Inner Work: Preparation for Working Cooperatively

Creating more cooperative, egalitarian and regenerative communities isn't only about designing new systems and structures. It can also require us to examine the ways existing systems live within us.

Changemakers often devote considerable attention to challenging existing systems and building alternatives. But what might it mean to take personal transformation just as seriously?

In this participatory workshop, facilitator and coach Wolf Born will explore the inner work that can accompany our attempts to build more cooperative communities and organisations. If traditional hierarchies and capitalist systems have taught us to relate through rank, privilege, status and extraction, what happens internally when we begin trying to create relationships and structures based on cooperation, trust and shared power?

The session will explore themes including trust and vulnerability, personal trauma, self-governance, and what Wolf describes as the “extractive capitalist” as a shadow aspect of the Self. Participants will be invited to consider which parts of themselves they listen to when making decisions, how internal patterns can influence our participation in egalitarian groups, and what personal transformation might ask of us as we attempt to create different ways of living and working together.

Drawing on Wolf’s experience with sociocracy, nonviolent communication, mindfulness and relational practice, we’ll also explore structures and processes that can help bridge inner transformation with the practical work of creating cooperative organisations and communities.

Through presentation, reflection and breakout conversations, this workshop invites us to consider a challenging but important proposition: if we want to build systems based on cooperation, trust and shared power, part of that work may begin within ourselves.

This session is part of Healthy Humane Habitats Month: Reimagining how we live, together.

Wolf Born is a group facilitator, coach and nature guide with a background spanning more than a decade as an executive in mental health and disability services.

Wolf is a certified sociocracy facilitator who works with organisations to implement decentralised governance processes and develop cultures of trust. His practice also draws on nonviolent communication, community ritual and trust-based policy development as tools for creating more relational and cooperative ways of working together.

A lifelong meditator and student of Eastern Tantric and Taoist philosophies, Wolf seeks to integrate mindfulness, Wu Wei — the action of non-action — and relationality into his life, coaching, facilitation and presentations. He lives on Djaara Country in Central Victoria.