Your big waves are creating a more socially, economically and environmentally just world. How is the world ~inside~ your organization, as you do this important work?
Working together can be powerful, and beautiful. It can be tricky to get there.
We know how that works. A lot of the friction comes from ways we have learned to work together: structures and mindsets that hold us back. The natural inclination to collaborate, and the ability to create more together than we can apart, is a beautiful thing. This is Big Waves’ specialty: guiding you through the tricky to the beauty.
Ripples & Rumbles is hosted by Big Waves Co-Waver Brook Thorndycraft.
To paraphrase Paolo Friere, Brook has made her path by walking it. She has a lifelong interest in how we create lasting transformation, and a deep curiosity about the complex human and systemic dynamics at work beneath daily life.
Over the years she has continued to encounter and adopt nodes of knowledge and practice that identify and address personal, interpersonal, and systemic patterns that get in the way of meaningful change. Some of these are mediation and conflict transformation, Deep Democracy Process Work, Liberating Structures, popular education and group process, systems theory, mindfulness, and Somatic Experiencing®. Embodied practice has changed her life, and she is evangelical about orienting to pleasure and feeling your feet.
She founded Big Waves in 2020 in order to realize a vision of the immense possibility inherent in working together.
They have many years’ experience in organizational change, conflict transformation, adult and experiential education, and relational leadership. Through coaching, trainings, facilitation, and custom processes, Brook supports organizations in areas such as: power, psychological safety, equity, feedback and communication, and conflict transformation.
She loves story and metaphor because of how they explain complex concepts and highlight shared experience, enabling people to feel connection and emotional resonance.
Brook hails from an Austrian Jewish, English and Scottish background and grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. She is proudly queer. After living away from the ocean for what she found out was too many years, she was pulled to Halifax by her love of Joanne and also the ocean.
In certain company, she is inclined to describe the moments of her day in song. Her sweet dog Rexy has grown very talented at tempting her away from her precarious book piles and into nature.
