Building Bridges for Systemic Change - A Conversation with Manda Scott

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If we accept that optimization is not useful and not possible and not necessary, and that there are other models, and that what we need to do is to build a bridge from where we are to where we could be, what does that bridge look and feel like?

Hi, thanks for joining me again for this week's episode of the podcast. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. So this week was a new experience for me, co-hosting a joint podcast with the amazing Manda Scott and her Accidental Gods podcast channel. It was an absolutely fascinating conversation, which I think Manda did better than me asking the questions, but for the first time for me, it was really fun to be on the other end of the interviewer's questioning. Manda is doing incredibly important work bringing people together around the question of what will be the future that we are proud to leave behind for our children. She does this through her shamanic work, her best-selling novels, and her membership communities and events she's convening around this vital question. Manda's new novel, Any Human Power, will be out in May, an amazing thrutopian novel breaking apart what we know about life, death, and the roots to hope, and asking us all to dream deeply and act boldly. I would also wholeheartedly recommend checking out Manda's Accidental Gods podcast. Podcast, such a range of amazing guests. And one of my favorites recently was the Democracy Rising episode with Audrey Tang, Taiwan's first digital minister and now ambassador-at-large in charge of cyberspace governance. And I'll put loads more links to Manda's work in the show notes.

Tim, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast.

Thank you, Manda. Welcome to the Future Learning Design podcast. The first time I've ever done a cross-posting podcast episode.

So yeah, super excited. Yeah, joint podcast. It's going to be fun. So from the Accidental Gods side, inquiring of you, how are you and particularly where are you this interesting Wednesday morning? We are recording, it's worth saying to everybody, 2 days after the US inauguration. So we are now 2 days beyond the end of democracy and into what might be techno-feudalism or might just be techno-cristo-something fascism. We don't know yet. So how are you and where are you as the world turns over?

Absolutely. No, strange times. Thank you. I love the question. I've been listening lots to the Accidental Gods podcast since we met. And yeah, I love the question. I think it's great grounding at the beginning. So I am, yeah, I'm feeling really good and excited to be talking with you. I feel like It's been a really special meeting actually, since I met you with our previous conversation with Jeannie and Raisa and Will on Collapse, our little pre-Christmas festival that we had. And where am I? Interestingly, I am sitting in an empty barn in the middle of Bordeaux in France. So we've, we've just bought a big empty stone barn, which is quite an adventure for us. I've got 3 kids and a dog and we're all sleeping in one room right now and trying to stay warm. But it's, but yeah, on the, on the way in a few years' time to getting, doing it up, seeing what happens, making it as eco as we can. Composting toilets perhaps, as we discussed off air. Exciting. So thank you.

Yeah. What temperature is it outside? Because I hadn't quite realized you'd moved in. When you said you'd bought it, I assumed, and we're living somewhere with, with full amenities while we do it up. But you're—

would be lovely, wouldn't it? It would be sensible. We tend not to do sensible things and we can't afford to do the sensible thing. So we're, yeah, we're in it and we're just, we're doing it. It's been cold. I mean, it's not cold like UK or Moscow or Kyiv or wherever, but, or post-Aymok collapse, but it's cold like minus 2 or 3 in the mornings it has been. So yeah, no, good fun. Staying warm.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. Goodness. All right. So, so thank you. In our joint podcast, it seemed to me that a useful kicking off point, because we are in very turbulent times. And yet I think a lot of us on whatever we call— those of us who are really interested in the continuation of complex life on Earth, which isn't necessarily everybody's focus, I am feeling along with the square-eyed horror at the things that are happening in a lot of places around the world, not just the US, is also that sense of, okay, we can stop pretending that the world is working now and accept that it really isn't. And that there is therefore a chance for something to emerge that would take us towards a continuation of complex life. Are you feeling that in your educational sphere of the world?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. In a way, yes. Personally, I've been feeling it. And I think, you know, this is something we discussed previously. There's been— I've shifted the focus of the podcast over the last few years very much more towards in a way, the big, more philosophical questions of what are we doing and, you know, how is this going to be sustainable over any kind of medium or long term? I still feel that there are a lot of people, and this was other people's frustration I know too, that are not even thinking about these questions. So maybe, I mean, that's my hope for this kind of strange and beautiful year, that maybe that it throws into sharp relief, as you say, the the fact that there is something very strange happening and that really might help people just sit up and take a bit more notice of the things that we have just taken for granted. I think my worry is people are so busy with just continuing and surviving, right, in institutional settings. For example, you know, I work with schools and school leaders and networks of educational, you know, systems and they're just kind of busy looking after the things that are in their gift at this moment, right? And that's a holding that's really challenging when there's these huge undercurrents or increasingly visible currents of collapse, change, you know, radical movement, whatever you, you know, want to call them. So it's, yeah, it's, it's always a weird paradox for me.

Yes. And I'm remembering that this brings up a lot. I really do want to continue down the education line with you because I think it's so vital. But it seems we recently, a group of us put in a grant application for an R&D sprint to create a feature film, and the remit was to explain the climate emergency better, specifically to explain the climate science. And I put quite a lot of effort in that application to very kindly, insofar as I could, reminding them that it's the knowledge deficit model was debunked a very long time ago. It's not that people don't know the science, it's that they have got no options. They don't have anywhere to go or any sense of empowerment or any agency to make things, or they don't understand that they could have those things. And absent those, frankly, why would you burden your sympathetic system with something you can't do anything about? Before we started, as you said, we were talking about the AMOC switching off, the Atlantic Meridian Overturn Current, which we used to call the Gulf Stream, which is much easier to say. And it is in the process of switching off, which is absolutely expletive deleted terrifying. But there's nothing that we can do about stopping that unless we have total systemic change. And if we don't have the roots to total systemic change, it's just another thing to lie awake screaming about, frankly. And so I'm also aware, I follow Stephen Spooner more on Substack, and he was the one right after the American election who was pointing out, he was harvesting a lot of Reddit threads of people going, oh, whoa, hang on. This is not right. And here's how it looks as if this election was massaged because they have electronic voting machines which run, as far as I can tell, on Windows 97, which is pretty easy to hack. And Donald Trump said at the inauguration, you know, Elon's really good with computers. He knew what he was doing. He got us the election. So, you know, now they're in, they're not pretending not to. But there was a really interesting post that Stephen Cross posted, and I'm just going to read a tiny little bit of it because I think it's worth So this is written on the 10th of January. To whom it may concern, I am writing this with a heavy heart and no small amount of fear. As a former ex— formerly Twitter— employee on an H-1B visa, I cannot reveal my identity without risking everything, but I can't stay silent any longer about what I saw and was made to do. When Elon Musk took over, everything changed. What started as a social media company became something much darker. I was part of a team that was directly ordered to manipulate Twitter systems to influence the 2024 US presidential election. It wasn't subtle and it wasn't ethical. We completely changed how the algorithm worked, pushing pro-Trump and right-wing posts to the top of people's feeds. To make it look balanced, we also boosted some left-wing critics of Democrats, but it was all carefully calculated. These changes didn't just affect Americans, they impacted users worldwide. There's a whole lot more, but basically he goes on to say that having done it in the US. They are now doing it around the world. I am terrified writing this, but I had to speak up. I just hope someone with the power to do something sees this letter. And they've put a whole bunch of stuff onto GitHub. He says, if you understand coding, we put breadcrumbs in there. We left breadcrumbs so you can see it, you can find it, you can understand what we did because we understood what we were doing. And he signs off, yours sincerely, a former employee who can't sleep at night. And wow, we know that we live in the best democracy that money can buy. And we have known this for quite a long time. It's been obvious around the world that the people with the money are the people who get to call the shots. And now the people with the money are doing actual fascist salutes in public at the US inauguration. And in the UK, we have The Guardian arguing whether it was a Mussolini salute or a Hitler salute, as if that were irrelevant. Please, anybody out there, just stop buying The Guardian now and tell them why you're doing that, because that's not how the media ought to be working. So we live in a world now where money buys democracy, and this is happening. And not only are people just struggling to keep the wheels on the bus turning, whatever they're doing in schools, they're having to feed the kids, they're having to buy their books for them. They're just having to hold people together as the social net breaks down. And they're being forced to teach stuff that, as far as I can tell, is institutional gaslighting of children, because we're all pretending that they're going to have jobs and a social net and a world worth living in. And here you've got to get an engineering degree because it's going to be very useful as the Amok shuts down. No, sorry, it isn't. And I wonder, in the networks that you're in, there are the people we need to reach who genuinely don't know what they could be doing? What kinds of agency are people seeing and taking so that we can build, let's say, social media networks that are not toxic and communities of place, purpose, and passion that are generative? What do you see?

Yeah, no, I mean, it is the question. And I think the first thing that comes to mind is the young people and the way that the young people are having to live through and with this when they see in their learning experiences, in their classrooms, they kind of feel this sense of disconnection with a lot of what they're learning, right? And they're kind of, they're holding, you know, eco-anxiety, talking about eco-anxiety as a kind of a catch-all term, but for, you know, mental health crises and all over the world, you're seeing this kind of, I was talking with a colleague in Beijing recently and, you know, you're seeing it Everywhere, these young people who are basically questioning the things that they're being given every day. And at the same token, many of the teachers are as well. But again, they're trapped in the institutional kind of hamster wheel, like, you know, they're keeping going. And the young people are kind of having to hold this, as you say, what's my future? You know, I was talking to some young people not that long ago, and in relation to AI particularly, but in With regards to what is the future that they're working towards, and they're incredibly conscious of the fact that it is not guaranteed. All these success narratives that have been just the lifeblood of the education system forever are no longer resonant with them. They just think, well, if I train to be a medic, is that actually gonna be the thing that I've been told it will be? And therefore I've gotta work, I've gotta do these subjects, I've gotta to work incredibly hard to get these grades, to do the next thing, the next thing, the next thing with this promise of, I mean, what exactly? But really some kind of promise of life, happiness, and success. Yeah. Which was the narrative before. And now they're just seeing everything that's going on in the world and thinking, well, that rings a bit hollow now. Right? So what do I do? What do I do with that when I've got to go to my next lesson? 'You know, which I'm not loving, but, you know, I've been told I've got to do.' And, you know, there's this kind of such an interesting kind of trap that the young people are in and feeling very strongly. And as I say, the educators simultaneously, many of them are kind of feeling like there's more and more kind of bureaucratic performance management of, you know, accountability structures, particularly in the UK. I work internationally, so, you You see very different pictures in different kind of systems, but there is a, you know, this kind of new public management observation of teachers to performance manage, to get outcomes. I mean, it's the thing that I find interesting is it's all the same kind of logic of optimization. And I don't know if you know Hartmut Rose's work, but I've been really interested in that recently. Just, he talks about optimization versus resonance as two different kinds of logics. In a way, right? And the logic of optimization is just, you know, how do we maximize? How do we be more efficient? How do we do more with less? You know, all of the stuff Keir Starmer was coming out with about AI last week, about how it's going to revolutionize the efficiency of government so we can get more for people in the public services because we can do more with less. I mean, this, these narratives.

Bonkers.

Exactly. But it's these narratives of efficiency and optimization. All the time, which is kind of soul-destroying, right? For young people in school, they can feel that that's what's happening. It's like, oh, do a bit more, get a bit of a better grade, do a bit more work so you can get a bit. And then plus, you know, you've got then this outside of school, college application, university application kind of treadmill that they're also thinking about, or should I be part of this club or this society so that I can show that I'm a well-rounded human. Like, Jesus, you know, you can't be a well-rounded human in an optimizing system that is basically the, the kind of treadmill of like, just keep going, keep, keep improving, and keep competing against your peers, the people you should be building community with.

You're all looking at each other sideways because if you get half a mark better than me, you might get into a college that I don't get into, and then my whole life falls apart.

Exactly.

It's horrible.

Exactly.

I was listening to Zack Stein a while ago, saying that in, I think, North Carolina, there are schools where every single child has gastric ulcers. And I was listening on your podcast to a lady saying that in the US, the parents are taking their kids to 5 separate things after school to prove how well-rounded they are.

Right.

You know, let's go to the violin lessons and then gymnastics and then you go and play chess. Right. This is, this is a form of torture.

Right.

And it's, it's, it's insane. And it is. It has to stop.

Absolutely. And I would temper that with a kind of, that's not everywhere. I mean, you know, it's really easy to catastrophize, I would say. And in many of the schools I work with, there are, you know, there are happy young people inquiring, learning together in class. So I think it's, this is partly my temperament, but I always, I resist the catastrophizing blanket kind of description of, it's not all like that. Right.

All right.

And there, It needs to fundamentally change, don't get me wrong, right? But there are spaces where committed, loving educators are trying to do the best with young people as, as our parents. But, and, you know, bringing in schoolishness, which is what you just did with, with Susan Bloom, the recent podcast I had, I mean, that concept of schoolishness has colonized so many spaces of life, right? It's the same kind of logic. It's like—

Well, it's the optimizing, isn't it? It's just a word for optimizing within schools, really.

Yeah. And then as a parent, it's become, you know, she talks about it pedagogizes everything, you know, everything's a learning opportunity because I can teach my young person, my child to be a little bit better so that they get the edge on the competition. It's a very weird concept that has colonized most of the world. And we are on that path dependency of, of that schoolishness, which is almost everywhere now. So the question is, how, what do we do about that? Right? When we're on that, we're on that path, on that treadmill. And that's the holding that I do a lot with the podcast and with all of the networks and amazing people I get to speak to is, yeah, how, what, what do you do when we're in that? We are so far down that rabbit hole, you know, because we, we still want to do something with the young people that we care about and work with every day. So.

So we're on to the question that we bring on Accidental Gods, which is clearly we need total systemic change. And it's relatively straightforward to see a future where that, what you're suggesting isn't happening. You were talking recently to your most recent podcast to someone in New Zealand about the Māori concepts of education. And that seemed very much to key into a binary that I don't really like binaries, but this concept that our culture is a trauma culture, this must optimize culture, and that first of all, optimization is good. Second, that it's essential. And third, that it's possible in the way the world is, which is, I think our, particularly in the UK, we've got a generation of political leaders who came of age in the 1980s and whose emotional world has not altered since then. So they're still thinking as if we're at peak fossil fuels and GDP acceleration, and they haven't got their heads out of that. But leaving them to one side, if we accept that optimization is not useful and not possible and not necessary, and that there are other models, and that what we need to do is to build a bridge from where we are to where we could be, what does that bridge look and feel like?

Are you—

What are you seeing in the educators that you talk to who are actively building bridges towards systemic change?

Yeah. So just to slightly go back on what you've just said, I would slightly disagree that optimization is not ever desirable. And the fact that you invoke bridge building is— I had a fantastic conversation a few years ago with an MIT professor, Sanjay Sarma. And we were talking about this then, that in certain contexts you want to be systematic, you want to optimize, right? You know, when you're— if you're building a bridge, you want to make sure that the engineering's spot on, right? You really do. And so there's something really important in that holding that. For me, that systematic optimizing logic has colonized everything. It's not that it's not useful some where in some places. So I just wanted to kind of again bring, bring that in because it's— I think that's an important point, that we sometimes can sweep away the value that is in some of that when there is also clearly a fundamental imbalance where that logic has moved into spaces where it is completely violent and unreasonable and shouldn't be there, right?

Okay.

Like bringing up children, like, you know, being in right relationship, in loving relationship with fellow humans. That, that is not a space where we should be thinking in an optimizing way. I would say that's eugenics, right? For me, that's eugenics. It's like, okay, so yeah, I think it's important to think about— for me, balance is a really a really kind of strong— yeah, it's a strong concept because it just—

it—

there is a sense that as we move away from the thing that we're in, there's a holding of the tensions of the cultural history and the tradition and the reason why we've ended up where we are. Yeah, as kind of—

so can we unpick this? Because this feels— I really still want to look at bridge building and green shoots, but this feels really quite core. So I start from a place where a fully realized human, and we have the potential for that and it's our birthright, is heart-connected to the web of life. And that if the web says you need to build a bridge, then you will be co-creating bridge building with other nodes in the web of life that might be beavers and the trees and the rocks and the wind. And what we would bring would be, here's my concept of my understanding of getting from one side of the river to the other, and let's see what we can co-create. And that's Absolutely. I'm not suggesting that we don't optimize for a bridge that actually bears weight, because clearly that's what we want in the long run. But the impetus to do so would come from the hypercomplex, endlessly emerging system that is the web of life. And I wonder where in your world, where does the impetus to build, make, grow come from? Does that make sense as a question?

It does make sense. It does make sense as a question. And I guess I think many people, myself included, have lost touch to some degree with that, where, with where that is coming from, the source of that. And I think that feels quite core to what's going on at the moment. I, and again, personally, as a reflection, I would say over the last few years, I've maybe come back to an awareness of where that is coming from, or I've come to an awareness of— I mean, you know, what different people call it different things, right? But ecological awakening. I was listening to Bill Plotkin in preparation because I have— yeah, it would be interesting to talk about that. But he calls it ecological awakening, right? And I find that to be a bit of an enlightenment-type term. But, but actually, at the core of the idea, you've got a really interesting an important connectedness and interrelationship with each other, the web of life, as you're saying, that I, I actually don't— I think a lot of people have completely lost touch with that sense. Totally. And I think that's, that for me is a really interesting part of the problem, problem in inverted commas, because reconnecting with that is not something you can mandate for everybody. It's not something you can put in a curriculum. It's not something you can optimize for, right? So, but there's, but there's this deep kind of need, yearning, feels, you know, to reconnect with that. And that's, for me, is where the impetus comes from. But when people have lost touch with that intuition, you could call it, I guess, the heart-mind, you know, as I love, you know, your description. There's something really important there about how do we reconnect with ourselves, with our bodies, with our connection to the web of life, all of those things that would allow us to then open up more of that impetus and more of the questions about where that's coming from so that we can then respond to, yeah, how do we build the bridges, you know?

Yeah, yes, for sure. Yes. And, and this is the spheres that I work in. This is a question that we constantly come to, is the inner work is paramount. But for people who don't even know the inner work exists, you can't make it happen. It has to be— you have to be asking the questions. But what I think we can do for people who are beginning to ask the questions— so a lot of people, they feel very isolated. And what we get a lot with the shamanic work is people come along and say, I can't talk about this to anybody else. I can't talk about it to my family or my colleagues at work or, you know, the people at the school gate when I go and pick up the kids, because our culture has created this, the kind of citadel mind that Tanya Luhrmann talks about, is so hegemonic that even to suggest that it might not be a real thing is to risk ridicule and exclusion. And yet what happens when people do begin to talk about it, they begin to get a little bit more secure in their own sense of where they're at, is people will deny it in public and then in private they'll come and want to talk. And we're finding that increasingly. And I think one of the things that I am working quite hard on is creating a space where it's okay to explore and where the narrative of Citadel Mind becomes less the only one. And it's frightening for a lot of people. It's really interesting watching Rupert Sheldrake quite often talks about this. He goes and talks about his morphic resonance theory and he'll be invited to big science conferences basically so they can shout at him and tell him how he's wrong.

Right.

But afterwards he says, two glasses glasses of wine in and they're queuing around his table to come and tell them about their own personal experiences of why he's right. But the public narrative has to still be that it's wrong. And that seems to be a very widespread experience. And so we need very fast, I think, and this is somewhere where I think tipping points will happen. I'm a bit cautious about social tipping points, but this particular tipping point is not demanding total systemic change. It's just saying, Let's take down something that at heart we all know, a lot of us know not to be true and make it okay for us to be able to bridge between Western— we are engineers, we know how to build a bridge that works. And is it appropriate to build a bridge over this river at this particular time? I'm remembering back in Schumacher, we first term we were taught, here's conventional economics and here's why it's completely wrong. And here's now look at Buddhist economics and a bunch of other forms of economics that are Slightly nicer. And because they knew I did the shamanic work, one of the main teachers went out and said, "And here's this instance of shamanic economics. Look, they went and they asked the river if it was okay to build the dam." No, they didn't. No, no. They went and did a ceremony to propitiate the river in order to build the dam. And of all the things that blew my fuses on that first understanding of the extent to which we were being lied to, that was the one. Because shamanic economics is not making an offering to the river before you pour millions of tons of concrete and totally destroy the ecosystem. Shamanic economics would be, we all need to thrive what's the best way. And I would be seriously surprised if the river and the web of life said, oh really, what you need is a dam. It's just not going to happen. So allowing for that mind shift to be a thing, and that becomes really important, I think.

I mean, it's all just in the word economics. It comes with all that baggage, right? You bring that in and you put it together with shamanic or, you know, like Charles Eisenstein, you put it together with sacred. It's like sacred economics. Okay. Yeah, that sounds beautiful to me, but it's still bringing with it all this baggage of, yeah, the Citadel Mind stuff. So it's, yes, it is.

The value is measured in, in pound signs or dollars.

Right, exactly. And it's so much, I feel like, of my exploration over the last couple of years, particularly, for example, Karl Mika I spoke to on the podcast recently, a Māori philosopher, and many others. It seems, it feels like such a a step for, for example, a teacher working in a primary school in inner London to be then engaging with this, like, also what, you know, these Māori ontologies about how— and it's a relationship with the world that is in, in context. And it's like, it feels such a— same thing with Vanessa Angiotti when I spoke to her. Yes, I remember I was— I said to her in the conversation, it feels like another planet. Or these really committed, loving, hardworking teachers who are there trying to do their best for these young people, holding all of the stuff that we're talking about. It's like, yeah, I want that. I want to go there. But how do I go there from here?

What's the through-topia from here to there?

Perfect. Yes, exactly.

Yes. But so we had recently on the podcast a young man called Elliot who is very aware of this. And what he's doing is introducing permaculture to the schools. Because that's probably at the edge limit of where their existing frame will allow. But within permaculture, we can begin to look at the whole of the cycles of life, really, in ways that then at least the kids know that food grows in the soil and doesn't arrive in plastic at Tesco's. That's a bit of a cliché, but it's a thing. And he can begin to introduce the what happens if we just sit in the land and ask what it wants. At the edges of that, Because I think that also is a thing. You mentioned Bill Plotkin, and I get very scared of— there's a whole movement within our field where people know that we need to be talking to— and they use the word nature as if it were something out there. And it's a really— we can talk about it and we can get very self-righteous about it and we can claim some kind of moral high ground. We're not actually living it as if it were real. And that's that too. Is a bridge we need to build is the difference between knowing that this is a thing and making it the way that we live. Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think just getting kids to just sit on the ground, put their hands in the soil and see how they feel is a huge step. And that may be a thing that a primary school teacher can do. Let's just grow beans.

Exactly. Exactly. I completely agree with you because, and I think that the permaculture or the nature-based learning or these kinds of initiatives, you might say, but they are the steps that we need to be taking because you've got, you can only do what's possible within your current context. But, you know, sometimes I get a bit frustrated by the kind of 21st century skills language about these are the things our kids will need in the future. And actually, I think what they, you know, this kind of preparedness narrative about, oh, we've got to prepare them for the future. And it's like, What about future prepping? Exactly. I mean, it's everywhere. But no, honestly, Amanda, it's everywhere in education in terms of—

What kind of things are they saying? Because this is obviously better than, okay, you need to go to school and get brilliant grades and stuff. But how is future prepping emerging?

So this is the kind of progressive narrative, I would say, that's pretty dominant in the innovation spaces in educational globally, right? So it's some kind of dispositions and characters and capability around creativity, innovation, critical thinking. It's not radically different, but it's all for me. And this is, this is the deep irony that I discovered in my conversation with Gert Biester a few years ago. The irony of the name of the podcast is Future Learning Design. And actually the thing I think is so needed is like coming back into now, the present orientation rather than this obsessive future orientation. And this skills language and this, you know, it's like World Economic Forum type language about what are the skills and capabilities that the fourth industrial revolution will need. All of that kind of language is what motivates a lot of the calls for educational change.

Wow.

And yes, they're calling for educational change, but the logic for me is still that same logic of optimization. And the thing that's much more of a radical move is exactly what you say, get the young people outside of the classroom to put their hands in the soil and just be, just connect. Just— and this is why resonance, I think, is a really interesting concept from Hartmut Rosa as the counter to optimization, is because you, you can't control resonance. It's like, it's that there is a, there is a presence that's required with resonance, and there is just a, some, I don't know, connectedness, or there is a being of a relationship with the world, a call and response he talks about. In relation to the world. It's like, that's now, that's not in 10 years' time when you're in your career or when the economy's changed. It's now.

And so I think it's an emergent process that is wholly unpredictable.

Exactly, exactly. And, and so I had a, I had a really interesting moment of frustration. I was yesterday watching Nate Hagens and Bill Plotkin have their conversation again, partly preparing. I know. And there was a moment in that where Nate and Bill talk about, you know, how psychology has kind of— why is there no ecology in psychology? And it's like, I was shouting at the radio, the podcast, that like, there is a branch of psychology called ecological psychology, and it is all about— yes, affordances of being in, you know, what is possible in this space right now. And I've got a podcast coming up with a couple of guys who have— professors of ecological psychology who have written— because I think this is something that everybody should know about. This is Okay, cool.

A woman, but yes.

Okay.

Yes. So we're both heading in the same direction. Isn't that interesting? Yes.

It's so important because I think, you know, education fundamentally has been based on cognitive and behavioral psychology, which has taken us into this control-based, you know, brain-based. And actually this ecological psychology is like, why didn't you just go and talk to James, you know, go down the corridor and talk to James Gibson at the time? It's like, what did he have to say about the affordances of the space that you're in and the connectedness to this space, what's possible here, all of that kind of language. That for me is what is really possible actually in a classroom. And I had a podcast a while back with Alicia Huarado, who wrote the book Context Changes Everything, and she's just amazing. And it, again, it was the same thing. It's about when you have an attunement and an awareness to context, the ecology that you're participating in.

Yes.

There's something really important there that I think we can bring more into educational conversations again, to get away from this obsessive future orientation with preparing young people for their futures. Like, no, it's now. This is it. This is now.

But, and also I wonder to what extent, I haven't listened to that podcast and I need to, it seems to me, yes, you go down the corridor, you talk to James Gibson, you also go outside and you ask the tree. Exactly. And you ask the hill. And you get the kids so that it's okay to look up at the sky and see 3 crows fly past and help that inform your decision-making and ask your dreams and work on how do we talk to each other in ways that aren't our mouths. I was talking to one of my shamanic peers recently, and he trained in North America, and he was expressing the fact that so much of the conversations that happen are not verbal. So he was sitting in a particular big gathering and people could ask questions of the shaman before you ate. And he was really hungry, traveled a long way and the food's all laid out. And these people are asking question after question after question. And he's sitting there thinking, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up. I just want to eat. And he got this piercing headache suddenly and his eyes were drawn around and the shaman was looking straight at him and he heard a voice in his head going, I think you should shut up. Oh, silence in his head. And okay, you can ask questions. And then later, same meal, next to a little 3-year-old-ish girl and her mother. And there's quite a lot of chocolate. People have brought gifts and offerings and people bring chocolate because sacred. And the little girl's going, "Could I have some chocolate?" And her mother's going, "Well, yes, I think so. You'd have to ask the shaman." And she opens her mouth to ask the shaman. And the mother goes, "No, no, you ask inside. You don't have to ask verbally." And this is, you know, this is in our lifetime. This is a living thing that happened in the span of your and my lifetime. Why are we not teaching this to our kids? Why not?

Such an interesting, yeah, I mean, such an interesting question because again, I would come back to how much we've lost. We, I mean, many of us in these weird cultures who are so disconnected from even, even our bodies, right? I mean, it's, it's like it goes so deep and I don't know whether I've said this to you before, but when I first heard your name was from Nick Mulvey at COP26.

Oh, really?

Okay.

So— You haven't said this before at all. I'm intrigued.

So Nick Mulvey, do you know who Nick Mulvey is?

It rings a bell. You're gonna have to give me a context.

He's a singer-songwriter from Cambridge.

Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Right.

Yes.

And he was performing at COP26 and he talks about you and the fact that we are awakening from a post-Roman nightmare is the quote he brings in, right? From Buddhica.

Yes. And he's written songs. Yes.

He has. Exactly. Mona and other songs he's written based on your writing. I love his music.

We'll see if we can find them and put them in the show notes.

Yeah, amazing. The reason I bring it in is because what he's talking about there is how much we've lost from our European indigenous past. So that's exactly what he's trying to say there is that something about this post-Roman nightmare that we're awakening from is this disconnection, like deep, you know, thousands of years of disconnection from something indigenous. Yeah, because we're all indigenous. I mean, you know, we're kind of— we're all indigenous, right?

Yes.

So there's, there's something really important, I think, in— to your point, how much we've— how many skills and competencies, you know, if you want to put that language on it, have we lost with this disconnection from our own nature?

They are rediscoverable. And in 2,000 years, in 300,000 years of, of human evolution, 2,000 years is a blink. And we're all born with this. I think this is our birthright. We're all born with this capacity. And in kids, it's still very much alive. I'm doing— I do CPD for the shamanic work. I'm doing a training in mediumship at the moment because it's similar. And almost to a person, the people on the course are saying, I was doing this as a kid and I was told it was wrong and I had to stop because I had to fit in. And now I'm trying to open those doors again. And it's hard because I've had 20, 30, however many decades of slamming them shut. They will open given time. And the kids, if we stopped telling them they had to not do it, then that's a whole generation that could grow with that. I think we're so afraid of what might arise if we allow the domestication of our citadel mind culture to evolve into something different because, because it's unpredictable. And we, we label a lot of things that are in other cultures normal as psychopathy. One of my other teachers works a lot with people with schizophrenia. He says the difference between us, the shamanic practitioners, and them is that we choose where to go and we know how to come back. But perhaps if we gave these people the skills to choose how to go and to know how to come back, they would not be on lithium. Yeah. Or that's a box for— they wouldn't be given a label and treated in the Western way with drugs because the other realities exist. Just would be very useful to be able to navigate them with a degree of predictability. And we're afraid, I guess, we wouldn't know how to do that.

Completely. And I completely agree with you. And I think it's also interesting, even, you know, the fact that we're talking about different branches of psychology, it's like when it has a, in inverted commas, scientific language around it, it's possible to say.

Yes.

But when it's shamanic or whether it, you know, spiritual or whatever, it's kind of woo-woo in inverted commas. And it's not possible to say actually in many contexts, it's not possible to bring these things in. And I'm really curious. You must have had that exact experience so many times going into a space, have you not? So I'm really interested.

Yeah. We had this conversation. So I was at the Oxford Real Farming Conference. We had a day before called Listening to the Land, which was curated by the Animate Earth Collective and by the UN Conscious Food Systems Alliance, which was really interesting. They had exactly woken up to the fact that shifting collecting data points with World Economic Forum criteria was not what it was at. And that the people they worked with were talking to the land and they needed to bring them together. And it was beautiful and gorgeous and interesting. We had a bit where we were put together, just turn to the person next to you and talk. And I ended up talking with Colin Campbell, who's part of the AnimaEarth Collective and was brought up in Botswana as a white child. But he spent a lot of time with the elders and has been initiated into their ways. And with a member of the Conscious Food Systems Alliance, and we had this conversation and I had just stood up and said something and I'd wept as I was saying it. And so they were aware that I was capable of being emotional in public. And it was, how do you talk about this? And actually my experience is I grew up as— first of all, I was openly lesbian from when I was quite young and in a world of veterinary clinical academia, I was the only out person in 6 universities in the UK. The whole of the— and it wasn't that I was the only person who was not heterosexual, but I was the only one who was going, hey guys, come on, let's pretend this is 1980-something, shall we? And then I was doing shamanic work while being a clinical anaesthetist and telling some of the students, you know, we're taking our horses, particularly that's what I worked with, to the edges of the River of Death and we're bringing them back. And it really matters that we know where they are in that journey. And there were some students who got that and there were some who just, you know, you're crazy. But once you got the label of being eccentric, you can say whatever the fuck you like. There you go. And it doesn't matter. And that's— I discovered that quite early, is I have a pass at the moment in the culture we have. And, you know, if the techno-feudalism comes, that pass may end quite quickly. But just at the moment, I have a pass to say whatever I like.

Yeah.

Whenever I like. And I use it.

Brilliant.

And then the people come up after us and go, I'm so glad you said that because nobody is saying that.

Yeah.

And it needs— more of us need to break that boundary.

Absolutely. And I mean, Rupert Sheldrake's another example, right? I mean, his books were being burned at Cambridge.

I mean, you know, his TED Talk is one of the few that has been banned.

Exactly. There was such a violent reaction to what he was saying. But then at the same time, we, you know, these weird rational cultures pride themselves on this critical thinking and this ability to kind of— which is nonsense. Because it's all dogma. Because it's like, well, what you're saying is outside of the dogma of scientism or of, you know, the scientific biomedical paradigm, whatever. And so you can't say that here. You can say that in your strange, strange spaces over there.

Yeah.

But I—

and we'll tell everybody that you're mad.

Yeah, exactly.

And then that's okay.

Yeah. But I completely agree. I think it's really important that we have more of those different kinds of tonalities, I guess, of ways of being human bring into the space because this really is fundamentally important. And it makes me think, actually, I've been doing some work with Nora Bateson on warm data. And this has been so interesting, but it's been such an interesting experience because we've been taking the idea of a warm data lab into a school. And so for listeners who aren't aware, a warm data lab is effectively a kind of a space, a protocol that that Nora, based on decades of her own work and the work of her father, Gregory Bateson, and many others, has kind of brought this space into this facilitation of essentially allowing complexity to emerge and for people to connect in that space. And, and for, for this idea of warm data, which is essentially a name that she's put onto the incredible, amazing, beautiful complexity of life. In order to talk about it.

Emergence in process.

Right, exactly.

But she's given it a scientific frame.

She's kind of given it a frame. It is. And it's, I think, really conscious. She's given it a scientific frame so that it can be participated in, in a way that's palatable, let's say, to some extent in these different spaces. So she's doing really interesting work in conference spaces and in all sorts of amazing spaces. We've been trying to say, well, what does that look like in a school context? And it's like oil and water, right? I mean, it's so interesting because it is in a school context that is completely obsessed with outcomes.

Right.

Pre-planned clear outcomes. Emergence is not, is a very dangerous concept in a school context, right? Because everything is about, well, what are these young people going to know? What are they going to know and be able to do by the time we finish this lesson, by the time we finish this unit, by the time they graduate from this school? It's predicated on pre-prepared outcomes.

Right.

And so a warm data lab is pure emergence, basically, but with some really important and interesting enabling structures put in there, right? All the different contexts. So you can see how the different contexts like health and education and law and media and social media and how they all overlay and interact. It's absolutely fascinating to be a participant in and to observe. But it's also so interesting to see how, where this meets up against the educational, like the kind of schoolishness, let's say, right? It butts up against the schoolishness. And so—

So have you actually done it? Have you brought it into schools?

Yeah.

What do the kids— So how do the people who participate, the young people, and I'm guessing you have teachers in there.

Yeah.

How does it sit with them physiologically in their emotional space when they've done it?? Because that seems to me critical. If they come out going, 'That was so amazing and my whole world feels brighter,' then we're beginning to create the stepping stones.

Yeah. So I would say a mix of experiences, right? So, okay, certain contexts have been— the scripts of the school have been so strong that it's been, it's actually been quite difficult to allow that to break through. So for example, if you've got a load of young people who are all part of the same year group, they've known each other for a long time, and you then kind of, you have this strange lady coming in, bringing this strange concept on a Tuesday morning that they're not quite sure why they're there. Then there's this interesting holding of, well, the friend groups end up hanging out with the friend groups, because in a Warm Data Lab, you can move around, right? So you can.

So the cliques that already exist kind of self-organize.

Right, exactly. So, and what, and unfortunately what happens, this there's still movement that happens, but it does, I think it doesn't quite, you know, come to its fullest potential in those settings because there almost needs to be, I've noticed it, I think it works better when there's a little bit of a frisson of like, you don't quite know the other people in the space. So there's a nice mix.

So in conferences where there's a lot of people all drawn together from a lot of different places.

Different mix of ages, different mix of different networks, So for example, I know if Nora's going into an organization, for example, she'll invite them to bring in people from outside the organization into the space so that it gives it that sense of, yeah, some kind of unfamiliarity that brings in a different energy.

So ideally mix 2 or 3 year groups from 2 or 3 schools. Exactly. And try and persuade them to not just self-select into the right people.

Right. So there's that dimension I think we've definitely noticed and then The other one is having a frame as to why they're doing it. And this is something I've talked a lot to Nora about, but there is some challenges around conscious purpose, right? And Gregory Bateson talks a lot about conscious purpose, that it's quite a dangerous thing to get trapped in when you've, again, it's about the, you know, you're planning, why am I doing this? And what I'm going to the market to buy bread versus I'm going to the market and buying bread.

Yes, exactly. Which is a subtle but important distinction that Nora makes, I think Although every supermarket is based on the fact that they put all the stuff that they want you to pick up while you happen to be there. So it's not like we don't experience the, I went to the supermarket with a list of 3 things and came back having spent way more money than I expected.

Totally. Because I've been manipulated by the funnel of supermarket marketing.

Cognitive neuroscience has been applied to me. Would that work? So I just, would warm data work better if you did it in primary schools where the kids have not yet been so inculcated into having to have a purpose?

It's a good question. We haven't yet done it with younger children. It might be interesting, but I think it would be magic in all sorts of other ways, I'm sure. But just to finish that about the frame, I think it's important. The other place we've done it, or one of the other places we've done it, is in an amazing college called UWC Atlantic College in Wales.

Oh, right. With Raisa.

With Raisa, exactly, where Raisa works. And The frame for that was they are the first school that is running the Systems Transformation Pathway for the International Baccalaureate, which is a whole nother thing we could talk about, but— Yes. Yes.

Please start a new podcast.

Right. Which is, it's an amazing development. It's a really, really important development within the establishment. There is a space being created for these conversations around systems transformation. It's really important and amazing, but the reason I bring it in there is because doing a Warm Data Lab in that context, where the young people are already learning about systems thinking, complexity, you know, systems change, food systems, energy systems, etc., they already had a sense of a why. And I've had this conversation with colleagues within the Bateson Institute and with Nora herself. I think it's important sometimes to give people a bit of a why because there's an orientation that happens about why I'm, you know, I don't want to know everything that's going to happen here, but I want to have a, what's my invitation? Why am I coming into this space?

Otherwise I just feel really lost and it spends half the time processing that lostness inside and all the trauma triggers that that's going to happen in the little frozen places that, that get very upset if I don't know why. And, and being kind to those parts is quite important, I would think.

Right. That's a lovely way of saying it. So yeah, I think that's been also super interesting is the places where there's a bit of a frame has been incredible. Like, and to your exact description, the young people come out of those thinking, wow, this is amazing. I want to do more. I want to learn how to hold the spaces, become a Warm Data Lab host. I mean, really amazing.

Cracking.

Yeah. So.

Isn't Wales amazing? It's, yeah. Is this arising in Wales because it has the 7 Generation concept and it just is slightly different, or is it pure chance? That this is a Welsh thing.

I don't think it's entirely pure chance. I mean, I would say maybe nothing's pure chance in that sense, right?

Okay, yes, that's true.

Because there is an adventurousness about the UWC Atlantic College, which, and it's been there for 50 years, 60 years. I mean, you know, there's something in Wales that has been there that has enabled Atlantic College to continue to thrive as quite a— well, no, I would say very progressive space.

And because other progressive spaces in England like Dartington School and things were shut down. Exactly. For being too progressive, as far as I could tell. I know someone quite well who was in the last year there and the headmaster, the students were able to choose the new head and this person came in saying all the right things. And the day they arrived, they started closing it down. And it felt like this place is just too progressive and it's frightening the establishment that we are creating people who have the capacity for autonomous thought and understand systems. Which is very sad. And so I'm curious with AWC in Wales, is the rest of the educational establishment on whatever scale we want to look at that, seeing what's happening and thinking, yes, this is stuff that we want all our young people to experience, or is it like, we're just going to wall you off like some kind of strange foreign thing and make sure you don't infect our people?

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question and I would say two things to that. One is there's a lot of interest in the Systems Transformation Pathway as it's in the pilot stage. So it was started in Wales. It was now at UWC Singapore. It's then gonna be in other schools around the world with more of a general kind of invitation in a few years. So there's a lot of interest in that for progressive committed educators who are wanting to do something differently. 100%.

And can you, for those of us on my podcast who don't know what this is, can you very briefly when you finish with your answer, tell us what actually Systems Transformation Pathway is, but finish Well, maybe I can kind of wrap it up with the 'and' because the 'and' is that it needs to also manifest differently in different cultural contexts.

So—

Because that's systemic.

Because that's systemic, right?

We're not imposing.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And that's a really important dimension to this because I work with the International Baccalaureate mostly with Festival of Hope, which we can talk about if you want to, but the important aspect of that is it's it's global, it's, you know, it's in 155 countries. And in every country, there is a sense that it, it will show up differently because of the cultural context in which that's happening. And particularly with something where you're talking about systems transformation, that is importantly different. That in a Singaporean context, what's possible to say, what's possible to do, what, you know, what the conversations that that course is showing up in are different. And so therefore, just to weave in the what is it, what it is, it's essentially a programme within the diploma programme, which is the International Baccalaureate 16 to 18, similar to A-levels.

Yeah.

And it's coming in as kind of in response to global challenges, in response to the mission of the organisation to build peace and a better world through education. And it's also responding to the questioning of standardized educational experiences and standardized exams. So there's no external standardized examinations as part of the course, bearing in mind, still in pilot phase. So it's, you know, it's, it's developing and changing, but it's really powerfully important to bring young people into, for example, in Wales, you know, understanding food systems, energy systems, and migration as three topic, kind of topic areas. But a lot of investigation around agency for young people in those spaces. How do they understand the systemic interactions of, you know, global supply chains and all of those kinds of things?

And they're not necessarily either collapse-aware or even predicated on a shifting climate and the necessity for total systemic change. They're just allowing young people to understand systems dynamics. Is that— What I'm understanding.

I think so. I mean, again, you know, allowing space for young people to find their own way in that, right? So to say we need global systemic change, neither you nor I know what that means really. It's easy to say. What it actually looks like is rather different.

How do we get there? It's an entirely different question.

And those young people will be holding a lot of that, you know, in 10, 20, 30 years' time, that responsibility of how they do that. So that I, for me, the idea of enabling a cohort of young people, a critical mass of young people who are aware and able to navigate that kind of systemic change, it's like, is the work, right? In a way. I mean, it's so important.

Yeah, totally. Wow. This, gosh, this does feel like a whole other podcast. I really want to talk more about systems change. And so I'm wondering where we could take it as a beginning to ramp down rather than a ramping up, because going straight into total systemic change feels like— does feel like opening a very big door, but it's so essential. And so I have a question. I'm thinking back to the podcast we did with Elliot, and they're doing a lot of work on helping the young people to learn self-regulation and learning emotional literacy as an integral part of then also learning to work with the land. And we were talking about addressing the parts that get frozen. I'm exploring a lot with Thomas Hubl's work of the fact that trauma is a moment frozen in time, and, and that if we can thaw all those moments in time within ourselves and between each other, then— and he works a lot with ancestral trauma that's passed down generations and freezes still— then we could create the energetic space where healing is happening. And that's also an integral part of this systemic work, that the Citadel Mind and the trauma culture is a whole cultural freeze in a way, and that allowing the thawing is part of something that we have to do quite urgently, because then that allows us to— for me, he doesn't say this, but I think if we thaw and we can flow, then the connection to the web of life and to each other in the nonverbal, nonlinear ways becomes much more accessible. Within the educational spaces that you're looking at, Is— what am I trying to get to— is an awareness of internal dynamics and how to navigate them an integral part of what young people are being given?

Yeah, it's a good question. I wouldn't say integral, no. And I would say it comes— it shows up with quite a different discourse surrounding it, obviously, but basically, you know, compared to what you've— how you've just described it. But I would say for probably 20, 30 years, there has been an emerging discourse around emotional literacy, emotional— it gets captured by the intelligence language. So emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman, all of that kind of work. Social and emotional learning is a big buzzword, buzz phrase in education. So there is, I think, very definitely an awareness that this is an important part of an educational— should be part of an educational space, educational diet for our young people, particularly, for example, with more challenges with mental health and well-being, more discourses around well-being, flourishing, these kinds of, you know, OECD talking about human flourishing. There is a sense that these things are, are being talked about. One of the challenges though is that they're often— this is quite a systemic challenge, I think, in educational spaces is that they're initiatives and projects that come in on the fringes, on the sides. It doesn't necessarily go to the heart of the business of what we do in classrooms, you know, in schools.

Right.

You know, it's kind of bringing in mindfulness once a week or, you know, to support with a connectedness and awareness, right?

And I've done that myself, honestly, you know, I, And it's better than nothing, I'm guessing.

I know, exactly, because it's like, where are those spaces in an incredibly packed schedule, in a logic of optimization? Where are those spaces that you can carve out to have those moments where you can allow a little bit of emergence to happen, allow young people to be a little bit more connected with themselves and with each other than they would otherwise be going from lesson to lesson? And so, for example, for me in my career, that's that's been— I used to teach and do a lot of work with programs around life skills, personal social education, citizenship education. They come up, they show up in different systems with different names. I see your eyebrows go up at citizenship.

I was at citizenship, so all I know about citizenship is a friend who was Hungarian who had to sit citizenship exams here and was asked questions that none of us would be interested in.

So it all sounds very nationalistic.

It was horrible. Yeah, right.

Yes. But my point is, is there are some spaces in schools where they try to do some of this work, and— but it's always fringe, it's never core, you know?

Okay. When in fact it is actually called to being human.

100%. Yeah, exactly. The problem is, I would say, one of the important pieces of work is to not allow the kind of capture of those things into a programmatic, optimizing, systematic approach. Because as soon as that happens—

We have more tick boxes.

Exactly. It's like, okay, we've done our mindfulness or we've done our— and it's the capture of these really well-meaning initiatives being brought in to try and create more space for young people.

Yeah, of course.

But they get captured by the optimizing system. And so that's a deep— that's like a meta challenge, I would say, for education. Yeah.

Yeah.

Really.

And, and who is— I'm guessing you know about it, so other people know about it. So I remember again, listening to your podcast of, of somebody, I think before Christmas, reminding us that during the Tory years, they had the same education minister for 10 years, which was Michael Gove. And he was, he was shutting down everything because he basically still thought that everybody should just learn Latin and then they would be perfect. And the trauma, the level of inbuilt trauma that is then being imposed was truly disconcerting, and I'm being very kind there. But then, you know, and therefore other people know that optimizing for internal healing is not a thing. How can it become? What are the bridges that we could build to make it mainstream?

And I would say that the things I'm seeing, the really exciting and important projects and, you know, green shoots that are coming up are spaces where they're— whether it's online or in-person schools where they are, or, you know, educational experiments if you like, where they're just allowing— often it's built around a concept. So for example, the Green School in Bali where, you know, good friends work, it's, it's a really— there's a concept there that says, okay, we are a school that takes us as nature seriously and we're going to enable young people to be part of that. Or the School of Humanity an online school that's just, you know, trying to bring more open generative spaces of learning for young people. They are happening, right? But they're not yet embedding themselves systematically, systemically, because— and I would say, and this is, you know, explodes the conversation into a much larger frame of people like Indi Johar— it's like a paradigm of control, you know, these kind of cultures of control, as you were saying about this fear of letting the wildness happen, right? Letting us explore. It's just based on those larger paradigms of control. It's really difficult to create genuinely open spaces where we allow for emergence because it feels—

But the teachers have to be in that place to begin with, and they've also been through the optimizing process.

Exactly. And, you know, Bill Plotkin again was saying, you know, if all young people just had nature-based primary school, primary education was just nature-based, you know, a deeper connectedness and on an ongoing basis until they're 10, 11, 12 years old, great, that would make a significant difference. Clearly that's not going to happen and it's not possible in all climates. That's the other, that's another interesting part of this when you work Globally, you know, okay, I live—

Right, it's -40 out there, nobody's going to go and sit on the ground. Exactly.

Or it's +40 out there increasingly and it's not possible to be outside in the sunshine. So, you know, there is sometimes a romantic European bias to some of these ideas.

Right. So we need to do the reforesting first so that you can go and sit under the shade of the trees that are— Yes. Gosh. Okay. Systems.

Exactly. But it's, you know, it's beautiful and amazing and there's so much possibility there, I really feel. And I feel the fact that more and more of these kinds of conversations are happening, like the one we had with Will and Raisa, you know, there are more and more people having the conversation about what is fundamentally disassociating about this optimizing logic. You know, something needs to change, but you can't just optimize your way out of that.

No, no, exactly. Yes. The master's house will not be dismantled with the master's tools.

Exactly.

And, and, or no problem is solved from the mindset that created it. And so where's your entry point? And I wonder, as we're closing, you talked about the Festival of Hope because it seemed to me that that was an entry point. Do you want to just say a little bit about what it is and how it works? Absolutely.

No, I'd love to. Thank you.

Take us there.

So it, I mean, it came up 2 and a half years ago in conversation with Olli Pekka Heinonen, who's the Director General of the IB, the International Baccalaureate, as a response to the need amongst young people, really. Do you know that the IB had seen really difficult challenges with, through the pandemic, with young people feeling suicidal, feeling just, you know, feeling the deep, deep challenges of the moment they were in, the disruption, the continued kind of, you know, pressure of assessments, etc., that didn't stop during that time. And their life goals were still hinged on these, you know, getting these grades. In response to that, and with a really important mission that the IB has of peace and a better world through education, we decided to, you know, think about how can we essentially create spaces for young people to come together and talk about these things that they care about, that they're passionate about, they want to change, like climate, like mental health crises, like, you know, all honestly any issues that are coming up for them in their communities. So we framed it again, we framed it around the Festival of Hope, which—

Which is online.

Which is, yep, and people can find out more about it. We do online, in-person spaces. Yeah, absolutely. And it's It's, I find it interesting that still 2 and a half years on, some people will kind of still be slightly perplexed about what exactly is this thing. And I feel quite happy about that in a way, because there's something important about the fact that it's a frame that clearly invokes something around systems change and, you know, hope of the future. And what is the world asking of you? These are the kinds of questions we ask. What are the things you care about? Enough to fight for, to hope for. These kinds of questions for young people, they're important questions, well, for all of us, honestly.

For sure.

But it shows up differently in different spaces. So it might— so, you know, we've been having Festivals of Hope in many countries. In India, with 100 schools all coming together for a Festival of Hope in Mumbai and New Delhi. We had one in Chicago back in 2022. In Wales, we've been at UWC Atlantic College there. Costa Rica, Colombia, Rio. I mean, it's showing up in different places and online. We had about 4,000 young people come and join us for the Summit of the Future online kind of festival that we ran. We ran, I say we ran, it's always co-created with young people. So the young people are really doing the design work of creating the spaces with support from us, with support from their teachers and leaders of the school that they're in.

So they're finally agency in the process.

Exactly. And that's a key part, right, is that we're practicing what we preach as well. We're not just saying, you know, we want to create these spaces, but we'll do it and we'll make sure it's all perfect and lovely. And then you'll come in and have a lovely time. So much of the learning is in how do we do this together? How do we co— you know, this praxis of co— that's really, really important, co-creating through the process. So yeah, it's been amazing. You know, we're learning lots along the way. We're continuing to to kind of develop. It's part of a broader engagement with young people that the IB is developing. No, it's a really—

Are you seeing, I think you first of all ripple effects out, but also a kind of lift through time. The young people who were engaged in this 2 and a half years ago, are you seeing them, I don't know how you, I mean, we don't want to optimize, we don't want to be measuring, but I'm wondering if you're getting feedback from them that this that they're different, that something has shifted.

Yeah, there's a trap there, isn't there, of like tracking the impact, right? We've been measuring the impact and we've got some hard data to show that we've had an impact.

Right, and my inner scientist really wants that, but that's not what it's about. This is worm data in action.

Right, exactly. And I would say amazing signals that that is happening is that we've got young people who stay connected with us, who want to continue to be part of a community, and then we're partnering with other organizations like iBelieve, a young people-led organization to bring young, young people mainly from IB context together. So there's a, there's a really good ongoing connectedness that obviously not all the young people who participate, but quite a number of them want to stay connected. They feel something alive in the space and they say, yeah, this is great. I'd love to come and be an intern or continue and, you know, sign up for one of your other things. Or, you know, we run— okay, we've got a grant-making initiative to support young people's kind of action changemaker projects called the Global Youth Action Fund. So that's part of it as well. So how do we support with some of the resources and invest in young people with the resources that they might need to continue some of the work? So yeah, I mean, it's— there's different flows between different ways that we're trying to continue supporting young people. But it's, yeah, it's really fascinating. And yeah, it feels important. It feels like the young people resonate with it. There you go. That's that concept again, right?

That's what we need.

They connect somehow with something.

Creating space.

Right, exactly.

Yeah. Brilliant.

Lovely.

So that feels quite a good place to end unless there was anything else that you had wanted to bring to the space.

No, no, I mean, there's lots.

We should do this again sometime. Yeah.

Thank you.

Brilliant. All right.

Amazing. Thanks, Amanda. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us at Good Impact Labs, on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.