NGL is primarily an online community experimenting with embedding nonviolence into the core of its operational and relational infrastructure. NGL currently offers coaching calls and sessions to its supporters, called “NGL Friends”. As our experiments are bearing fruit, we are also offering more and more outward facing work, including monthly introductions on different topics, workshops on Nonviolent Communication through a systemic lens, courses on the VM frameworks, and work with individuals and organisations based on what we have learned within NGL. NGL is the heart of all that I do and is a project I have been a central part of since it was founded in 2017. Members collaborate to design systems that empower us to move together towards NGL’s purpose and values, operating entirely within the gift economy.
You can see more about our work and become a Friend at http://nglcommunity.org/
A group of 15 of us are co-holding the Reweaving Humany project, with 4-5 of us physically living together doing on-the-ground experiments. At the highest level, the aim of this project is to create viable and scalable systems for exiting the market and re-commoning land. At the minutest level, it is about giving our lives to experimenting with how to disentangle ourselves from internalisations of capitalist patriarchal ways of being. We have been vagabonding, some of us, for 4 years, and are now looking for land. See www.reweavinghumanity.org
From November – December 2021 I worked as part of a team of 7 facilitators to co-hold Tamera’s community consolidation process. This process involved re-working the vision, purpose, values, and mission of the community as well as doing a capacity assessment and beginning to map the current systems, into which later work could be done to integrate the purpose and values. NGL still supports Tamera in continuing this work, in a much less intensive way, and NGL Friends have access to the monthly coaching calls with Tamera’s Continuation Team.
I worked with the Peace and Justice Centre from 2017 – 2020. Starting as a facilitator delivering the Cooperative Games and Conflict Resolution programme to Primary Schools in Edinburgh, the role developed into working with the whole team to clarify the purpose, values and systems. This formed part of remodelling the programme as “PeaceBuilders for Schools” and the offering within that called Collaborative Classrooms. Collaborative Classrooms works with children and teachers in their class to align their class agreements to the class intention / charter. PeaceBuilders assesses what is needed by the class to move them towards their intentions and offers targeted training to support them in getting there. You can read more about the programme and apply to become a facilitator at www.peaceandjustice.org.uk. The work we did to refine the organisation’s vision, purpose, and values is also on their website.
I co-organised the first NVC-UK de-escalation group for Extinction Rebellion’s November 2018 Direct Action, which has subsequently been taken on by others who now deliver de-escalation support at direct actions and training in de-escalation around the UK and beyond.
