“The Community Catalyst supports the Community to take forward the right structures for collaboration.” This third Field Note is part of a series ‘Field Notes from a Community Catalyst’. These notes are all personal reflections made ‘in the midst of living’ within the Community - to help us and others keep on discussing, exploring and reimagining.

Structures

What might a structure for collaboration look like?

We don’t yet know. Perhaps that’s because we’re still learning—and unlearning—what the practice of reimagination truly requires.

• How do you build for shared power, not just shared work? 
• How do you design for creative collaboration across borders and the full span of timezones?
• What models of collaboration support deep reflection, but also honour multiple hats and activist identities of our members?

WHAT HAVE WE TRIED?

We’ve tried to be bold in co-creating alternative organisational structures for the work, exploring what this might look like in line with our values and supportive of our collective reimagination. Knowing that we didn’t want to replicate a traditional organisational model (‘The Ministry of Imagination’), our first governance prototype (‘The Collective of Imagination’) drew inspiration from emerging models of transformational governance and alternative organisational forms. We admired collectives working in beautiful, intentional ways. It seemed deeply aligned with our commitment to live by the values we want to see in the world. It honoured the commitment to center relationships. In 2023, we committed to collective leaderships and organising the community into pods with delegated power. We experimented with that governance for that year.  And yet we struggled in the fight against timezones. We wrestled with asymmetry of availability. And most importantly, in trying to build a shared power structure, we found that we were diverting energy and focus away from imagination and peace. 

Our second attempted governance iteration (‘The Stewards of the Imagination’) focused on resourcing the edges: placing imagination, relationships, and learning at the centre. It brought more creative freedom—but raised concerns about resourcing and sustainability, and was never endorsed. It felt like there was a fear that it could concentrate power and represent a slip back toward more traditional structures, even as we tried to move beyond them.

As of September 2025, we remain in a liminal space—self-organising, experimenting, and sensing what wants to emerge. And perhaps that ongoing emergence is what we need: we might not be ready to finalise a structure until we more fully understand the practices we’re trying to support. And, indeed, we may be slowly discovering a tension between the goals of sharing power and reimagination, and we need to wrestle with this as we keep treading the path forward.

Practices

WHAT ARE WE LEARNING ABOUT THE PRACTICE OF REIMAGINATION?

Rehearsals

It’s the doing that teaches us.

• Reimagine Peace has been an important sandpit — testing ways of being and doing we can’t easily practice elsewhere.
• We’ve called these “experiments,” but they have felt like something deeper. Not neat or scientific. Messy, relational, embodied.
• The times our imagination felt most alive for me were in the meeting points along the way—when we encountered each other fully, in three dimensions, in the complexity of our relationships.
• I’m learning that articulate our values is the start. I’m now fumbling towards what it really means to live by them.
• At their best, these moments felt like mini rehearsals for the future.
• When we struggled, there was a pull to the familiar: focusing on projects and deliverables instead of discovery. 
• Sometimes I grieved what we hadn’t achieved, rather than honouring what we uncovered along the way.

Reflection

It’s the things you can’t see that matter most.

• This journey has stretched my identity and worldview.
• There are times I’ve struggled to connect the dots—like waiting for an internal upgrade that takes time to install.
• I’ve had to confront how the dominant systems live inside me. Even when given every freedom to reimagine, I’ve created my own constraints.
• I advocated for slowness, yet didn’t know how to take my own foot off the pedal.
• I’ve seen myself polarise—making one perspective right and another wrong, in the name of values. But this closed down possibilities rather than opening them.
• I prioritised discussion and documentation, but perhaps not real learning—the kind that needs slowness, spaciousness, and deep introspection.

Ripples

It’s the things you can’t easily measure that matter most. These are the silent ways we reimagine ourselves—and carry that reimagination into our communities.

• My way of showing up—as a coach, facilitator, human—has changed.
• I hear others say the same. 
• We’ve carried lessons home.
• Tools and approaches that have resonated are being applied elsewhere.
• Relationships, power and collaboration have new definitions and expanding potential.

What if it’s been about the journey all along?

What if it still is?

What if we designed our experiments to be rehearsals of the future?

What if we honoured and embraced deep reflection as essential to learning and transformation?

What if we trusted the ripples—even when we can’t track them?

What would our structures need to look like to support this type of collaboration?

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Mycelium

What inspired and inspires me (and might inspire you):

• Build Up – A living example of a collective exploring new ways to organise—and to do peace—differently. They share their experiments and governance agreements and learnings generously.
• Farzana Khan – Healing Justice London’s work on Rehearsing Freedoms and this episode of Corporate Bodies where she explores the time-travelling nature of post-oppositional work.
• Action Inquiry – A learning approach to systems change. This report has reshaped how I think about learning itself—its rhythms, reflections, and reach.