Crowd-sustaining Organization Unbound

At the top of our minds these days is the question of how to financially sustain Organization Unbound so that it can grow into the community of practice it is yearning to be, with a deeper and wider impact across the globe. We’ve been exploring this question with many people over the past year. Out of these conversations has emerged an exciting vision- to crowd-sustain Organization Unbound so that the financial support it receives is gently […]

Join us for a Tiny Open Online Course!

During the month of October, Organization Unbound and The Barefoot Guide Connection will be hosting a TOOC (Tiny Open Online Course) to explore the relationship between organizations and social transformation. This light, month-long learning experience called ‘Seeding Change from Within’ will explore how to increase an organization’s social impact by growing change from the inside out.

Self-guided learning sessions – new and improved

After spending some time beta-testing our self-guided learning sessions with organizations, we’ve come out with these new and improved versions. The sessions were created to help people introduce the concept and practice of expressive change into their organization.

Film release- An intro to expressive change

* Now subtitled in Español & Français *

The short film that we’ve been working on over the last year and a half is finally finished! The 16-minute film is intended as a conversation starter for staff, volunteers & funders of social purpose organisations. Through a compilation of crowd-sourced interviews, it challenges us to pay closer attention to the link between an organisation’s social purpose and how that purpose is lived inside the organization on a daily basis.

A conversation with Dayna Cunningham

I’m just finishing up a fascinating six-week on-line course on Theory U. I found this 10-minute excerpt from Otto Scharmer’s interview with Dayna Cunningham particularly moving. She shares about her experience as a civil rights lawyer and how she came to understand the importance of developing an individual and collective capacity for empathy in social change work.

Is democracy an enemy of nature?

Are the environmental challenges we face as a planet too urgent and pervasive to be effectively dealt with through democratic means? I was surprised to read that in the wider circles of global environmental discourse, the implied (and occasionally directly expressed) response to this question is increasingly ‘yes’. Andrew Stirling, in his powerful essay ‘Emancipating Transformations’, sheds light on […]

Calling in

This provocative essay on Black Girl Dangerous sheds light on how the oppressive social patterns that we’re trying to change ‘out there’ inevitably live inside us and our social movements, no matter how hard we try to chase them out. Author Ngọc Loan Trần invites fellow activists to engage with these patterns more consciously and lovingly in order to be a stronger force for change.

What was sparked

More than 170 people from 14 countries tuned into the Stanford Social Innovation Review webinar in February where we shared our learnings around the concept and practice of inscaping. A number of interesting questions and comments were raised during the Q&A. Since we did not have time to respond to all of them during the webinar, I thought it would be worth sharing our responses here in writing.

Exploring the link between inscaping & social innovation

At the end of last year, we spent some time trying to deepen our understanding of the relationship between the practice of inscaping and the organizational capacity to initiate and sustain social innovation. Through the generous support of Nesta, we wrote a paper on the topic, which we presented to an international audience of […]

Join us for a webinar

As a follow-up to our article Social Innovation From the Inside Out, the Stanford Social Innovation Review has invited us to share our learnings around the concept and practice of ‘inscaping’ through their next SSIR Live! Webinar offering. We’re excited to have Marlon Parker, founder of the Cape Town-based organization RLabs, join us to share his organization’s experience. Twenty complimentary tickets available!