Hope, for us, means daring to be optimistic in a time of terrible change. It is not a light thing. We are not going to try to persuade you that the climate emergency is real, or to think through ecological ethics, or to embrace a full understanding of the relevant science. That’s up to you.

But we will show you that hope is the right approach, even though there is a real chance of human extinction. Your organisation is full of creative, connected people who hope that what it means to be human can be re-imagined and reconstructed, that all our children and their children will inspire us, that new ecosystems will emerge to replace those that are dying. They hope that human ingenuity will grow to serve life and not exploit it.

We will work with your organisation from a standpoint of hope: it is worth the effort to change so that we can mend the world.

By skill we mean the hard work of learning and applying both the sciences and the arts. It means valuing learning and teaching; it means building communities that include all the voices, so that learning is never again an instrument of extraction, exclusion or oppression. The climate emergency pushes huge changes—the physical environment, the economy, diseases, available technologies, conflicts—and you have to anticipate and react to wholly new situations. That requires an organisation which doesn’t just learn: it is actively curious and rewards folk who thrive outside the envelope.

We’ve got years of experience in training, teaching, and fostering teachers. We will help you identify mentors and build a learning culture through which your organisation can adapt and evolve. We can even help you develop contemplative and reflective skills.

We have skills too. We’ve learnt a lot over our years of research and activism, and we know lots of really wonderful skilled people, and we bring all of that to work on the specifics of your organisation and how it will change as it evolves. (You can look at our expertise.)

Trust is in short supply these days. We don’t mean the bogus sincerity that is evoked by a commercial brand. When you pay back the local café for that cup of coffee; when you accept help from an stranger; when a bird lands on your hand to ask for food—that’s trust. We humans are deeply social. Sadly, the very instincts that help us be social have been captured and commodified by marketing agencies and social analytics. We have lost that ebullient, sometimes embarrassing, social relatedness that weaves us together with our neighbours, with forests, with our ancestors—and our capacity to give and receive trust has atrophied.

Trust is the sinews by which we mend the world. They grow stronger through use! We put trust at the centre of rebuilding an organisation. We have learned in our research that only the organisations that put trust before commercial success survive across generational change. We will work with you to discover the flows of trust that make your organisation resilient and respected.

Some folks are driven to be the very best. We’re not. We’re not entrepreneurial, or ambitious, or disruptive. We’re curious. We ask the questions that shouldn’t be asked, because we can’t help it. We wander off the path and arrive at meetings with muddy shoes; we bring home odd, occasionally rather smelly things from the beach. We stay up at night and read articles way outside our specialist expertise. We talk to crazy people and crows and trees. We have learned to suspect comfortable narratives, to spot hidden assumptions, to challenge the way things are. We delight in the playful, pellucid rhizomes of inquiry and accident that shuttle across the disciplines, and the burst of growth when sore need engenders deep reflection, committed research, and effective action.

We very well might ask you awkward questions and approach your challenges from odd perspectives. We don’t compromise on ethics. That’s how we work. If you want conventional answers that allow business as usual, then you don’t want to work with us. If you want to be part of the change that our whole planet so desperately needs, then get in touch.