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An 8-week online course that will help you take your collective, community, or distributed organization to the next level and find support from peers to address common challenges around money, value and leadership.
Starting networks is easy, sustaining them is not.
The complex challenges we face today demand collective action, which is made possible through networked, distributed and community-based ways of organization. Many groups are already leading the way: impact networks, self-organized collectives, place-based communities, and DAOs. Yet too often, challenges around money, power and value flow hold them back from fulfilling their potential. If that's you and your network, we have good news: this is a path many have walked before, and you don't have to walk it alone!
As experienced community builders and network practitioners, we have seen many typical challenges of growing networks. To name a few: power and workload imbalances, tensions between volunteer and paid roles, burnout of core members, developing healthy and effective leadership, attracting sufficient resources and contributions, difficulties speaking about money openly.
We have created this course to help you navigate these challenges. It will support you take your network to the next level and create a space for you to safely explore these topics with a cohort of peers.
Get an overview of the course content and a taste of it here.
This course is for you if...
- You are starting or part of a nascent network that is facing questions of value and money flow for the first time.
- You are a network leader or highly active member of a mature network and want to take it to the next level.
- You are a curious explorer who wants to learn about this topic in a concrete, applied way.
What you will learn
Each week we dive into a different topic starting from the hosts lived experience in networks. You will apply what you are learning in your own network projects. To learn more about the context and why of this course, check out this article.
After this course, you will walk away with:
What to expect:
A great curation of resources on networks, communities and collectives on the topics of value, money and leadership. This is a course about the intersection of systems and personal development. In our experience with networks and collectives, relationships are at the center. We will engage in experiences that will lead you to personal reflection and, if done in a group, these experiences will help you deepen your relationships. We think this is key to sustaining thriving networks.
Networks are complex systems. Please do not expect a linear roadmap or a magic formula. Instead, this will be like a writing course. There are many different approaches to writing. We will share tools, our experiences and reflections. But you have to get to practice and write, write, write. You don’t get better at writing by theorizing about it (end of analogy 🙂). If you want to make the most out of this course it’s necessary for you to experiment with your networks by trying the practices we introduce.
What do we mean by networks and communities?
This course is for what we call "Purpose Networks" and "Impact Communities". This ranges from professional to livelihood-focused networks, online to locally rooted communities, communities of practice or interest, to DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), "neo-guilds" and movements. What they all share is that they have a larger purpose and intention to catalyze action, beyond connecting people and organizations.
We use the terms network and community interchangeably, since the difference between them is often blurry.
Schedule & Format
The commitment
Weekly Sessions
The course contains 8 x 2 hour participatory live sessions, featuring a combination of content, reflection and practice.
Week 1 | What is a thriving network? Introductory session to connect with your cohort and dive into what it means for a network to be thriving.
Week 2 | Crafting Roles & Contribution Pathways
Creating a system where network membership, different levels of engagement and types of contributions are in balance.
The Money Game
An experience to deepen your reflections and learning about your personal relationship to money. Learn more about the Money Game.
Week 3 | Reclaiming Money
Surface and explore your personal stories and myths about money.
Week 4 | Collective Money Practices
Discover how to work with personal money patterns in the collective context. Learn about innovative models for accounting value.
Week 5 | Making Decisions Around Money
Explore the challenges of collective budgeting and financial decision-making, as well tools and practices to address them.
Week 6 | Unlocking your network challenges
Reflect, digest and apply what you have learned so far to your network
Week 7 | Redefining Leadership and recognizing 'Source'
Discover Peter Koenig's Money and Source work, and how to apply it in networks to unlock collective leadership capacity.
Week 8 | Integration & Closing
Walk away with tangible insights, practices and experiments to try in your network
Schedule for the upcoming cohort
We will be meeting 2 hours per week
Week 0 - October 12th - first readings, preparation - there is some groundwork to be done to get started into Thriving Networks!
Weeks 1-8 - from October 19th to December 7th we will be meeting 2h per week on zoom, time:
Mondays 3-5pm Paris | 6:30-8:30 pm Delhi | 6-8am Los Angeles | 9am -11am New York | 10am-12pm Buenos Aires
On October 25th Europe switches to Winter time, the anchor time is the Paris one, the time change in the US happens on November 1st, for example, please be aware of this when programming your participation!
Your hosts
Francesca Pick
Francesca is an ecosystem builder, organizational explorer and founding partner of Greaterthan. Everything she knows about growing healthy networks and communities stems from over a decade of practice and experimentation. She was a core member of the self-organized communities Ouishare and Enspiral, and has supported dozens of organizations with shared leadership, network governance and community building. She is co-author of Better Work Together and Fellow atEdmund Hillary Fellowship.
David Weingartner
David is a collaboration catalyst with a passion for supporting transformation journeys, participatory processes, systems practice. He has been part of the self-organized Ouishare community form its early days and co-led its conscious closing process, and brings a broad toolkit with him: systems practice, appreciative inquiry and sociocracy. David teaches on management tools for networked organizations and digital transformation at Munich University.
Alícia Trepat
Alícia is a designer and facilitator of distributed leadership, community building and decentralised governance. In addition to practicing these in her own communities, she is currently studying a Phd on self-organising and affect. Her work is focused on how self-organised communities can be places for personal transformation / awakening through the interaction with others. She has been a catalyst within Ouishare and several other social networks.
Pricing: contribution within capacity
We have decided to take a needs based approach* to pricing, because we want this course to be both accessible to all participants and sustainable for us to run as facilitators.
Below you can find several pricing options to choose from, or you can also choose your price with the "Accessibility" option. Our invitation to you, to quote Miki Kashtan, is to “give the most that you can do without overstretching or resentment”.
To help you decide how much to pay, please read this information about our needs to run the course.
When clicking "select ticket":
- For the accessibility tickets, please select the number of tickets under "accessibility" and your chosen amount in the donation box.
- For all other ticket types, please check the donation box after selecting your ticket type and complete it with a donation if you want to or turn the amount to 0.