The Story of Change
WorldEthicForum – a place of the birth of the new wilderness, a recognition of new emerging webs that are woven, where dreaming manifests itself and the spoken word brings the colourful wildness into existence.
A sense of division and powerlessness, and alienation run as deep undercurrents in today’s society at local, national, and global levels. These are often rooted in centuries-old injustices, unresolved traumas, and hierarchical worldviews that continue to fester and leave us often feeling helpless, afraid, and overwhelmed.
Yet, there is in all of us a fundamental knowing and desire for balance, social connection, and belonging to others and life itself. Relationships between humans and the natural world are often a big source of nourishment.
Our vision is to embark on a journey of discovery and inquiry to understand these undercurrents better, listen to what they allude to, and explore what it takes to shift and translate them toward meaningful actions.
Together, across places, sectors, and social classes, we will encounter unknowns, challenges, and new opportunities. The journey will encourage us to rethink our most basic assumptions and invite us to embody reality in new ways that regenerate and enhance life, maybe more radical than we can imagine now.
On the journey, we will explore concrete solutions and actions for diverse sectors, areas, and aspects of our global and interconnected world, inspired by this emerging culture of care that includes all beings.
The WorldEthicForum aims to co-creating the preconditions for building and maintaining a culture of care and partnership and to nurture individual and collective capacities to help shift deeply ingrained patterns.
The WorldEthicForum wants to build on this foundation to move toward a society characterized by a radically shared aliveness.
We acknowledge that we live in a time of global polycrisis, a time of high urgency and necessity for transformational changes, where speed could be the answer. Nevertheless, our suggestion is to slow down, valuing the listening, repatterning, and learning from each other’s experiences and perspectives, and dedicating a seven-year arc to this inquiry and exploration.
We have seen that many attempts to shift the tides have not yet added up or landed substantially over the past decades.
We wonder if it may be in the deeper layers of our culture that there lay some answers and findings for how to restore and rewire our social fabrics towards fostering intentional and awareness-based aptitudes, practices, and individual and collective capacities and to strengthen them over time.
Embodying the following principles and practices, our journey involves living into a concrete, radically shared aliveness, giving substance to a conscious, shared, and inclusive global ethic:
- Willingness to meet ourselves, reconnect with everything we are, recognize our patterns, and work with our shadows
- Willingness to devote ourselves to the collective and trauma-informed dynamics and to listen with open ears and hearts to what a radical shared aliveness calls us to become and do
- Networking and collaboration across real and imaginary boundaries such as age, gender, sectors, nationalities, and cultures
- Growing an active network dedicated to the question of an applied global ethic
- Creating synergies with decision-makers to connect thought with action
- Creating spaces of experience for a broad audience, cultivating education, and learning from and with each other
This year (2022), we are primarily dedicated to building a network of people from different sectors, cultures, and nations who contribute through their actions and thoughts to a culture of radically shared aliveness. We create common ground with the intention to achieve a broader impact by putting our findings into practice over the next few years.
The next few years will be dedicated to the following processes:
- Broaden the network: This includes shaping a common intention across different countries and cultures.
- Explore questions such as the following: What does a global ethic dedicated to radically shared aliveness mean? How do we connect to the land and to place to be inspired? How do we listen to everything that is alive so that we see ourselves as part of the ecosystem again and act accordingly?
- Deepen the research: What is already there? What can we learn from each other? What are the deeper roots and causes that we have to deal with? What is needed for such a change? What are the different prerequisites and capacities that need to be cultivated?
- Leverage: What does it take to set change in motion? Which areas are ripe to start implementing radical change? How do we bring different groups together to work on participatory solutions?
- Prototype: Design and co-creation of first prototypes of possible solutions
We communicate regularly via various channels (blogs, podcasts, articles). We seek dialogue with diverse audiences, including decision-makers, to initiate mutually beneficial partnerships and invite interested parties to exchange ideas and experience radically shared aliveness together.
Pillars
- Networking, exchanging, and learning from one another
- Exploring and better understanding the various interrelationships and correlations
- Experiencing and sharing
- Co-creating and offering mutual support
- Applying and practicing