Being Weaved:

Tickling the Underbelly
of Collective Decision-Making

Friday 24th - Sunday 26th January 2025 (non-residential)

Plus follow-up support sessions (online)

South Devon

How can we become vessels for healthy power
in service of Life?

How we make decisions in our groups and organisations is important. It holds up a vivid mirror to how we relate with and share power. It shines a light on the degree to which we are in alignment with our values around equity and justice and our Love of Earth.

The underbelly of decision-making, whether collective or otherwise, consists of our relationships with power. For our decision-making to be in service of Life, and especially all that and those which are marginalised, we, and our groups, need to apprentice to becoming vessels for healthy power.

Apprenticing to healthy power is one of the most potent things we can do to transform the systemic power-over culture that resides at the root of the current polycrisis.

And since ‘the only way out is through’, becoming a vessel for healthy power’s transformative potential requires us to reveal and compost our existing relationships with power.

It is helpful to remember that our struggles around power and decision-making are part of a great historic untangling, a re-membering of how power, as Life energy, flows through us all.  However, transitioning from centralised power-over and top-down hierarchy, to healthier, more relational, regenerative, caring, equitable and just ways of collaborating and making decisions together, is inevitably messy and can, at times, feel very painful and despairing. 

This 3 day deep dive will support you to explore your own, and your group’s relationship with power and decision-making. We will splash around with what healthy and unhealthy power feel like in our bodies and psyches - and how this plays out in our relationships, groups and the world. We will inquire into what supports us and our groups to step more and more into healthy power so that our decision-making is generative and Life-serving. 

"If you have come here to help me

you are wasting your time.

If you have come because your liberation 

is tied up with mine, then let's work together" 

Lila Watson, Aboriginal elder and activist

Composting Power-Over Culture into Relational Cultures

All of our explorations will draw on our Vital Ingredients and Design Principles for composting power-over culture into relational cultures. By dropping beneath our strategic minds and into our sensing, feeling, imagining and heart-centred thinking, we will reveal and go beyond the stories and beliefs that Modernity has conditioned us into around power and decision-making. 

In wild reciprocity with the land and our other-than-human allies, we will resource ourselves so as to more and more be able to shed the skins of power-over as they show up through us and our groups. This is how we more and more become revealed as the vessels of healthy power the world is longing for through us.

During our three days together we will:

• Engage in inquiries and practices that support us to reveal the ways in which power-over shows up in us, our relationships, groups, organisations, workplaces, communities and families.
• Explore ways of making decisions that help you and your group to operate more effectively and transformatively in a complex and fast-changing world, responding to what emerges while staying connected to your organisational/ group purpose.
• Nurture and experience the modelling of healthy relational group culture, processes and structures in which power and decision-making is visible, examined, composted and distributed.
• Invoke and experiment with processes and structures that enable a blend of vertical and horizontal power and decision-making.
• Integrate earth-centric practices to support reverence to a power greater than the individual human self. 
• Create a tender, brave and compassionate space that supports us to stay with the discomfort that comes when we turn towards the decolonising at depth that is needed to compost power-over culture.

Who is Being Weaved for?

This 3 day immersive is for members of groups, organisations or projects who are wanting to explore their own and their group's relationships with power so as to move towards becoming a vessel for true power in service of a more Life-affirming world. It is for those of us interested in co-creating a tender brave space to reveal and explore the ways in which Modernity has conditioned us into power-over ways of being, so that these become more available for composting into healthy generative and relational ways of sharing power.

What Being Revealed is not ...

This is not a space to solve, fix, analyse or judge anything. It is a compassionate space that will support gentle embodied revelation of what is, in service of us becoming more able to choose how we relate with power and decision-making within our groups, organisations and workplaces.

Timings

Friday 24th January and Saturday 25th January 10 - 6.30pm
Sunday 26th January 10 - 5.30pm

Venue

Droridge Barn, Droridge Lane, Dartington, Devon TQ9 6JG 

Sliding Scale Exchange

Our relationships with money are deeply entangled in the power-over paradigm we seek to help compost. We long to offer our work in the spirit of; mutual generosity; and calling-in abundance for all that which serves Life. For more about this take a look at our application form. We invite you to feel into what feels like the appropriate amount for you to contribute for this 3 day deep dive.

• I’m able to meet my basic needs but little else: Between £250 and £400
• I have savings/ own my own house: £400+
• I am unable to meet my basic needs and can't afford this sliding scale: Let's explore
  If you are unable to meet your basic needs and therefore can't afford this sliding scale, please go ahead and fill in the application form, and there is space within that for you to let us know how much you can afford, and a little of your situation.
  

To Apply

To apply to join this three day deep dive please fill in this short application form by Sunday 15th December.

Our recent taster session had 19 participants plus 8 on the wait list. This deep dive will be a much smaller more intimate group so we suggest applying sooner rather than later. It also really helps us in our organising to receive your applications as soon as you are able rather than waiting until the last minute. And we of course understand that this is not always possible.

Questions?

If you have any questions email clairemilne@starterculture.net

Testimonials

“Claire’s facilitation & teaching style is something magnificent to witness and be part of. Her ability to hold complexity, multiple perspectives, and different roles in one space is quite unique. She can switch between facilitator, her own personal perspective and tapping into the group field with striking fluidity. Her leadership style is one that is emergent and guided by deep listening. Learning about shared governance with Claire was a process far more rewarding that I anticipated. As part of a cohousing group, we went through a process of un-learning and re-learning how to be together and make collective decisions using shared governance - which in itself was a deep excavation of our fears, needs and internal parts. We were guided by her expansive knowledge of shared governance, and her years of experience and embodiment of what it means to make a decision that centres the interests of the whole, whilst including the many individual voices (and parts!)

Co-housing group participant who took part in a 2 year accompaniment process

I fully trust Claire’s facilitation, especially around collective decision making, and her capacity to catch her own or others’ biases, stories, or wounding that may be having an impact on group processes, and bring them into the light lovingly. She has a way of seeing through the layers of noise created by many bodies and minds being together, and cutting through to the core need or question wanting to be found. I appreciate this so much about her and any group who get to be facilitated or taught by her are a lucky bunch!”

Co-housing group participant who took part in a 2 year accompaniment process

I just wanted to say a huge thanks for the workshop. I really loved your facilitation style in general and was particularly impressed with the way you included and handled challenges and input from the group - no doubt a skill honed over many years and one I wish to emulate in my own facilitation practice. I also now have a much better understanding of consent-based decision making (and an appreciation for what it can do!) that I think clears up some confusion I’d made between this and consensus.

Participant on a taster workshop

“Claire offers an inspiring insight into how to create an alternative culture to the power-over hierarchies of our current system. A new culture that connects us to ourselves, each other, and our earth. A culture that honours the human need to be seen, heard and valued in all our diversity. Within this she offers skills to create functioning structures for human collaboration that enable decision making that is truly collaborative, engaging and effective. Creating a culture that supports the well being of all involved: a safe space to express vulnerability and the skill to draw out the wisdom present in any group. Through my work with Claire I began to acknowledge how much the current 'power over' system runs through us all, and that in order to change things we must begin our work from the “inside out”.

Participant on 6 month collective-decision making program

“Claire ran an in-depth training for our local group supporting us to establish distributed governance skills and understanding within the culture of the group. Claire is clear and responsive, listens deeply and cares about both the structure and details of decision making, and the interpersonal aspects of working as a group.
I feel supported by this approach that is designed to facilitate resolving of interpersonal dynamics within groups. I see myself relaxing into a trusting of feeling empowered in roles, and I am nourished by being able to bring my skills in a way that is valued and received.

I am deeply inspired by collective decision-making’s potential for inner, interpersonal and cultural transformation - how we relate to self, others and the world, reflected in how we organise as groups and make decisions together. This is part of the deep change work that I see as being needed in the world.”

Participant on 6 month collective-decision making program