ecosystem of support

The UFI and its partners support the transformational experiences of each cohort. guided by a wisdom and youth council, they steward the iterative experimental process in close co-creation with the participants.

  • we’ve never done the future before. To break free from the status quo we need a guiding light - an aspiration. we want to share the stories of what our cohorts learn as widely as possible to showcase a wide array of how we can live into our uncertain futures. this team will work closely with the ME&L system to make system dynamics visible and create data visualizations that are meaningful and speak to the heart of the cohort’s learnings.

  • due to the complexity of our approach, traditional ME&L rooted in highly quantitative metrics and standard key performance indicators are not fit for purpose. Instead, a novel, multi-scale ME&L system will be co-created with an academic partner to track progress through transformation pathways and apply the most current advances in evaluation theory and practice. this will involve a detailed analysis of enabling conditions for implementation, attention to both process and outcomes, focus on critical changes in behavior and mindsets, and data gathering to support a robust learning and reflection process.

  • how we organize is where transformation begins. we are setting up the UFI as a liberated super-organism with an evolutionary purpose. all of our nodes are self-organized in a decentralized, fully transparent and trust-based decision-making process. the operations team makes sure the architecture of infrastructure is set up for this and everyone involved can use their full potential. this includes taking care of administrative, logistical and financial management tasks.

  • inclusive, nature-inspired and emergent design and strategy takes skill, patience and a lot of humility. we are bringing together a team of experienced co-creators and artists who are well versed yet open-minded when it comes to experiential education, system transformation and wholebeing. this team is in charge of building the human collaboration technology that will take advantage of the multiple synergies across our co-creation eco-system and its learning cohorts.

  • what becomes possible when money is not a limitation? we want to free our imagination from the limitations of money to develop innovative and collaborative resourcing and financing strategies that set everyone involved free. we are looking for wealth-holders of all kinds of backgrounds and assets to accompany us on this journey to come up with a sustainable eco-system model that allows for the realization of our wildest dreams.

  • we will convene a wide and diverse network of unlikely allies to co-design all aspects of this initiative, to analyze, to digest and to share learnings in view of inspiring the entire sector of system transformation. we are looking to gather leading practitioners of system transformation from all areas to learn together and shift our practices as much as our mindsets and assumptions to move into the uncertain futures that are calling us forth.

  • we are accountable to future generations and guided by the wisdom of our elders. we are constituting a council of equal parts of youth representative and wisdom keepers to guide us on this journey.

 

  • as humanity, we are facing a global mental health crisis.²⁹ we are caught up in a deep fear response to the mediatic onslaught of news relentlessly reporting on multiple, highly complex and constant threats to our accustomed ways of life. we are deeply stuck in a fight, flight or freeze downward spiral due to our cognitive biases, ever more disenfranchising us from our ability to think straight and take informed action.³⁰

    while most people simply try to avoid and deny the seriousness of the situation, others delegate the solutions to experts and a minority of activists pick up the fight against the institutions perceived as responsible for all that “evilness”. the result is decline in trust in public institutions³¹ while political polarization is worsening.³² few people are aware how their responses are rooted in unresolved trauma and how their behaviours are actually reinforcing the system logic that brought us into this place.

  • the UFI’s mission is to prototype the trauma-informed safer and bolder spaces that allow people to heal individually and collectively on their terms and at their pace. a key focus in this process is put on increasing system awareness, both within and surrounding the participants, so they can regain their response-ability. this also allows participants to meet each other in egalitarian settings that increase their ability to listen, be informed by each other and develop new insight together, thereby fostering the emergence of networked collective intelligence³³ ³⁴. it’s the basis of building a new collaboration culture that involves all of us and breaks free of “othering” practices.³⁵

  • top-down and hierarchical ways of organizing thought, work and life, favouring efficiency over creativity have turned from being the main driving forces of our economies in the 20th century to becoming our greatest limitations in facing the wicked challenges of the 21st century³⁶ ³⁷. capitalist market economies have fostered the emergence of pyramidic ponzi schemes where few are on top benefitting from the exploitation of the general population at large, deepening inequality over time.³⁸ this has severely hampered our collective ability to address the complex challenges we are facing today.

  • at the UFI we transcend traditional power systems and bring awareness to how colonization of our minds, bodies and spirits has not ceased, so we can transcend it. we seek to explore pathways of how we can shift from a helio- and anthropo-centric single (male) hero myth to a cosmos- and biosphere-decentric collective hero story.³⁹ where everything revolves around everything, like our immune system takes care of our health or beavers steward their eco-systems.⁴⁰