Nerdy Corner
Grant Proposal – April 2022
We are sharing the proposal that we submitted to the Cotyledon Fund who supported us last year with a grant.
Vanda is the primary writer and the ideas emerged from conversations that she, Verene, Selene, and Miki were in with the program office from the Cotyledon Fund. During these conversations we experienced breakthroughs in understanding ourselves, the nature of funding relationships, and a host of other elements. This proposal is written from the perspective of reducing to a minimum any aspect of instrumental relationships between NGL and the fund.
Of course we are hoping that this proposal will mark the beginning of a relationship of discovery and collaboration, of true partnership with the fund, including NGL offering them support in their quests related to philanthropy. And, deeper than this, those of us involved are at peace knowing we honored truth and life in what we are putting out, and that putting this together is valuable regardless of the outcome.
Even if you are not going to read it, we invite you to take a look at the proposal itself. It’s filled with visuals that many of us find deeply beautiful. It feels like a significant step for NGL. An articulation of an orientation we aim to bring with other possible funders.
Grant Report 2021
In 2020 BayNVC was invited to apply for a grant with the Cotyledon Foundation (Here’s a link to the grant proposal, written by Miki Kashtan with engagement from others within NGL). Much of the grant money was assigned to NGL’s financial gift hub. The following report was written by Miki in collaboration with others within NGL. Even though its primary goal was to answer the questions of the donors regarding the use of the grant money, it offers a comprehensive overview of NGLs activity in 2021.
NGL Community Living Experiment In Portugal 2021
In May – July 2021 we hosted an NGL Community Living Experiment in Colos, Portugal. Part of our purpose was to “reawaken our cellular memory of what’s possible within a field of deep interdependence”. This report explores some of the learning from the experiment, along with further questions to explore and requests to various NGL teams. It was written by Selene Aswell, with support from the Villages Team.
(There are some links in the document that you don’t have access to. Please don’t click “Request Access”.)
Liberation Pods
A Liberation Pod is a small group (4-5 people) that comes together with the purpose of supporting each other to surface and co-hold their patriarchal conditioning around specific topics (such as resource flow, female or male training, class oppression, etc) and move towards liberation. Each liberation pod holds their own experiment, choosing what to focus on specifically, harvests learning, gives feedback to the wider community, and seeks support as needed. In addition to the specific liberation content, each pod is also experimenting with the experience of being in a pod and moving towards greater intimacy and purpose with others.
Purpose Pods
A purpose pod, in general, is a group of people coming together to support each member in ongoing development and movement toward their purpose, ideally with some sense of coherence between their individual purposes. There can be, for example, “Convergent Facilitation (CF) Purpose Pods” for people who want to support each other on the path of using CF in a variety of settings.
Purpose Pods may form based on one or more of the following pathways:
- Shared context (within a community, through activism, at organisations, shared location etc.) within which you apply the NGL framework.
- Shared focus within liberation (e.g. internalised racism, overcoming class oppression, specific kinds of trauma, nonviolence, increasing agency, etc.)
- Any other relevant criteria, like geographic proximity, language, logistical ease, or personal affinity.
The Gap
The distance between where we are and the vision of fully interdependent living is what we call the ‘gap’. Here are more ways we describe the gap:
Between current global crises
… and fully interdependent living
Between living in scarcity, separation, and powerlessness
… and restoring in full our individual and collective capacity to live in flow, togetherness, and choice
Between the overwhelming majority of people in the world not having agency
… and all of us having the capacity to take action to care for our own and others’ needs
Between the overwhelming isolation in which many people lack a nurturing community
… and all of us knowing that we matter and are cared about
Between being torn from land and dependent on market processes for our basic sustenance
… and being fully embedded in the natural abundance of life
Between endless wars about “good guys” and “bad guys”
… and all of us coming together to make things work for all of life
Between struggling for success, individually, leaning on extrinsic rewards for motivation
… and all of us mobilizing to realign humanity with life, passionately energized from within
Between so few of us having the power to make decisions that impact all of life
… and all of us fully participating in the decisions that affect our lives
Between 1% of us owning 50% of the world’s resources and 50% of us owning 1% of them
… and all of us being part of a mysterious dance of sharing resources with all of life and flowing resources within willingness and capacity to where needs are
Between overwhelming waste leading to environmental degradation and extinction
… and all of us coming together as kin, all of us as one human species, to transition to using, with reverence, existing technologies that can restore us fully to living within the means of the planet
Between existing in a web of control, protection, secrecy, and withholding of information
… and all of us living in a web of transparency and vulnerability
Between engaging with other living beings, both human and not, as instruments or obstacles
… and living in reverence to all living forms and taking our place within the interdependent web of relationships that is life
Other Parts of NGL’s VM
Purpose
In the linked page, you can find notes from the NGL Online Purpose and Values Team, articulating in more depth what we refer to when we say ‘nonviolence’, ‘experiments with truth’ and ‘liberation’
Principles
At present, we are still working on completing the Advice Process for articulating the principles that we work by based on our values, as well as the practices that exist and that are voids within each principle. What you will read is still work in progress. We plan to update this regularly until we complete this work.
Click here to read the 45 NGL principles.
Capacity Assessment
Several initiatives have begun within NGL to do capacity assessment for NGL as a whole, and none of them have reached sufficient clarity or completion to know what to share with people who don’t even know us.
Theory of Change
Our theory of change has not changed since the beginning even though our understanding of what “theory of change” means has gone through a dramatic change. You can read about the beginning of this change in this blog post by Miki Kashtan: “Apart and Together: Mending the Tear.” At present, this section of our VM isn’t engaged with as we do our work, which we believe is lowering our overall capacity to do our work. The word “program” below is from a time when NGL in its totality was conceived of as an apprenticeship program.
This program is based on the belief that a group of committed people working together with the assistance of a coherent purpose, clear and collaborative systems, conscious leadership, and a practical visionary approach can be a catalyst for change in the world as each and all integrate, model, and engage with others and larger systems based on progressive refinement of purpose, values, and methods.
This program is based on the belief that a group of committed people working together with the assistance of a coherent purpose, clear and collaborative systems, conscious leadership, and a practical visionary approach can be a catalyst for change in the world as each and all integrate, model, and engage with others and larger systems based on progressive refinement of purpose, values, and methods.
Mission
Our mission changed only once since we started in 2017, and that was in 2019. It is almost entirely out of date and many of us believe it doesn’t match what is happening and isn’t sufficiently related to our purpose. Here is what it is now:
To take the actions necessary for all of us to support each other in learning, co-creating, living, applying, and sharing the principles and practices that emerge from this body of work. These include, in particular:
- Co-creating an infrastructure and systems that optimally support learning communities around the world, emboldened to live and act towards a post-patriarchal, nonviolent future
- Co-creating and maintaining a learning community that in itself is a collaborative organization, including in particular experimenting with gift economy systems for sustainability
- Supporting both distance and in-person learning, community-building, and projects across all continents (offering and co-creating online & offline learning opportunities)
- Building on everyone’s wisdom, experience, and specific situations to collectively generate and articulate ever more principles and methods in support of everyone’s efforts
- Supporting the completion of developing curricula, practicing ideas, and more to complete the initial articulation and curation by Miki Kashtan
- Exchanging ideas and challenges that we can work on together to increase our effectiveness and reach
- Providing tools for self-reflection
Behavioral Anchors
Alongside the work on values, the NGL Agreements team engaged in an extensive project to create a template for behavioral anchors, a term we created instead of the word “agreement,” because we see it as less ambiguous. The template is embedded here so anyone can see what it looks like. This is also a tool that we offer to others. We haven’t yet populated our own structure of behavioral anchors.