Patterns for accelerating systemic evolution
Shifting the way we co-create, fund, and govern initiatives to benefit living, shared prosperity.
The Need to Evolve our Process of Systems Change
We’re seeing the need for a rapid shift in many different systems of our society to realign with reciprocity with the earth. Our systems for education, housing, financing, energy, and food are stuck in outdated ways of operating in the context of a world that requires adaptivity, ecological intelligence, and vision.
A lot of time, money, and resources have been poured into adaptation across all of our systems. However, we seem to lag behind on delivering in the redesign of social, technical, and financial infrastructure that shifts our world on a significant scale. Financial inequality, mental illness, homelessness, apathy in our public education systems, pollution, and unhealthy food still are the “mainstream” for us in America.
We believe this disconnect between goals and results stems from an outdated process built from the template of competitive capitalism - not in a lack of capability, motivation, or resources.
At the heart of this process lies our way of being, or state of consciousness - the emotions and energetic states we cultivate during the process.
We wrote about the consciousness aspect in a previous post that you can read here.
In this post, we’ll focus on concrete structures and approaches that social innovators and ecosystem builders can apply to embody the shifts in consciousness needed to evolve our human systems more rapidly, comprehen
A square peg and round hole: Individualistic design and funding process for collaborative solutions.
Our current systems for social impact - financial, social, organizational, and mental - are set up to solve a variety of individual problems. Individual organizations spring up around an observed problem, create theories of change to solve it, and activate business models around grants, investments, and revenue streams to resource their efforts.
We talk a lot about collaboration, but the process of discovering intelligent, deep, and sustained collaboration between the stakeholders needed to create a systemic solution isn’t invested in on a regular basis.
This creates gaps around resourcing, facilitating, and maintaining high-level coordination and shared vision across groups of stakeholders. The gaps are more glaring when it comes to equitably integrating perspectives of grassroots leaders that have deep lived experience of problems with funders or institutions who’s services and initiatives span many communities.
This results in many individual initiatives who could be working together to create new levels of value instead competing for funding. This competition and siloing of efforts prevents orgs with similar missions from establishing the necessary shared infrastructure that ultimately accelerates and deepens efforts for healing our Mother Earth and creating shared prosperity.
Thankfully, many are practicing innovative approaches for funding, building, and strategizing that facilitate shared power and reconnection to what matters most - deep collaboration, coordination, and cooperation towards a future where human systems support the thriving of all life.
Here’s a breakdown of the cutting edge of systems change, the capacity needed to continue evolving, and some visions for the future:
Pattern 1: Culture-Driven Development
You’ve probably heard the term “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. However, few organizations and collaboratives truly prioritize building and practicing their values, ways of being, and beliefs. Most of us start with the “problem” and focus on executing the strategy and tactics to solve the problem. But in a world that changes rapidly, the ability to adapt your strategy to better serve the whole is more valuable than the strategy itself. The culture of an organization is the layer of shared beliefs, ways of working, and values that guides the direction of strategy.
FSG visualizes this nicely in their graphic “Six Conditions of Systems Change”
FSG positions mental models as the deepest layers of systems change. When you work on culture, you work on shifting foundational mental models which can have ripple effects throughout the rest of the system.
Ultimately, if we don’t connect relational and structural change to intentional shifts of underlying mental models, we’re creating temporary band-aids, not systemic shifts. That doesn’t mean we have to only hyperfixate on changing mental models, but it does mean we have to be aware of them.
Developmental Space as a Pre-Condition for Healthy Culture
Psychological safety is a key “limiting nutrient” for a healthy culture and systems change. If your group doesn’t create space for authentic and difficult conversations around shared values, you won’t shift the energy of a system. Holding the tension innate in shifting mental models, first within your inner group then externally with key stakeholders, requires deep acceptance of differing opinions and ways of being. A great culture and strategy set the centering space for members to return to when things get tense as long-held assumptions and beliefs are challenged.
Values + Culture Building in Action
Curtis Ogden has led a Food Solutions New England Network that spent intentional time to craft a powerful set of values that guide their decisions:
Democratic Empowerment:
We celebrate and value the political power of the people. A just food system depends on the active participation of all people in New England.
Racial Equity and Dignity for All:
We believe that racism must be undone in order to achieve an equitable food system. Fairness, inclusiveness, and solidarity must guide our food future.
Sustainability:
We know that our food system is interconnected with the health of our environment, our democracy, our economy, and our culture. Sustainability commits us to ensure well-being for people and the landscapes and communities in which we are all embedded and rely upon for the future of life on our planet.
Trust:
We consider trust to be the lifeblood of collaboration and collaboration as the key to our long-term success. We are committed to building connections and trust across diverse people, organizations, networks, and communities to support a thriving food system that works for everyone.
Curtis expands on how these values have guided decisions and discussion in his article “**Into the Matrix and Beyond: The Value of Network Values and Values-Focused Processes”:**
In the last few years, these values have generated a lot of good discussion, both internal to the network and with others, and we are discovering that this really is the point and advantage of having values in the first place. They can certainly serve as a guide for certain decisions, and in some (many?) instances things may not be entirely clear, at least at first.
What Curtis points to here focuses on how we lean into our values to guide important discussions.
Here are some practices we’ve tried to do this:
Culture guiding strategy: One of our principles at Interform is test ideas against reality through action. One recent idea that we’ve had is a Collective visioning session to pull out the vision of a group of aligned people who’re looking for ways to work together. Before offering it to others, we’re doing pilots with our inner circle of collaborators and other adjacent groups. This testing will allow us to understand where the value comes from, what needs to be refined, and how we might test it on a higher level.
Meeting Rituals. In our work designing a cooperative platform, the founding team starts every meeting with an intentional check-in and ends with an intentional check-out. For the check-in, we discuss how we’re feeling and what we want to get out of our time today. For the check-out, we share what we’re grateful for in the project and take a deep breath together. These simple practices have supported us immensely in embodying our culture of ease.
How you can get started exploring Culture Driven Development.
Great culture starts with essence discovery - finding the unique character and source of energy that drives your initiative.
A few questions you can use to dive into your culture.
What aspects of this culture do we source from our unique place, it’s history, and characteristics to embed ourselves within the web of life?
What mantras, acronyms, gestures, or other simple tools help us remember the essence of our culture?
What habits, rituals, and processes support embodiment of the values and beliefs that drive us?
You can also use the culture canvas, a great tool to map the different aspects of a healthy culture
Access the Culture Canvas Here
It’s important to remember that culture is a way of being, an embodied practice. The words you have on a document don’t matter if they’re not embedded into the way you do work.
For example, if your value is connection to earth, you could implement a check-in practice of sharing gratitude for a specific earth being.
Since all projects ultimately impact the world in a way that mirrors the thinking processes and values driving them, culture-first development drives more intentional, deep, and long-term change that has potential for generational benefits.
How are you implementing culture-driven development already? How could it benefit you?
However, to effectively develop culture takes time. Which brings us to the enabling pattern of patient & creative capital.
Pattern 2: Creative Capital - Trust Based, Blended, and Bioregional Finance
To again reference the FSG graphic, we’re now touching on on “practices, resource flows, and power dynamics”.
One guiding principle from Living Systems Thinking lies in working on conditions in the greater whole that hold a problematic system in place, instead of working on the problems directly. In India, the Paani foundation has found great success in raising water tables in a drought stricken area by working on the enabling conditions of social structures and motivations that shape how communities interact with the water system.
However, most existing funding programs are designed for direct action to create quickly measurable impact (or profit) on a known problem. This prevents organizations from working on conditions - a process that requires more exploratory action and doesn’t have “certainty” for specific benefits in a 1-2 year timeframe. This is why we need patient funding programs for shifting conditions.
The Pando Fund provides a vision of the future, where exploration of enabling conditions are funded, connected with the clusters of collaboration that are necessary to shift the enabling conditions.
We’ll cover a few emerging approaches to funding that align with the condition focused approaches:
Blended Finance
Blended finance is a funding approach that blends investment for profit return and grants for impact return. This could enable more capital to flow into experimental or grassroots projects with attractive terms for both investors, grant funders, and projects.
Currently, most blended finance activity happens on the macro-fund level (tens of millions and above), with funds onboarding first loss capital, or capital that takes the brunt of financial loss if a loan defaults. This lowers risk for other investors to contribute their dollars to a loan. These funds then offer lower-interest loans to riskier projects.
However, there’s potential for blended finance to be deployed on a grassroots or project level, with different capital providers working together intentionally to provide more accessible resources in the form of hybrid grants/loans.
Think about a project raising $1,000,000. In a traditional fundraise, they might seek to raise grant and donation money from philanthropists and supporters. They generally spend a lot of time and effort raising this money, and there’s no promises it would be fulfilled.
In a blended finance fundraise, they could potentially raise all $1,000,000 in a single blended transaction, where $500,000 is a grant and $500,000 is a low interest loan that can be paid off after a certain period of time. This way, the project can focus their fundraising efforts, start thinking about a business model, while not feel as much pressure to produce returns immediately.
Echoing Green’s fellowship model provides a grassroots blended finance approach, where the $100,000 stipend for fellows is a grant, but turns into a loan under the following conditions:
Organization is a for-profit
The Organization reaches $1,000,000 in revenue within a year of the fellowship.
Imagine hybrid grants and loans to support condition-shifting organizations in building culture and capacity over the long-term while providing incentive for designing a business model that enables their operation moving forward. The organization would have more funding to do their work, the philanthropic funder would have a partner, and the investor would have a low-risk, high impact investment on their books.
Blended finance also gently introduces the need for systems change organizations to build an earned revenue model, which could enables them to ultimately support themselves and become more resilient. If a systems change initiative is a tree, the business model makes up the branches and leaves, enabling the cultural roots to grow deeper over a long period of time.
Trust-based philanthropy
In it’s essence, trust based philanthropy describes a values centered practice practice of funding long-term grants without overburdening monitoring of results and how the money is spent.
Trust based philanthropy describes a philanthropic culture rooted in trust, with a common practice of distributing multi-year, unrestricted grants with minimal reporting necessary.
This enables grassroots organizations to do the work on the ground of connecting, building, and convening without needing to devote unnecessary time and resources to make sure funders understand their approach.
Mackenzie Scott is a well-known pioneer of this approach, with key aspects to her work that enable organization to accelerate their ability to shift systems overtime:
Unrestricted funds
Larger amounts (100k minimum)
Multi-year funding agreements.
This philanthropic approach enables organizations to adapt, address the bigger picture, and build coalitions to address systemic conditions.
We envision a future where the vast majority of philanthropic money is distributed in a trust-based way that honors the wisdom of people on the frontlines and enables people to do deeper systems shifting work.
An emerging opportunity in Philanthropy - collaborative incubators
At Interform, we seek to evolve trust based funding for individual organizations through creating an Incubator. We envision a process based in a specific bioregion that brings together social innovators, city and state government representatives, and other key institutions to design and fund the projects necessary to secure the necessities for a healthy society in a shifting world.
Through this incubator, we seek to connect funders to seed-stage social innovators with a trust based approach while providing all a rich space to build capacity for innovation and creating partnerships that are essential for deeper systems change.
If you’re interested in bringing this approach to your place, feel free to reach out here.
Bioregional Finance
Bioregional finance blends together many of these patterns to propose an entirely new way of organizing resources. In Bioregional finance, we pool and distribute resources around ecological boundaries. For example, we could have a Bioregional Finance Facility that focuses on the Sonoran Desert Bioregion, distributing funds to ensure the shared well-being of people and place.
Bioregional finance functions through shared ownership, where the bioregional residents, First Nations, and beyond-human keystone species, like the Saguaro, would share governance rights to make generational wealth building decisions.
We’re seeing a pathway of bioregionally-sourced blended finance where a large pot is sourced from a large decentralized community, centered around the well being of people and place. We’re located in Maricopa county with a population of around 4.5 Million - imagine if just 100,000 residents agreed to pay $5/month into a shared pot from which we could distribute grants and loans to essential organizations who are building capacity for our living system to thrive! That’s $500,000/month that can flow into causes and organizations that people see as essential both in the moment and for future generations.
To learn more about the bioregional way of being, check out the video below.
How to get started exploring creative finance
If you’re a funder, getting started with exploring creative finance can be as simple as a few questions.
Where can we shift to align with the trust-based philanthropy principles?
Who are other values-aligned funders we could collaborate with in creating a blended finance vehicle to serve more ventures?
What does bioregional organizing with our community and values-aligned funders look like?
As a social innovator building a specific product or service, creative financing is likely something you’re already doing - finding grants, revenue, and maybe investment from values aligned partners. However, one question that you can start exploring:
What place-adjacent partners could I start aligning with to form a bottom-up bioregional organizing movement?
We’re currently in talks with Regenerating Sonora to support their efforts in going through the BioFi cultivator to form a Sonoran bioregional finance facility!
The unifying power of place that bioregions activate means that you can start organizing now, no matter who you know.
Pattern 3: Shared ownership
Shared ownership describes projects where decision making and revenue or profit is distributed among a community organized around a shared purpose. Co-ops have been a resilient shared ownership structure, contributing roughly $2.1 trillion to the global economy in 2024. More and more organizations seek to intentionally shift the culture and eco/social impact of their industries through shared ownership structures.
The basic premise of shared ownership in the context of this article can be broken down in the following way:
Give direct governance and decision making power to people at all levels of an organization.
Give the communities and stakeholders you interact with opportunities to provide context and feedback to the major decisions you make.
Provide wealth building opportunities beyond salaries for all the workers in your organization and the communities you serve.
In it’s essence, shared ownership is a pattern that decentralizes power to build through collective intelligence.
As Interform grows, I seek to embody this pattern as a cooperative social innovation platform that brings together social innovators, guides, subject matter experts, and funders to create products and services that heal our earth and human society.
Mondragon provides a shining example of a shared ownership model bearing fruits, with yearly revenues of 13.48 billion. As
expands upon the brilliance in her Article “Mondragon as the new City-state”:This cooperative of cooperatives is run by workers who directly build the things society needs while directly benefiting their communities with the profits they earn making them. They are self-governing locally even as they compete globally, with plants around the world and products and services sold in 150 countries.
How you can get started with exploring shared ownership
Lead with quality product or service: Get clear on your core value adding process. Shared ownership in and of itself can provide many benefits, but without a clear understanding of the unique value you seek to bring, it will lose momentum. What’s the unique value you provide, and to who? What makes it unique, something that another organization couldn’t provide?
Explore the benefits that shared ownership could bring to your current business model and community. Who else has a stake in your success? What does the potential for your organization look like through their eyes? How do they want to get involved? If you have employees, they’re a great place to start.
Pilot a process of shared decision making for a project coming up that could benefit from a variety of perspectives, experimenting with decentralizing your process of making decisions.
Once you pilot, start reviewing your incorporation documents to explore how to incorporate shared ownership into the legal DNA, of your organization.
You can explore some different models for decision making in a cooperative environment here:
In talking to co-op experts, one big obstacle becomes people obsessing over the bylaws/specifics of the ownership model. It’s good to remember point of shared ownership model is to deliver value sustainably and equitably, not build a perfect governance model.
Tying it all together
This was a lot of information about many different aspects of organizing around systems change. However, they’re all connected through the six conditions of systems change.
The culture you build, in connection with your bioregion and partners, influences how capital flows with a more accessible, trust-based, and long-term intent. This culture and capital gets distributed and evolved through shared ownership models, enabling greater and greater percentages of the living system to participate.
Where Do YOU Feel Called to Start?
When you think across the culture, method of financing, and ownership structure of your project, where do you feel like the most work is to be done?
In an ideal state, how do you see these patterns being integrated into your place?
What’s the most powerful next step you could take?
This can be as simple as planning a conversation with your project team or stakeholders about how to embody your culture through regular practices.
The next step doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be doable and in alignment with the larger vision.
Let us know how you seek to integrate these patterns into your projects!
Envisioning these patterns in the Sonoran Bioregion
At Interform, we’re starting with building a culture of organizing around a vision and cultivating collective prosperity through action.
Sourced from the desert - a place with a scarce supply of water, the plants and animals don’t focus on what they don’t have, they focus on how they can grow together to survive. This has produced one of the most biodiverse deserts in the world, with the capacity to support thousands of species of plants and animals with less than 10 inches of rain per year.
This informs our approach in gathering the partnerships and resources necessary to deliver our services that accelerate and expand social innovation (our value adding process).
Through an alliance with Regenerating Sonora, the local community, institutions, and funders, we can create a financing facility and incubation process that supports emerging innovators and established institutions alike in building in partnership with the essence of resourcefulness, beauty, and collaboration of the desert.
We focus on cultivating place-sourced, collaborative innovation in essential verticals (housing, food, agriculture, water, culture, transportation, and education) across urban and rural areas. Over time, this approach leads to conditions for shared ownership to emerge across these essential sectors, enabling people to contribute their wealth and have a say in what the financing facility invests in.
Not a checklist, but a compass
While there’s a lot unknown and we don’t have a hyper specific roadmap to aligning with these three patterns, we’re committed to utilizing them as a source of direction, doing our best to align our next steps with our adaptive culture, shared ownership, and creative financing structures.
What does this process look like in your project and place?