decisions, flowing feedback and engaging with conflict in community.
After leaving the community and coming back to Colombia (my country of origin) I joined NGL. Where I experienced resonance with depth of the commitment to nonviolence in a very practical and concrete way, in each aspect of how to do things in alignment with our values.
Being in NGL has given me a clearer understanding of how we arrived where we are as humanity and how we can lean on vision, purpose and the power of the collective to find new pathways. I love how the learnings within NGL happen through continuous experimentation of how to collaborate while moving in the direction of liberating ourselves and others from our conditioning in order to re-connect with the essence of our biological qualities of love, care and collaboration.
I am part of seeding NGL in Spanish as well as co-holding and stewarding in different areas.
I love dancing as an experience of interdependence.
Mareike Haustein
I joined NGL in 2021 and since then got more and more deeply involved. The depth and radicality with which we are committed to nonviolence within NGL as well as the complete acceptance and consideration of complexities is what motivates me to steward NGL. To be more clear: at this point in time of humanity I don’t know of any other place where my capacities and life energy are more well used than here <3
Through Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and other practices I have been on a more focused liberation journey since 2016 and deepened it since I joined NGL. One of the liberation edges that I continue to focus on is a pattern of overmobilisation and doing more than is within true capacity for me as well as a pattern of not bringing myself in fully (also information about my capacity).
The areas within NGL that I am most engaged in are the All Ages Collaboration Project, in which I am offering coaching, Maintenance and Design of the Financial Gift Hub (FGH) and the Human Capacity Gift Hub. I am also part of the Lineage Carrying Track.
My personal journey:
Born 1986 in the former GDR (socialist dictatorship) three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall in a working class family in which just my mother studied (mechanical engineering), I grew up in the post-reunification years as a single child with both of my parents working in full time jobs in a small town. The 1990s were in general a time of big unknowns and lots of fear in people about what comes after socialism, about losing their jobs as this was happening to many many people.
During that time I was lucky to meet horses as ongoing companions in my life. Whenever I could, I was going to the next little village with a horse association and spent lots of my days and time there, caring for the place, the horses and other animals there and having a little part-time community and deep friendships. That’s the place where I basically grew up and then started giving riding lessons to young people myself.
School wasn’t an easy place for me and still I managed to graduate in high school and studied five years mathematics, sociology, economics and politics, pedagogy and didactic to become a teacher at high school, which in addition had two years of teacher training. During this time I encountered even more the absurdity of the school system. In addition to the usual studies I got diplomas of alternative schooling: Marchtaler Plan, Jenaplan and Montessori diploma and through that I got to know a lot of visionary schools and people. During my study I also lived in Ghana for three months and took part in a publication.
I spent a total of nine years working at various public and private schools throughout Germany with heart and soul for the children and young people who accompanied me/whom I was privileged to accompany.
Leaving the school behind me, but not the students, I left in 2020 to work for nine months on a horse farm in Spain, before traveling between May 2021 and April 2024 without a permanent residence with my camper ‘momo’ to the places / to the people who i was curious to meet and connect with. In parallel, a long-standing vision began to take shape: an enchanting place called “machada” in Portugal was calling me (with a group of originally three others) to design, to become a place of life and experimentation, a place of being that I gave most of my energy and time to. I left this place in 2024 due to capacity limits.
I first encountered NVC in 2017. Since then it has been my constant companion. Since May 2021 also on the certification path with CNVC. Through that I learned about the Vision Mobilisation framework that Sabrina Kley presented in the certification group and took part in the Vision Mobilisation Course (VM) in May 2021. Even though I rationally understood next to nothing at first, there was an intuitive wisdom within me that told me this was something my whole system was waiting for and I wanted to go deeper and joined NGL as a friend. Since it was challenging for me to allow deeper expressions in English, I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to be part of the emergence and growth of a German-speaking community while growing my capacity to understand and speak English, which happened over the last few years :)
Menaka Neotia
Menaka is deeply engaged in exploring the integration of the Liberation for all lens within the Power and Privilege (P&P) work that we are seeding in all of our teams in NGL. As a key person in the development of the P&P tracking function, Menaka supports grounding our movement towards vision in the reality of the present.
As part of the Global Sisterhood from the Ground Up Holding team she is growing her capacity by designing the program so that Sisters (participants) who are from marginalised communities and have less access to resources have more accessibility to NGL resources and grow their capacity through the liberatory self-directed interdependent design of the program.
Menaka has also written a story about labour migration and citizenship based on the principles of Convergent Facilitation, a process for integrative decision making developed by Miki Kashtan, with coaching about sensing into the non-controversial essence in what matters to all from Paul Kahawatte.
She currently lives in India where she is valiantly working on untwisting the field in her personal environment. She is also stewarding introducing Systemic and Liberation awareness to those who practice and teach NVC in India. Menaka is an Associate of NGL and an Apprentice.
Sabrina Kley
I was first becoming more conscious of the world around me when I became a vegan in 2012. I started engaging in initiatives around reducing food waste (foodsharing), sustainable living, city gardening and vegan activism. I quit my job as a mobile app designer, worked in an organic kitchen and co-founded a vegan education café.
In that time I also came across NVC (Nonviolent Communication) and it changed my life once again. As I looked through the needs lens I found myself questioning basically everything about how our world functioned, from couple relationships to schools and governments.
Having little companionship on this way and lots of limitations I almost got lost in patriarchy again when I encountered NGL and dived in deeply.
Now I am vagabonding with my podling-mate Fox (we are in the process of forming a pod, an alternative model of relationship) with our shared purpose of creating pathways for people to join NGL’s intense experimentation – on land and online. I’m part of the Human Capacity Pathways team and the Mycelium web.
Heather Austin
I was introduced to, and fell in love with, Nonviolent Communication (NVC) through Inbal Kashtan’s book, “Parenting From Your Heart” and I am deeply grateful to have been working closely with and learning from (and together with) Inbal’s sisters, Arnina and Miki, as a founding member of the Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL) Community, the Event Coordinator at Bay Area Nonviolent Communication (BayNVC), and The Compass Program Coordinator and Coach.
My passion is to support people, especially parents, educators, and children, in cultivating their capacity for non-judgemental present moment awareness; deepening their connection with one another; and co-creating compassionate, purpose-aligned, collaborative family systems, in the hope that these family systems will serve as seeds for creating a world that works for all. I have been doing this with the consciousness and practical tools that are part of my learnings from NVC, NGL, The Compass, UCLA’s Adaptive Schools & Parent Empowerment Training, Attachment Theory, Polyvagal Theory, Mindfulness and more.
In addition to my work with the Kashtan sisters, I facilitate NVC classes and groups, and offer individual support sessions including home and school visits. I bring wisdom from my decades-long journey of teaching parents, educators, and children of all ages, in and out of school settings, both in the U.S. and Mexico (and more recently across Europe) as well as my own journey of parenting and homeschooling her neurodivergent child.
These days, I dedicate much of my energy to facilitating the flow of NGL’s wisdom more widely in the world through collaborative stewardship of events, alongside offering workshops through the All Ages Collaboration Lab, the Heart of Parenting, and the Compass.
Fox Keohane
Originally from Ireland, Fox began untethering from normative society as he explored alterative schooling systems, spending some time at A.S. Neill’s Summerhill in England and founding Ireland’s first democratic school based on the Sudbury model.
Fox’s untethering deepened through his housing activism in Dublin as a member of its squatting community. It was through his interest in the Sudbury model that he first came to appreciate the potential human systems. In NGL he found an intoxicating mix of a commitment to nonviolence and experimenting with human systems and he is committed to realising their potential within the context of a land-based NGL community.
These days he is increasingly seeing his life as an ongoing series of experiments with truth. Currently his experiments are focusing on recovering from male-training and the practice of impact sharing.
He enjoys reading fiction that supports readers to explore visionary possibilities. His favourite book is ‘Parable of the Sower’ by Octavia E. Butler.
Fox firmly believes that in order to transform the current state of the planet we need to experiment with moving beyond the traditional patriarchal unit of the nuclear family and form affinity groups based on shared purpose and a commitment to each other’s and collective liberation. To this end he is currently vagabonding with his podling mate Sabrina and exploring pod forming with another NGL member.
Within NGL he does miscellaneous tasks including the internal community newsletter, holding one of NGL’s financial storehouses and collaborating with others on the Human Capacity team to create within capacity pathways for people to land in NGL and step into more co-holding of its visionary purpose.
Kerstin Engel
I am Kerstin, one of the people stewarding NGL, working in the events team, the support pod project team, FGH maintenance team and several other projects. Writing something about me is actually a huge liberation edge for me, just stepping forward and being visible is quite scary for me who got deeply used to the strategy of hiding, observing, listening, sensing and thinking.
I do not know who you are, how you look into the world, what interests you.
Still I understand that you came here to read a bit about who we are, you seem to be curious about NGL and I am a part of it. Is it meaningful for you to know that I was born in 1978, in a village near a small town in Lower Saxony, Germany? In a big house that had been a farm still when my father was growing up there. I spent lots of time outside, talking with trees and snails and spiders, met spirits that live in stones and experimented with growing colourful moulds in earth holes. All of these became my refuge where I could process what I learned about the horrors in the world – things like: punishment, children being beaten, witch burnings and people starving. I could accept that these things happened, but not that it has to be that way. I also understood that these acts were done by people who are in pain themselves, and who had somehow hardened their hearts.
Community
I have lived in community for the last 20-odd years. I have a deep interest in humans and how when we live together, we share the beautiful and the ugly and get to know each other at the layer of ‘realness’. In a visceral way, I also learned how hard it is for us to live in community and that things like collective decisionmaking, caring for a place and collaboration are not straightforward with our deep individualist conditioning.
Resources Flowing to Needs
It was, as named above, already in my childhood that seeing people starving while there is enough food was deeply confusing to me. I questioned things like money and why resources aren’t distributed according to needs. And even later on as I learned more about capitalism and understood why systemically this happens, this confusion never left me – the absurdity of selling our life energy to get money to get food (and on the flipside some people just have enough money without needing to do anything for it). I started learning about capitalism and became interested in Marx and active in Marxist ‘circles’. I felt very connected to the vision ‘Everyone does what they can and gets what they need’.
Nonviolence
As already named above, I saw early on that people who hurt others are deeply wounded themselves. I also saw how absurd the concept of punishment is – ‘if there is harm then add more harm to it to somehow make things better’; it never made sense and other people thinking it did was very confusing. Even before I encountered NVC I had the orientation of seeing what is important to everyone involved and finding a solution from here. Learning NVC meant having companionship in how I experience humans and in the yearning to care for everyone’s needs so that people are peaceful and loving to each other. For a world that works for everyone, where we care for our planet, animals and beings living on the land, the movement itself needs to be caring for the whole. It seems obvious to me that if we use violence, this only brings more wounding and trauma, causing us to harden our hearts, which then gets built into whatever we want to build, and doesn’t get us to a place of togetherness and flow and empowerment.
Feminism
When asked once what it means to be a woman, what I came to was ‘it means being in fear, being taken less seriously, being thought of as less capable to do things like physics or math or repairing things’. I started meeting with women’s groups where I found meaning in reflecting on male and female training (which also is a strand in NGL that resonates deeply), for example: the active discouragement to think of oneself as capable of thinking deeply and logically, or to connect to other forms of wisdom. Or care work being thought of as less important while it obviously is the thing we all rely on. In these women’s groups I saw how strong, capable, wise and thoughtful we are when there are no men around and we trust each other’s capacities.
Play and Mourning
All of the above I connect with through the process of play and mourning, even as a child: when I am fully connected to myself and to the life energy that is flowing through me, I process experiences through play: in images, in melodies, in sounds, in smells, in movements and crying more than in words.
It’s a way of finding and exploring alternative narratives and perspective-taking, and a throughline I actively and secretly preserved from childhood.
Holding all the above in me, it was astonishing to meet NGL and see how these and many other things important to me, are in the NGL framework already. I’m amazed at how much I can learn in this community and from Miki and the wisdom flowing through her. It’ s empowering me and growing my capacity to be more aligned with the wisdom that’s already there in me.
Rosalie Monod de Froideville
I grew up in a small town in the Netherlands, as the dentist’s daughter in a liberal family. In my childhood I made something of a vow to have nothing to do with ‘the world of adults’, which I now think was me recognising patriarchy for what it is. I kept this up through my teens, twenties and thirties: first by rejecting school, living in squats and organising rave parties in abandoned warehouses, then attending art school whilst finding Zen Buddhism. The squatting and warehouse parties have always stayed with me as a first crack in the ‘surface’ of patriarchy and the farcical construct of ‘work’ and ‘money’. Later, being an artist allowed me to stay at the fringes of society looking in, to weave my own meaning about what I saw there and communicate this to others. Exploring, playing with and expressing my own truth so fully was utterly fulfilling and brought a deep imprint of what I can only call a connection with Life.
I managed to keep up my eluding the ‘adult world’ until my mid thirties, when I gave birth to my daughter and I crashed into a frighteningly ‘adult world’ life that included a child, partner, house, car, job, and cat – with no mental space or physical energy left for my art practice. It all felt like a trap, completed by crippling insomnia and the intense pain of falling into trauma-patterning in my parenting. I did a deep dive into a whole host of healing modalities, which is still ongoing and now includes liberation through the NGL framework.
It was shortly after my daughter was born that my friend Emma (Quayle) introduced me to this new thing: NVC. Delving into this ‘thing’ was a revelation: I have feelings and needs! And they are valid! Not too long after that Emma, Miki and a few others founded NGL. It was a slow process for me coming into the community: Emma and Miki came to stay with me for a mini living experiment in 2020. After that I supported them for a few years with logistics for their vagabonding. In 2024 I joined NGL fully, first in the All Ages Collaboration Projects, later moving into other areas.
What we do in NGL continues to strum my ‘truth cord’. Here I have found the most radical vision for creating an alternative to this ‘adult world / patriarchy’ thing, coupled with both the deepest integrity and the most pragmatic view on how to get there. Looking at that photo of baby me, moments after being born (umbilical cord still attached to the placenta in my mother’s womb) I think of how this ‘bundle of needs’ came into a world that causes most of us to drift so far from our connection to life. It’s an honour to now follow the breadcrumbs back there, with the NGL community.
Meike Clever
I joined NGL in 2018 after attending the first NGL retreat in Poland. At the time I was co-leading a community cycling project working for social change, having left my career as a plasma physicist upon becoming disillusioned with nuclear fusion research.
Grappling with how to create fully collaborative organisations, I was longing for community and learning, and drawn by the idea of applying NVC principles with a systemic perspective (having “discovered” NVC several years earlier).
Another one of my major focus areas after leaving physics is what I would now call “liberatory learning”, which I enjoyed exploring at the cycling project through teaching cycle mechanics. That is probably why, after leaving the cycling project at the end of 2020 (triggered by a combination of burn out and the pandemic) I decided to do a Montessori Diploma. The intense Montessori course left no space for anything besides it and so I moved a bit further away from NGL at that time.
After my graduation I worked in a Montessori school in London for a term and then left there somewhat disillusioned once more, this time through the discrepancy I experienced between theory and practical application. The diploma course had also revealed to me the depth of my affinity with and commitment to nonviolence and so I found myself reconnecting with NGL, gravitating back towards wanting to learn and experiment with others how it might be possible to apply the principles of nonviolence to all aspects of life, including systems.
I am currently co-stewarding NGL’s Information Flow system and work on system design, maintenance and coaching, supported by the ease and experience I have in working with IT infrastructure, with organising information and setting up systems. In order to be able to focus more intensely on my liberation as it relates to honouring my capacity limits, I’ve paused work on several other teams, except the team that is stewarding NGL’s organisational structure.
Sandra Bédigis Rueda
Originally from Paris, I grew up with a Cameroonian mother and a French father. From an early age, I had the feeling that I was living between different worlds, cultures, and ways of relating within my own family. Witnessing the lack of tools to create understanding, care, and togetherness across differences shaped my lifelong interest in how humans can live well together.
After completing high school, I studied at ESSEC Business School, obtained a Bachelor’s degree, and later a Master’s degree from La Sorbonne. Equipped with this academic background, I began an international business career in the ocean freight sector. I was convinced that I could help make the world a better place from within existing systems.
For ten years, I climbed the corporate ladder, working in Pointe-Noire (Republic of Congo) and later in France. Over time, I was confronted with decisions that conflicted deeply with my integrity, including supporting the closure of an office and the dismissal of dozens of employees despite strong operational results. Working long hours in contradiction with my values led to emotional and physical exhaustion, particularly after the birth of my two children in 2016 and 2018, one of which was particularly traumatic. It became painfully clear to me that the system would crush me long before I could change anything from within it.
In the spring of 2018, I made the decision to leave corporate life and follow a different path. I trained as a doula, integrated haptonomy into my practice which I see as a deeply nonviolent way of supporting couples and babies through pregnancy, childbirth and early child development, from preconception until babies take their first walking steps.
Later that year, we moved as a family to Portugal, where we were inspired by the ecovillage movement to co-create a collective housing project, later named Colmeia 62. As part of this journey, I encountered the Les Pas-Sages model, which offered a robust legal and financial framework for non-speculative collective ownership of housing communities.
Through a process of election without candidates, I was invited to bear the function of president of the Les Pas-Sages non profit association, supporting the spread of cooperative, non-speculative community models across Europe and beyond. A few years later, I became one of the people representing as ambassador the Les Pas-Sages Constellation, which is the wider network of dozens of housing cooperatives now being connected through shared financial and human resources.
Through my education in modern feminism and my encounters with Les Pas-Sages and later with NGL, I feel deeply called for contributing to alternatives that support a more sustainable, liberated, and nonviolent world. Supporting the spread of NGL framework and the Les Pas-Sages mechanisms is, for me, a way to help communities become living acupuncture points, places where we collectively reinvent how to live together across and beyond differences in a collapsing world, with care, interdependence, and dignity, consciously walking toward rebuilding our shared humanity.
Shar Molloy
I have a vision of being present to the reality of our interconnectedness so that we act from care, trust and love for the wellbeing of all. What I long for is to be part of a community with its heart, eyes, and mind wide open to our present reality, whilst working towards co-creating a world that works for all.
A courageous community that can hold the grief and love and have structures to keep choosing vision and purpose in a way that honours nonviolence to its core. I long to share this next stage of my life with people who hold reverence and care for mother earth, for all kin and are present to the interconnectedness of life. I am grateful that NGL is a home for my longings and vision and am deeply thankful to be on this path of liberation.
I chose an unconventional pathway from aged 24, when I left a banking and finance career in Melbourne, Australia to pursue a vision of community and growth. My journey took me to living in an intentional community in Scotland and studying polarity therapy, whilst learning co-counselling and different forms of meditation including Vipassana. Upon returning to live in Australia I combined my business and finance skills with my longing for a ‘sustainable’ world to working in environmental organisations and a workers co-operative. I experienced the breakdown in communication of the social change groups I was involved in and the abandonment of purposeful visions and projects. I then trained extensively Joanna Macy’s ‘Work that Reconnects’, nonviolent communication and mediation and used these skills to successfully support environmental campaigns and community projects.
Joining NGL has provided the understanding of the devastating impacts of patriarchy and started my journey of liberation, one baby step at a time. Within NGL, I am currently supporting the NVC for liberation project and I also contribute the financial gift hub team and the packets project. I currently live in Tasmania, Australia and also spend the winter months in Darwin.
Tricia Armstrong
Participating in NGL has been one of the most meaningful initiatives I’ve engaged in. Along with being intense and immensely challenging at times, it’s also been fun and connecting!
I so long for decisions, big and small, to be made on the basis of needs and I was raised in an environment where I wasn’t supposed to have or bring in my needs, which is sadly true for many people I know. Thankfully, when “my” first born found his way into the wider world, he wasn’t shy about his needs and any inkling I had of his life somehow revolving around mine, of me “controlling the situation”, was quickly extinguished. From the earliest days of mothering him, I was set on a personal liberation path and yet, it would be some time before I could hold my own needs as precious as his. To be truthful, it remains a challenge to this day as I navigate a culture that seems to equate a woman sacrificing attending to her own needs as an expression of maternal love.
My parenting journey (I went on to have two more children) and experience in several different fields – educational, political, psychological, and religious/spiritual – led to discovering NVC and eventually NGL. I learned about NGL through participating in Miki’s long running coaching course, Responding to the Call of Our Times. For three years I was immersed in a learning environment unlike any other I had experienced and the same has been true since I stepped into NGL. I am committed to learning and practicing nonviolent ways of being in the world to increase the chances that all of life on this planet can thrive.
When I first landed in NGL I started attending Conflict Engagement and Onboarding team meetings. Those meeting environments helped me discover quite a bit about the history of NGL and the challenges the community was facing in its earliest days. It also helped me discover quite a bit about myself and nourished the belief in me that something besides the status quo could exist. NGL is birthing alternatives. I can still remember the thrill I got when observing my first NGL FGH distribution circle. I couldn’t believe that something like this was actually happening and that I was getting to observe this sincere attempt to distribute resources to where they were truly needed. In NGL there is no “payroll”.
As of this writing, I’m in a learning and service function in the Lineage Experiment (LE) Core track and co-holding the Info Flow system through serving on the Info Flow design team. I also co-hold the Info Flow Maintenance Crew and the Info Flow coaching team. When I’m not focused on NGL online, I’m supporting the founding of the Mycelium Maine community. Regardless of whether I’ll ever take residence within it, it’s deeply fulfilling to help “midwife” a community committed to practicing NGL’s values and principles.
Vanda Perez Bessone
Vanda Perez Bessone has been part of the Nonviolent Global Liberation community since 2021 and has been participating in making NGL’s visionary framework accessible to others through visual means and in active experimentation related to community living.
She was born in 1973 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to migrant parents from Spain and Italy and now lives in Germany. She has been studying and experimenting with holistic science, the commons, nonviolence, and the gift economy in various contexts and has been running two self-organized pre-schools in Köln since 2007.
People collaborating within NGL
People collaborating within NGL
Rosey Hakim
I was exposed to a variety of ways of being that are now core for me through growing up in the immigrant Egyptian community in the US, experiencing myself as an outsider looking in at American culture, and valuing interconnected community and interdependence. After 6 years working in the corporate world (aerospace engineering, designing military aircrafts sadly), I started to realize there was more possible through other models living outside of the systems in various ways. I moved first to Thailand for a year, then India, living on gift and living amongst marginalized neighborhoods, for 12 years. There I focused on social change work, internal and external, though I struggled with how to bring in systemic change, and also felt quite alone in doing what I was doing.
I first got excited about Marshall Rosenberg’s way of presenting NVC in 2014, then started to follow Miki’s work a few years later, and eventually found NGL. There I started to learn about the systemic level change I was longing for for my neighbors in India, as I also experienced a way of being together that finally opened up access in me to reach levels of courage and inner clarity that I hadn’t yet found through other practices, work or community.
Within NGL, the purpose work I feel most strongly connected to is within the Power and Privilege (P&P) Holding Team and the Global Sisterhood. I steward some of Supporting Others’ Liberation work as accompanying others one-on-one is what I find to be what I cannot not do, and gives me a lot of energy. I support stewarding certain events within the Collaborative Events Team. And I eagerly engage learning and practice within the Weaving Togetherness, Supporting Others’ Liberation, and All Ages Collaboration Labs.
My dream currently is to build a community in person where I am in Americus, GA that makes this kind of interdependence and way of functioning available to those who otherwise wouldn’t have access to it. I also love networking out into other communities, especially ones taking risks toward social change and increasing access for marginalized communities, and sharing what I have integrated with them by offering individual accompaniment, support to weave between individuals or groups, and support in thinking about their systems of functioning together.
Roni Wiener
I am a nonviolent systemic change facilitator focused on supporting the global shift toward decisions that care for all life. I co-create community learning spaces where people can discover and practice collaborative leadership and integrative decisions. I love holding space, coaching, and supporting groups with inner transformation and systems design. I also offer mentoring to a growing number of people on their journey to become nonviolent facilitators, activists, and leaders.
The NGL community has offered me companionship, resources, and opportunities to contribute to deeply meaningful projects. I’ve been working closely with Miki and Emma on Vision Integration Design for more than five years. I deeply enjoy writing principles and creating structures that support the community in living our shared values. I spent several years in the Info Flow team, and I celebrate that many of the things I created, like guides, zoom automation, and the Dashboard are widely used. My experience in NGL has also included intense conflict, which limits my participation.
My home community is the Integration Station collective, where we offer workshops, create materials, and develop collaborative games that teach integration. We combine the NGL framework with diverse sources of wisdom like Sociocracy, Deep Democracy, Theory U, Open Floor and academic publications. We are building a creative commons of simple practices that introduce and support integrative decisions. We help groups, organizations, and communities cultivate a culture where everyone’s needs matter. Our main focus is supporting activists and movements to transform resistance that relies on force or separation into a nonviolent revolution.
I orient to each day with a sense of reverence as an opportunity to embody, inspire, and support social change. I root myself in reflective practices that help me transform separation within myself and share what I learn with others. I see the immense gap between where we are and the future we long for, and it calls me to action. I am nourished by people sharing how my teaching has transformed their lives, and by finding integrative solutions in highly controversial and polarized situations. I draw on gift economy principles to keep my work sustainable and accessible for people with less access to resources.
My personal journey:
My life journey began in Israel, surrounded by violence and manufactured scarcity. At 19 I immigrated to the United States in search of financial security and was lulled into complacency by living the American dream. Achieving “the dream” made it painfully clear how empty and coercive it was. I slowly became disillusioned with capitalist narratives, chose to exit the corporate environment, and committed myself to nonviolence and social change. Along the way, I spent two decades of consulting focused on transforming collaboration practices and got a degree in Psychology, Sociology, and Gender Studies.
I now live in the Netherlands, where I hope to establish or join a sustainable local community rooted in shared risk, self-responsibility, and trust. I am holding small gatherings every few months to explore possibilities for partnerships and community living.
daniel ehrhart
the undying forest
this forest is ancient,
spread wide and far.
when it was young,
we were young, and
it grew,
in the flow of life, love and unity.
it was not,
until this day,
uprooted as a whole,
by any storm that ever came along.
over all of its existence many of its trees,
have withstood,
horrific and devastating calamities.
its seeds are spread far and wide,
its seedlings struggling in infertile soil,
dying, withering or stunted.
its remains are so firmly rooted into the ground,
that they will only perish,
when the world around them does.
if the forest above is our true essential self from which, as a species, we’ve moved away, NGL is a place where we are looking for ways back to our caring and trusting essence.
in accordance with the mystery of how we came to be, i believe that whatever calamities are haunting life can’t lead to the extinction of the essence of what we are. so, i am here to flow my capacity into NGL in the best way i can, which can fluctuate. you might see me tending to different seedlings within NGL, and maybe not all because life is a strange whirlwind.
mica vainwright
mica (they/them) is a student of life, giver of hugs, meditator, and is deeply drawn to learning through experimentation. This avid curiosity and commitment to finding creative pathways to integrate feedback and being in right relationship to change set them up to feel aligned with NGL’s mission.
mica has been engaged in activism in their local communities for the last 6 years, often by offering care in emotional/spiritual/ritual support, mutual aid, and designing project systems. They have also facilitated community grief rituals, land-based activism events, and opportunities to gather in local watersheds in their in-person communities.
mica was introduced to NGL’s framework through their teacher, mentor, and friend Erin Selover, and initially engaged with NGL’s mission through NGL’s learning packets. Inspired by the content they were taking in, they were quick to begin experimenting with how they could apply the liberatory principles they were reading about into their own life. With past experience with housing insecurity and a conditioned low-income/working class relationship to resources, they were particularly moved by the integration of resource flow liberation and the principles of the capacity and willingness lens. In the spring of 2024, NGL put out a call to support the Financial Gift Hub maintenance (FGHm) team–with support, mica responded to that request and, in service and support of the FGHm team, they made their first step into the actual relational web of NGL online.
They have helped tend and steward various needs within NGL’s FGH and Resource Flow system for almost 2 years now, and continue to do so by co-holding a temporary design team that is moving forward with steps in the Financial Gift Hub re-design, a long-term project that aims to bring the FGH experiment into a more co-held and within-capacity implementation. They are ecstatic for their next chapter in NGL, where they plan to help hold the project stewardship of the Weaving Togetherness Lab, support the HCGH (Human Capacity Gift Hub) team, and continue to learn from the NGL framework throughout their collaborations within NGL online. As they deepen their liberation and skillset within NGL online, they bridge what they’ve learned into their communities and other place-based activism projects they are part of, for which they are deeply grateful.
Katherina Janevski
I collaborate within NGL, where I maintain the community’s Financial Gift Hub, support the community’s Resource Flow system and work on outward-facing projects with organizations focused on setting up resource flow distribution systems based on needs while apprenticing in Convergent Facilitation. I am part of NGL’s apprenticeship program called the Lineage Experiment where I am in the Core Track.
I am also a freelance translator that collaborates with specialists to bring works that focus on social change to the English-speaking world. My most recent co-translation in the process of being published is one of Naoki Shiomi’s books related to the Part Farming Part X movement in Japan.
With Macedonian roots, I was born in 1995 in Ottawa, Ontario in Canada. I currently live in Ayabe, Kyōto and contribute mainly remotely while participating in local farming activities, and travel to various parts of Japan to walk pilgrimages and treks. During the winter season I also train in avalanche rescue for backcountry ski guidework.
I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Modern Languages in Japanese and German with an International Concentration in Japanese from Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec. I studied abroad for a year at Kyōto University. Prior I spent five years in a Biology undergraduate degree at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, taking mostly anything but classes in my Biology curriculum.
My vision, much like others’ on this page, is to continue working with communities, organizations, and groups to help transform systems and frameworks into ones that are in better service to future generations and the planet, and aligned with principles of collaboration and willingness. I am doing this by increasing my capacities in collaborative decision making, and systems design through engagement in various service areas, apprenticeships and projects in NGL.
Sheryl Faria
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, attended Catholic schools and the University of California at Santa Barbara. My working life has been shaped by a combination of Sociology and a technical support background, from the telephone industry to information technology.
A cohouser since 2001, I learned about NVC through my neighbors and Bay Area Nonviolent Communication (BayNVC) as we soon discovered that our hopes and good intentions weren’t quite enough to help us live well together in our community! NVC has helped us so much to know and care for ourselves and each other, work with conflict, appreciate each other, and do our best to create a community that works for everyone as much as we possibly can.
Through NVC classes I came to know Miki, volunteered with other NVC teachers at a local prison, and worked as an administrative assistant for BayNVC, which eventually led me to NGL.
I am part of the Events Team – motivated to create and sustain, along with my team mates, a group of us who can collectively support each other and NGL events happening in the world.
Tara
I dream of a world where humans practice clear thinking, pure feeling, free choosing, and the energetic implementation of a world that works for all. I work towards this social transformation by living, applying and sharing principles and practices at the intersection of Yoga philosophy and the NGL framework.
My yearning for this transformation was sparked in 2020 when I started learning about the South Asian tradition of thought. With a rich tapestry of unique moral philosophies rooted here (Yoga, Buddhism, Jainism, Karma Yoga, etc.), it seemed to me that these people knew how to get along with each other, even as they disagreed about things so fundamental as how to approach living life. This understanding created an opening for me, a window into what is possible, and since then I have been finding my way towards people and organizations that are interested in re-creating these conditions of a world that works for all.
I have been choosing Yoga (as described by Patañjali in the Yoga Sūtra and translated by Dr. Shyam Ranganathan) as my approach to living for the last six years. This journey led me to find Nonviolent Communication and Extinction Rebellion, both of which led me to Miki Kashtan’s work and then to NGL. And while there have been moments over the last three years when I have sensed philosophical incoherence between Yoga and the NGL framework, this experience is surprisingly rare. No where else have I found the concepts of nonviolence in action so rigorously explored and articulated, across such a wide variety of contexts. It is a no-brainer for me to continue my journey here, learning the NGL framework, supporting those who are articulating it, and applying / practicing what I learn within and outside of NGL Online. As such, I am an active community member in the Lineage Experiment (LE) Core Track, blending learning and service as I prioritize tending to vital functions in the community. I am also in the process of exploring which aspect of the framework makes most sense to devote my energy towards now. Of note for me at this time is the Mycelium Track (not yet fully functioning), which focuses on short- and long-term in-person community living.
My interest in this arena was inspired during a community living experiment (not related to NGL) that I embarked on in 2023, which lasted 2.5 years. It was during this time that my passion for humans living together in community grew, as I tangibly experienced the camaraderie, unleashed human potential and increased resource-use efficiency that we accessed when we did things together. While it was an inspiring, life changing experience, it was also a sobering one. With time I understood the decision-making paradigm as one of the ends justifying the means, which affected our group dynamic in ways that became increasingly painful and beyond capacity to process. The tension between this approach and my devoted practice of aligning means with ends—an orientation that I think is crucial for realizing my dream of social transformation—highlighted a philosophical incoherence within the core group that ended up being insurmountable for me at that time, and in the end I chose to leave the community.
Since that experiment, I have initiated a new community living project in Treaty 6 Territory, Alberta, Canada. Here we are stewarding 15 acres of UNESCO Biosphere Reserve land in the morainic landscape of the Beaver Hills—a place that provides optimal conditions for bison, deer, elk, moose, waterfowl and beavers to live. With this project currently in its gestation phase, my main focuses now are on relationship building with the already-present community, and co-creating baseline physical and relational infrastructure to hold those of us who are new here while we are landing. My hope is that our community-joining and -building experience will feed and be fed by the ongoing experimentation within the global web of in-person NGL communities and NGL Online as a whole.
yanae yang
Growing up in China, migrated to Hong Kong in 2008, I experienced a long term of confusion about what life I want to pursue. I wanted to be successful but knew the common achievement was not satisfying.
I came across nonviolent communication in 2016, and then joined International Intensive Training in Bali, and was touched about the intention for social change and a world that works for all.
In 2018, I came across Miki’s NVC workshop which was so different to any other ones on youtube, and then I learned about the Nonviolent Global Liberation she founded with other colleagues. I gradually realised this is a place where all NVC intentions can be put into practical manifestation. Then I quitted my job as a research assistant in the area of surgical nutrition.
Now, my focus in NGL is around welcoming new people, power and privilege tracking apprentices, and also being part of the mycelium web, moving toward to live in a physical NGL community within a pod.