Shared Leadership & Power: Stewarding our Commons with Jamaica Stevens, Jeff Clearwater, Keala Young

How do we share?  How do we learn to share.  We learn early on in life that sharing is important even if challenging.  But we don’t really learn how to share decision-making or leadership or things we hold in common.  We have been raised in a very my my my culture.  Now we are moving powerfully into a WE culture.  This we might say is whole human culture, this is true human being culture.  

When we think of leadership we often think of the personal side of it and that’s critical but it’s not the whole story.  What is more and more needed is to really understand shared leadership, this is the future, this is what’s needed now more than ever.  Shared leadership brings with it other dimensions of our capacities, our awareness, and how we need to play differently.  You might think of it as distributed leadership as well.  This gets us closer to what we name as collective intelligence.  With shared leadership comes greater access to the wholeness and to greater intelligence that can be revealed through increased participation.  We know our politics needs better participatory democracy, so we need spaces to practice.  

It is this understanding and more that we are exploring in part 2 of this conversation around the ideas of a participatory commons, but we can also talk about it as shared leadership and how it relates to patterns of connection and creativity and shared power.  I read many years ago a great quote about the next evolutionary edge for humanity being about sharing power.  We might think that’s an exaggeration but when you go deeper, you can see how this is where we find synergy, cooperation, cocreation, and we become more whole.  Let’s create communities of practice to become proficient at this.  Each of our guests here has incredible wisdom and experience that can be of support to each of us in multiple different kinds of situations.  

To more fully explore this, we may realize that we are redefining leadership and to understand that we are often inside of a commons.  A commons is our shared resources, those can be physical, the land, finances, time, energy, intention and more.  In this kind of space of true participatory leadership, we want to be able to be fluid, we don’t want to be rigid, we aren’t looking at a hierarchical approach, and we don’t want to be flat, where everyone is equal.  We want to be like a jazz band, not a symphony, where there is only one conductor.  

In order to redefine leadership in this more expanded participatory and shared and creative way, we need to look at what it means to be serving the common good; how do we align around a common goal; how are we serving community together; how do we scale a morally and ethically grounded collective vision?  These are some ways that we create the container and structure needed for the work that is ahead of us - this great regeneration of our biosphere and all our social systems.  These capacities and explorations we believe are so vital to the times we are in.  

Personally, I live near Seattle on Vashon island and this is in the bioregion called Cascadia.  There are bioregions all over the world working toward regeneration, bioregions are a pattern in relationship to watersheds.  Right now we have a fabulous ‘bioregional activation tour’ happening called Regenerate Cascadia.  It’s so exciting - it’s 5 weeks, 14 stops, with 100 plus organizers.  This is a commons this glorious bioregion - these land and waters.  This bioregion is a commons and for 5 weeks we are exploring some of these questions all up and down the Pacific Northwest Coast. 

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