Grant #200466 to Collective Imagination Practice Community

Kay Michael, Co-Founder and Director of Letters to the Earth and Amelia Parisian, Programmes director at Craigberoch Business Decelerator and Founder of Questpass are partnering up to develop a range of programmes aimed at transforming organisations through collaboration with nature, as nature.

Our question for the collective imagination is how might we live our lives, shape our work and make our choices in true collaboration with nature?

Mainstream and corporate culture currently both hold a narrative that we are separate from nature and that nature is a commodity and resource at our disposal.

We would like to help end this destructive story and engage the 'collective imagination' of this demographic in a new story through working directly with organisations (including larger corporations), leaders and individuals who have agency, people who have the power to change culture, the behaviour of organisations and large scale human behaviour. 

Most organisations operate in a people-focussed vacuum, taking the needs of humans, particularly stakeholders, into account whilst forgetting our primary life support system - the natural word of which we are actually a part.

Letters to the Earth have been asked by a leading UK based company to lead a series of workshops focussed around nature connection and writing letters to the Earth.

Kay Michael and Amelia Parisian have decided to take this idea further and to work together to develop a series of deeper transformational experiences to roll out to mainstream companies, not for profits and individuals across the UK and beyond who are newer to some of these ideas. 

The aim of this work is to: 

Kay and Amelia are experienced 'bridgers' who work and collaborate with people from all walks of life and parts of society. A high degree of adaptation of language and practice is needed when taking these ideas into mainstream western, organisational culture.

Our programmes will draw inspiration from thought leaders including Bill Plotkin, Arne Ness, David Eisenstein, Joanna Macy and John Young. We may also include adapted practices drawn from Deep Ecology, Theory U, Process Work, Council Work, The 8 Shields and Grief Tending.
Our intention is also to form a link to the Global IDG movement who have developed a research based framework relating Inner Development to the Sustainable Development Goals. We are planning to offer a workshop at the CAUX IDG Forum in July as part of our test phase. 

This funding would support a 3 month pilot and develop phase in preparation to roll programmes out to organisations and individuals across the UK and beyond.

6 x team days for the 3 Facilitators / Project leads to meet and design programmes:

Room hire for design work @ £180 total 

UK train travel expenses estimated @ £1200

1 x funded day long pilot programme to offer free for community sector organisation staff

Facilitators paid at £200 per day - £600 total. 

Venue hire @ £150 

Design work costs to pay for the development of stylised slide decks, information packs and promotional banners and images. 2 days work estimated @ 400 per day - £800 total

Funding request total: £2930