The working group arose out of a widespread impulse for change and a history of different groups and organisations gathering to understand and address central issues of how we make decisions, co-create and live together. Some examples of recent initiatives that came before, are the community deep-dives and Transformation Games, the FF change and NFA review processes and the Community Governance Roundtable.

The working group is mandated by the NFA Council and FF Management, and has received the community’s blessing. Our mission is to consciously design and facilitate the next step of community evolution that provides greater clarity around roles and process, more places and ways to engage, better connection to and between all facets of community, a more decentralised structure and a more Planetary Era character. Our task is not to decide for the community, but to listen deeply, synthesise and create a proposal for the whole community to discuss and decide on. We see ourselves as designers, facilitators, listeners and communication synthesizers.

• Our intention is to serve the purpose of this centre as a whole and engage with the organisations, individuals, and residential groups of the community.
• Our task is to gather and organise observations, insights, concerns, and suggestions; draft a proposal for how we respond to the request for change; and seek and integrate ongoing community input as we do this.
• We want to “listen to the whisper of the future.”

Why change?

We in the working group, and probably not just us, feel like the community has outgrown its current structures, and that the frustration, sense of isolation, disempowerment and lack of acknowledgement regularly expressed by many community members and organisations to an extent is a symptom of that. We also feel like the community is ready for something new that is more capable of holding, channeling and manifesting our common purpose as well as our individual creativity and wish to collaborate and contribute, to each other, to our community and to the world.

Looking into the issues behind why the Community Change Working Group came into existence, three main themes stand out to us: The future pull, the fact that our community has grown and changed, and learning from past and current pain. Below is our initial attempt to map the key questions, specific issues and things to address of each main theme.

The future pull – This centre has more potential than we are currently living to fulfil our vision and core principles

• Key questions:
  • How can we continue to translate our vision into lived experience and be a beacon of light, inspiration and service to ourselves, our visitors, our local region and the world?
  • What kinds of structures and ways of working together will support us in taking the next step towards manifesting the core impulse and vision of the community?
  • If we were coherent with the common ground and core principles, how would we actually organise ourselves?
  • How can we find more ways to empower ourselves, each other and the beings around us to be co-creators?
  • What do the organisations, initiatives, people and other entities that make up our community want and need in order to thrive?
• Specific issues
  • The core vision and purpose of our centre hold more potential than current structures can hold, serve or carry
  • We do not have a clear core vision owned by all, or a clear vision for each of the parts that supports the whole
  • We need common ways to present ourselves and describe our shared values and way of life that are accurate and feel good for all of us
  • There is a sense of frustration and blocked flows, that it is hard to take initiative and change or affect things
  • A sense that we are not really embodying what we actually want to create in the world, that there is a mismatch between vision and practice, and vision and the way we organise ourselves and our lives and work together
  • A lot of ‘old paradigm’ structures in our organisational and financial forms
  • Complaints about bureaucracy, stiffness, inflexibility
  • People feeling like their initiative and energy is not welcome
  • People sometimes say we are not cutting edge anymore. Some sense of let-down
  • There are huge amounts of goodwill, skills, and intention in individuals in the community, but not necessarily clear ways for people to bring them, and work synergistically together
  • Other than the common ground and NFA peacekeepers we do not have clear community conflict facilitation/ boundary keeping
• What do we want to address?
  • Conflict resolution
  • lack of clarity re purpose – for the whole, and the parts
  • outmoded or outdated structures that block and hinder or go against our vision/core principles
  • Increasing the space for emergence and creativity in the system

The community has grown and changed, and now our structures need to as well

• Key questions
  • What forms of governance, organisation and being together is best suited to us now?
  • How can we combine diversity and with coherence and transparency?
  • How can we make collaborative decisions that are wise, timely, efficient and supported?
  • How do we have input into the decisions that affect our lives here?
  • How do we each know what is going on in both the whole and our many parts?
  • How do we get a sense of our place in the whole and how to contribute energy, ideas, concerns, and solutions to our shared lives here?
  • How can we ongoingly see, acknowledge and honour the contributions, work and holding of the many organisations and beings that make up our community?
• Specific issues
  • The relative size of the Foundation and other organisations is changing; the NFA has grown and many community members live outside the Park or Cluny
  • There is possibility for much more synthesis and symbiosis than we currently benefit from
  • The NFA was created out of the need to create a membrane for the community that had grown bigger than the Foundation, but it is not clear how the two organisations can best relate to best serve each other, the community, our planet and the highest.
  • The Findhorn Foundation was envisioned to be ‘just another organisation’ within the NFA – this is not lived in practice – what is a structure that makes sense, honors all involved parties and works in practice?
  • There are now many organisations, some of them grown out of Foundation work departments, which have not really made use of the Forum of Organsations
  • There are individuals and parts that do not have a clear way of linking with each other
  • There are many different kinds of organisations, and sub-communities, initatives, – non-profits, cohousing clusters, residential organisations, educational organisations and so on – how do they relate, how do they make decisions, how do they contribute to our common purpose?
  • We have many decision-making bodies in different organisations deciding about different things that often affect the whole community (FF Mgmt, Co-workers, NFA Council, NFA Membership, titleholders association, Dunelands board of directors, PPG, NFD).
  • Risk that decisions made are less well informed, wise, supported or efficient than they could be with more clarity and cohesion
  • It is often unclear who decides about what and how people can engage with decisions that directly affect them
  • It is difficult to keep well informed about what is happening and understand what happens where and who decides about it
  • People express a longing for more clarity, transparency and cohesion throughout the community and its different members, bodies and organisations
  • We lack a shared identity – an accurate, satisfying way we agree on to describe ourselves collectively and in terms of our parts
  • We don’t have a clear way of dealing with conflicts and disagreement, or holding boundaries that is community-wide
  • We don’t have ways of holding each other to the common ground or other agreements we make
• What do we want to address?
  • The organisational structure and governance system for this centre
  • Transparency, decision-making and flows of information
  • Common vision/shared identity that we can all agree on
  • Connecting with the individual organisations and address / listen to their ideas of a shared vision and how they fit into that
  • Community-wide conflict resolution

Learning from and addressing past resentment and pain

• Key questions
  • What kinds of structures and systems will support us to move from pain, isolation, disempowerment and a lack of acknowledgement to joyful collaboration, connection, clarity, inclusion in decision-making and a sense of celebrating each other for the work we do?
  • What do recurrent areas of pain or conflict tell us about underlying structural conflict or dissonance in our system?
• Specific issues
  • A sense of lack of acknowledgement and separation between:
    • The FF and NFA – The Findhorn Foundation sometimes doesn’t feel seen and acknowledged for all that it is holding and doing – The wider community sometimes does not feel seen or acknowledged for all that it is holding and doing.
    • Individuals and the organisations they are connected to
    • Individuals
  • There is not clear understanding (and therefore acknowledgement) of the contributions of the different parts. Ie FF; NFA; Titleholders; Volunteers; etc. Filling this ‘acknowledgement deficit’ would free up energy and build trust.
  • Lack of transparency, accessibility and communication about decisions, plans and actions
  • Unclear how to connect, belong or contribute – A sense of not being able to give of our gifts.
  • The community is full of people with diverse talents who feel they lack ways of contributing to or serving the community.
  • Lack of sense of common purpose / shared vision
  • Mistrust and fear between people and organisations
  • Confused identities – it is unclear who the community is, who is included or excluded and who ‘owns’ what image of ourselves.
  • ‘All talk no action’/’Meeting fatigue’ – we just spend all our time in meetings and talk and nothing ever happens.
  • We end up with the lowest common denominator
• What do we want to address?
  • Identify key issues and practices that give rise to pain and frustration today
  • Analyse what current pain, frustration, annoyance, disillusionment etc. tell us about what we need to move forward

An overarching ‘what do we want to address’

Based on the inquiry into the three mains themes, we also identifies some overarching key areas that we want to address in our work. These are feedback loops, community governance, shared identity and vision, mapping what is, and dealing with conflict.

1. Feedback
   1. Integrate the feedback we have from living with our current structures, and adjust our ways accordingly.
   2. Design proposed future systems so that they have clear feedback loops, enabling more fluidity, responsiveness and creativity in what we do
2. Community Governance
   1. Propose a decentralised but coherent shared governance and decision-making structure with clear roles and processes and many ways for community members to engage and connect. A connecting structure — so the Foundation, our organizations, residential groups, and individuals have insight and input into the decisions that affect our shared lives here.
   2. Propose a governance system where it is clear who makes what decision when, and decisions made are wise, efficient, supported and timely as well as reviewed and updated regularly.
   3. Propose a governance system that better enables and supports us to fully embody and realise the vision of our community and the core principles of inner listening, cocreation and love in action.
3. Shared Identity and Vision
   1. Propose an accurate, satisfying way we describe ourselves collectively and in terms of our parts.
   2. Propose coherent structures that resonate with our common vision and core principles
4. Map what is
   1. A clear map/presentation of the organisations of the community, what they do, their vision, their assets, the kind of decisions they make, and how they can be connected with, influenced etc.
5. Dealing with Conflict
   1. Propose a community-wide conflict resolution method and way of holding each other accountable to community agreements and the common ground

We also feel that the proposal we formulate, if implemented, regardless of specific content needs to accomplish the following things:

• Foster a sense of common vision
• Give people a clear place to ‘plug-in’ / contribute
• Yield a place to deal with conflict
• Make the decision making process of this center more transparent and understandable, more efficient and more easy to engage with – ‘more clear’
• Yield a clear structure of how different bodies/organisations relate
• Increased synergy in the community

Mandate
Identify community-wide needs around connection, collaboration, healing and evolution.

• connect all change processes in our community to each other and to an umbrella strategy,
• create a community wide participatory process dreaming into community wide structures, strategy and governance,
• present a proposal for possible community change (including structures and implementation strategy) that is
• ready for decision making by the spring equinox 2016

WG members profile wish list

• excited by the idea
• representation from FF, NFA and community with knowledge of internal change processes – but not acting as representatives but serving higher purpose by co-creating as group feeding back to organizations
• knowledge, skills and experience with community development, evolution theories, sociocracy…
• community (stakeholder) engagement experts
• strategic thinkers
• good listeners with flexible mind to be “change agents without ego” (midwifes)
• service oriented: “workers instead of key players”
• seen in community as balanced and fair

Specific roles within WG

Group coordinator

• official contact person from group to community & world
• ensure accountability (review dates, commitments, promised outcomes)
• arrange meetings, rooms, skypes
• make sure agenda is prepared, minutes are taken
• make sure all documents are saved and available
• ? facilitate, lead?

Synthesizer

• distilling essence to create clear and inspiring documents based on group findings: graphical material, presentations, articles, documents,…
• could be 1 or 2 people

Commitment

Time

For everyone:

• average 1 shift a week
  • for weekly or bi-weekly meeting plus some “homework”
  • from last week of June to April
• available from 11 – 21 July for intense working with Robert and Diana

For coordinator

• 4-10h weekly on top of meetings
• and same as above
• needed now

For synthesizer

• 4-10h weekly on top of meetings
• intensity will vary – more during proposal phase (Jan – March)
• could join later?

Money

• WG members volunteering or supported by their organization
• proposal to pay coordinator and synthesizer(s) for time above the 1 shift / week: 200GBP / month each
  • funds to be confirmed (from Hygiea via NFA and potentially fundraising, FF or other organizations)

Vision

The Findhorn Community is a center of light with clear, coherent and empowering structures. The Findhorn community acts as a model for societal change and sustainable, co-creative living. The people of the Findhorn community are engaged, connected and inspired.

Mission

Consciously design and facilitate community evolution providing greater clarity around roles and process, more places and ways to engage, better connection to all facets of community, a more decentralised structure and a more Planetary Era character.

Expected Outcomes by spring equinox 2016

• proposal for possible community change ready for decision making including
  • community structures
    • value, role and function of bodies
  • processes
    • decision making, communication flow, appointing,..
  • business model
    • financial set up, energetic exchange
  • implementation strategy
    • steps, people, funds
• stakeholders engaged in change process and on board with direction
• accessible roadmap manual for community change process

Tasks

• connect all change processes in our community to each other and to an umbrella strategy,
• create a community wide engagement process dreaming into community wide structures, strategy and governance,
• bring all these strands together in one proposal to community,
• clear documentation of all steps and decisions.

Timeline

Budget