Do you have a nagging feeling that all the EDI/DEI and sustainability ambitions in the world
Do you wonder how you can effect
Note: Whilst this is not part of the POSSIBLE FUTURES curriculum, your co-facilitators are guest coaches on the POSSIBLE FUTURES' Intro to Decolonial Sustainability course. We developed this workshop in response to questions, doubts, concerns, and ideas that have frequently emerged in and around the margins of the four cohorts that have taken place to date. For those interested in taking this further, we recommend the Intro to the Intro course they offer.
from within the EDI/DEI, sustainability, or aid industries, academia, or the nonprofit/ nongovernmental industrial complex? Do you ever wonder if you might be better placed to effect change from outside dominating entities and ideas in the above fields? What scares you about this? What excites you?
to a thriving society or livable climate?
we will dive deeply into the following:
what you think/sense/feel about the effects of these industries on the world;
where your role is, or could be, in relation to them;
if the world, and you/your family/your people, would be better served with you inside or outside these industries;
the fears you have of making changes from the inside or the outside (regarding money, status, influence, conflict, etc.); and,
what makes sense for you in terms of next steps.
We will share
across sectors and regions, field your questions, and give you structured time and space to sound out your own observations, concerns, and ideas about how to foster change.
Heather is a communitarian-anarchist. She spent seven years as the Education for Sustainable Development Project Coordinator for the Higher Education Academy in the UK. As a climate change activist, she founded an early Transition Town in South Gloucestershire, England and co-developed and delivered Principles & Values training for Extinction Rebellion International and UK.
As part of activism work within very white and middle class movements, she facilitated trainings on white supremacy culture patterns (including for Greenpeace International) and eco-fascism. She supports people marginalised by society who have had cult-like experiences within the climate change movement.
She challenges with care.
Born and raised in the United States, Heather is half-USer and half-Colombian. After 17 years in England, she now lives in Colombia with her 15-year old ex-climate change activist daughter. Her current paid work includes anti-racism and anti-oppression workshop series and support programmes for people marginalised by society in various ways.
Find her at keduzi.org
Lavinia has 15 years of experience in the field of sustainability in fashion & agriculture, having transitioned from roles rooted in compliance and auditing. She has grappled with her own challenges, recognizing the limitations of the traditional sustainability narrative. Lavinia has also witnessed the pitfalls of engaging in what she refers to as "stewardship superiority" during her years of advising farming communities, textile factories and fashion brands and retailers around the world. She is currently in the process of getting divorced from so-called Sustainability Inc.
Through her participation in the POSSIBLE FUTURES course Intro to Decolonial Sustainability, Lavinia has come to understand the importance of social justice and environmental justice, embarking on a journey of questioning power structures within the context of sustainability. She now works as a freelancer, dedicated to diverse projects focused on justice issues in the consumer goods sector and is also on the way to decolonize her personal yoga practice.
To get in touch with her: https://www.laviniamuth.com/
Vidhya is an interdependent, intersectional, and interdisciplinary evaluation practitioner, scholar, organiser, and activist. She has spent the last 20 years sustaining her family and a larger community by selling her intellectual labour—research/evaluation services and knowledge products—to organisations and governments within the nonprofit/ nongovernmental industrial complex. She started her own practice by necessity, upon being fired at the height of COVID and in the midst of the 2020 uprisings because her last employer objected to her public discussion of the dissertation research that they had actively recruited her for two years before. In response to countless experiences like this, she founded The May 13 Group, which is a still-emerging ecosystem among those of us seeking to repair the harm caused by this kind of exploitation of racially otherized evaluators through a cooperative, solidarity economy.
She has a Master's degree in Public Affairs, concentrating in Nonprofit Management, which she supplemented with a self-designed secondary concentration in Race, Class & Gender in Global Perspective. An artist first, she brings her training in Fine Arts and Art History with her everywhere.
You can reach her at vidhya@whyisevaluationsowhite.info or read/ watch/ listen to her work in/on/through/around research & evaluation on LinkTree.
B. Lorraine Smith stopped working in mainstream sustainability and ESG in 2021. Now she tells the truth without the constraint of misguided ESG frameworks or truth-bending quarterly earnings. Guided by diverse wisdom, Lorraine advises and coaches leaders and their teams, working towards a vision which is an economy in service of life.
That is an economy where all businesses—across all industry sectors—can only succeed by enabling society and the biosphere to thrive.
She has also voluntarily conducted open-source Matereality assessments on Google, TD Bank, Danone, and JBS. And she writes incisive articles about plastic waste, lobbying, Net Zero, and more in the Matereal World substack. View her introductory video on Matereality.
Originally from Toronto, Canada, Lorraine spent a decade based in New York City before moving to her current home Montreal. She has also lived, worked and/or studied in Brazil, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand.
For more on her work and ways to get in touch, visit www.blorrainesmith.com.
How much is right for me or my business/organisation/government to pay?
We are offering this workshop on a sliding scale fee, using the practice of radical relationality. Such practice can help us determine how to move capital to repair, reverse, redress, and regenerate from harm. Radical relationality involves explicitly placing ourselves in relation to others and naming how we are in relationship—the nature of the relation—as well as how we are related to common patterns of exploitation and extraction. It allows positionality, status, power, advantage, and privilege to be defined in fluid, relational terms rather than fixed or static terms of identity or difference that somehow lies in us as individuals. Instead, we believe capital is mobilised through relationships that economic, political, and social structures mediate. See our last FAQ below for some prompts to practise radical relationality and determine how you should move capital/ how much you should pay.
If specific amounts would ease your decision-making, we suggest USD 200 for those who have profited the most from capitalism and colonialism and/or are most closely connected to the disproportionately—but not exclusively—European/Euro-settler owning/ruling class. Lack of access to financial capital should not prevent anyone from participating: $0 is an acceptable payment option.
Q: Who is this workshop for?
A: Anyone who is currently working in any role, at any level, in academia; development aid; corporate sustainability; environmental, social, and governance (ESG) consulting or reporting; impact investing; sustainable finance; or other "business/academia as a force for good", including the philanthro-capitalist nonprofit/nongovernmental industrial complex, is welcome and who we designed this session for.
Q: What languages and formats will the workshop take place in?
A: The workshops will take place in English, in multiple time zones, at multiple times of day and days of the week by video-conference using the Zoom platform's meeting format, whose accessibility features are listed here. We suggest downloading the platform in advance and practising to use it if it is new to you. A facilitator will guide newcomers through the platform 15 minutes before each session starts. Participants will be muted when they are not speaking, will not be required to be on video, and can hide self-view. We will refrain from using flashing or strobing animations. We will enable closed captioning. Due to the sensitive nature of the topic, a transcript of the session will not be available afterwards (nor will the session be recorded). During each session, we will share our screen for a short amount of time to present a slide deck, which we will also make available to participants to view in their own browser during the session. We will not be sending slides out before or after the sessions. Please indicate on the accessibility intake form (which you will receive after registering) if you would like the content of the slides translated into a language other than English. The meeting format allows for interaction by chat. Participants may also call in. Facilitators will describe and read the content of the slides and periodically summarise the chat for those who may be joining by phone, visually impaired, or otherwise hindered from engaging with the chat function during the call.
The facilitators also aim to speak clearly and enunciate. Pauses are included to allow time for people to think before sharing and 10-minute comfort breaks are provided around each 60-minute mark.
The facilitators are often able to support participants with other languages. See each workshop date and time for the language support available. Unfortunately, our current budget will only accommodate language support and not interpretation.
You are also invited to indicate on the accessibility intake form if you require any accommodations or alternative formats, such as large print for the slide deck and transcript or videos on for the presenters, to read lips. During the session, participants can use the chat function to publicly or privately communicate with one of the facilitators about accessibility issues that may arise.
Q: Where does my registration payment go?
A: After the payment processing platform (Stripe) withdraws its fees automatically, all registration fees will be disbursed as follows:
approximately 12% will go to POSSIBLE FUTURES for administration of the events
26% will be donated to POSSIBLE FUTURES’ indigenous rights partner organisations in West Papua, and
the remaining 62% will be divided equally amongst the workshop co-facilitators.
refund requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Q: Do I need to prepare anything ahead of time?
A: No. However, you may want to familiarise yourself with the co-facilitators by reading their bios above and exploring their work.
Registration closes 24h prior to the start of each session.
Q: How much should I pay? How might I consider the sources of each type of capital I have access to and how we are each related through patterns of extraction and exploitation?
A: The following prompts may be helpful:
Land(s) of your ancestry, birth, training, residence, and work: What lands are you connected to and disconnected from? What have they gone through? What condition are they in now? Who cared for them or worked on or lived in them for generations? Who was ripped apart from them or from their intimacy and mutuality with them? How are you related to each of these peoples? Think about colonisation, forced migration, segregation, redlining, gentrification, pollution, deforestation, mining, and climate shocks.
Place(s) you work/ed: To what extent have you needed to work for wages to pay your bills? To what extent have you been able to find and keep work that pays your bills? Reflect on the history, location, pay structure, and decision-making roles of any places that you may have worked. What institutions did they replace/displace? How many times more does the highest-paid position make compared to the lowest-paid? How much control have you had over the work that you do? The work that others do? Who all has been affected by decisions you have been responsible for through your work?
Person(s) you partner/ed with (if applicable): Think about your access to healthcare, retirement, and legal and economic protections, especially in relation to the institution of marriage. Do you have a partnership in which one person can focus on paid work while the other focuses on unpaid (devalued) work? Do you calculate how your individual or combined earnings may affect your access to public benefits, subsidies, or assistance? Can one or both of you earn higher wages or enjoy leisure time because you rely on lower-paid labour for certain types of work?
People you were born to/raised by: Account for all that was available to you growing up. What kinds of work did it come from? Who performed that work? Who profited from it? To what extent do you, or did your family, depend on family and friends during an emergency or for financial survival? To what extent could you or did you depend on the State? To what extent did your family and/or the State invest in filling your childhood with resources such that your adult "success" appears to be "independent?" To what extent did others depend on your family, or do they depend on you now? What financial transfers of wealth have you received from your family for big expenses that allow you to avoid destitution or to generate income or accumulate wealth? These may include educational credentials, a vehicle, or housing. What such transfers have you made or prepared to make?
Once you've had a chance to reflect, specify an amount that feels right for you to pay.
