I’ve joined forces with Selfcraft to co-facilitate the RAP – a co-creative learning journey for 16 amazing activists around the world who want to build communication bridges across societal divides. My own journey as an “activist” overlaps with many of my clever colleagues and friends from around the world who have joined us.

Below is the intro that I posted there. Sharing it here gives you a chance to know more about my herstory, and also offers a tiny glimpse of the RAP starting point. (Yes! We are likely to offer the program again).

Most importantly, follow the links to see just how impressive and inspiring these fellow changemakers are!

“Such an interesting context for introducing myself, since so many of you already know me very well, others less well, and still others not at all. So I thought it could be fun to try to frame this by making those connections visible (and I’m going to try to use some of the vocab from our first week’s readings too.)

Wendy Brown Kelly and I have never met in person, but we first crossed paths on a pre-social media collaboration platform for world-changing minded folks. I was living in Uganda then, GUIDING an “Internet4Change” class of 40 people in how to participate & collaborate with the world on that platform. Those 40 were part of about 350 families who were members at 2 “Webbed Empowerment” Centers I had started with people in Kampala and up north who were displaced by the 25 year long war in Northern Uganda.

At that time I was a respected CITIZEN as a privileged diplomatic wife, and also a REBEL – saying a hard no! to the international development aid industry where I had worked in commercial management functions in Geneva, Brussels and Washington DC for a decade. I became a CHANGE AGENT who pioneered ways to bypass the disruptive and imbalanced global aid system by channelling all kinds of resources (technical assistance, knowledge, money, goods, partnerships) through this new thing called the internet, directly to the grassroots. The hardest part of working with war-affected communities was getting them to really trust and use their own voices to articulate what they wanted to do with all that unknown potential, which was my segway into GUIDING and NURTURING co-creative approaches to defining locally driven development dreams.

I won a schmancy award and a lifelong designation as an innovator for the public for my early work in Uganda, from an organization called Ashoka. After 11 years in Uganda I returned to Brussels (where my kids’ Dutch dad works at the EU), got myself some actual training in facilitation, and began designing, hosting and facilitating events in the social change space. During this part of my activist life I was playing the role of REFORMER. I was taking the participatory approaches I’d intuitively employed on the mats with the mamas in Uganda into international corporate and civil society events, inviting those groups to go into deeper levels of conversational sharing. Carolina Tocalli worked for Ashoka in Argentina in those days, and we found each other at a big global Ashoka event I organized the facilitation team for in Paris. It was love at first sight

I was starting a small global working group to explore and nurture more collaboration in the global social change space, and Carolina joined. We called ourselves Ci2i Global for just under 4 years, during which time we narrowed our focus on collaboration and collective impact to find examples of “co-creative impact” because that’s where we suspected the juiciest cutting edge of thrivable social change to be. Working as a team on 6 continents we co-hosted 3 international Learn/Share Labs on co-creative approaches to making social change happen. The last of those events was in Chiang Mai (I moved there as a single mom with 3 kids when their Dad got posted to neighboring Vietnam). Carolina was there, of course, and she returned a second time to Thailand for an event I hosted a few years later – with her whole family! – near the end of a project I facilitated with a war affected village here in Northern Thailand. We called that project HaaSii. In Thai it sounds like 5 C’s. They stood for Cross-Cultural Co-Creation Club.

For the HaaSii project, I was back in the role of CHANGE AGENT. I tried to establish 2 cross-cultural co-creation spaces (in Chiang Mai and Pai), offering co-creative experiences to travellers that connected them in mutually uplifting activities and conversation with local communities – especially, but not only, our special refugee village. That village wanted to re-think their tourism model: I designed a year long co-creative process schedule around monthly visits to their place and mine in order to GUIDE a process of thinking through the issues and NURTURE their discovery of actions they could implement on their own. It was awesome, and the village – as well as the Thais and non-Thais involved – got a lot out of it in that year. The village changed their tourism model quite a bit as a result, and discovered whole new ways of understanding the value of their culture, and how tourism could actually play a role in helping them keep it alive.

But just as we were getting out of prototyping mode and into launching the business plan that would sustain the project (which I had invested my nest-egg from my divorce settlement in to develop), the Thai government (relatively fresh from a change to military rule) changed some laws that meant our project was no longer legal, because I was not, in fact, a Thai CITIZEN, and had no rights to be in any CONTROL function of the project at all. Poof. Haasii went from awesome to over in the passing of 1 new Thai law.

Dani Elle never made it with us to the village, but I do have a funny memory of her trying to help get us inside when a bunch of us had locked ourselves out of the Chiang Mai co-creative space, and nearly falling through the roof! But Gina Lauricella Hope – who I first connected with through our kids’ school – was side by side with me from the beginning to the bitter end of the HaaSii journey. Though she’s no longer living in Thailand we remain close besties and have met up since, in Barcelona (where we co-hosted a co-creative conversation gathering), in Holland and in England.

So with my project dreams (and budget) dashed by the Thai military’s new policies, I tried for a hot minute to pursue the big hairy global vision beyond the HaaSii Club vision, of coordinated global grassroots conversations and co-creative experiences that would build bridges between people who normally perceive each other as “other.” Despite what felt like Herculean efforts on my part – including a “world tour” where I prototyped cross-cultural conversations with groups organized by friends around the world in their homes – the administrative CONTROL side of setting up an internationally operating start-up from a country where I was not a CITIZEN was more than my wee brain and diminished finances were eventually able to handle.

With no small amount of trauma I broke up with my activist self, and decided to become just a normal, non-activist human, literally for the first time in my adult life. I spent 2.5 years flying back and forth between Brussels and Pai as part of a shared custody thing, perfecting the Art of Doing Nothing (no small feat for the world-changing workaholic I had been) and becoming very, very poor. I also deepened my exploration of the Divine Feminine, did a ton of “shadow” work on my wounded soul, and became a priestess (together with Gina) of the Mother Spirit lineage.

A bit more than a year ago to I finally decided to reinvent myself as a coach. My dear Pai friend Damien Pitw was in one of the coaching courses I signed on for, and Cairo Rha was our most excellent teacher (whose home i have visited for countless Friday night potlucks over the years. I think I know Leela , Mona and Aida mostly from those parties, and I remember meeting Merry at Cairo’s least once, no? I’ve no doubt we’ll be seeing my new friend Kumar at the next one ) In exchange for my coaching course tuition, Cairo offered to let me work it off…. by using my skills to help make his long-held dream for the Restorative Activism Project come to life. It’s an understatement to say that we have enjoyed our collaboration on this so far. Cairo rocks and I am super excited to bring what I can to an all online context this time, with world-changing folks like all of you (what an amazing global group, eh?).

In becoming a coach, I have discerned that along the very challenging way of working toward the “hypothetical reward” I thought I was after for decades – of someday witnessing new kinds of international cross-cultural understanding and cooperation that could lead to a kinder, gentler and more balanced world – the moments that inspired me the most to carry on were when I got to witness the personal aha moments: when individuals involved in whatever activity I was experimenting with would recognize their own power and agency to make change happen in their own lives. With coaching I get to focus just on guiding and nurturing that. The aha moments are really just lovely, and I’ve come to understand that NO development ever happens without someone finding that agency within themselves and deciding to take a new kind of positive action.

So it all feels aligned: the impact I am seeking is now much narrower in focus, perhaps, but maybe fundamentally it’s exactly the same. And as a CITIZEN I’ve still got a couple of co-creative adventures with amazing friends happening, because I guess that’s just who I am and will always be.

In addition to being here for the RAP, Damien, Wendy, Carolina and Gina have all just finished a 6 month co-creative learning experience I’ve been guiding (and loving!) on Divine Feminine archetypes, that I’ve called a Virtual Goddess Walk. Before our journey with the RAP group ends in late May, I’ll be breaking ground on a new eco-home I’m planning to build out of recycled plastics and mud, for which I am in the beginning stages of reaching out to my community for support in collecting 5000+ plastic bottles. In modelling the CONTROL of plastic waste through using it as a building material, my intention is that my home will serve as a GUIDE that will NURTURE alternative uses of plastic waste in my community. Creative recycling has often been the “what” space that my co-creative communities have played in over the years, so this feels like a really cool thing that is within my reach to do.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I was also in the early stages of mobilizing a co-creative travel adventure to a remote mountain hamlet in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, to replicate and build on the co-creative tourism development approach that we experienced with the village here in Thailand. That’s on hold but not forgotten for now…. keep an eye out for #cocreate22! And finally, I am building myself an online home to house all of these things, which shall soon be launched at christinaswwworld. com. “