This is a live doc tracking decisions made by the GM Systems Changers members network.

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  May 2025, by the Temporary Stewards

  The temporary stewards have been unable to reach a consensus around the roles in the organising/weaving team and how they were going to be appointed – it will be handed back to members to decide.

  In the meantime, they decided to appoint a transition team of Afshan, Vi & Viv to hold the process until the members have decided and recruited roles. They appointed this team for at least 6 months, but the duration of this process will be guided by the speed of the membership.

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  17th of April 2025, by the Temporary Stewards

  • Hold at least 4 Members Meetings per year for reflection, discussion, and decision-making
  • Cap to 2 person per organisations to attend Members Meeting
  • Core decisions to be made at Members Meetings
  • Set up an online mechanism for time-sensitive decisions
  • Allow delegation of decisions to roles or circles where appropriate
  • Capture learning and create space for collaboration at Members Meetings
  • Explore support for attendance (e.g. £50 per organisation for access needs)
  • Members can form circles/groups to focus on specific areas
  • Those circles can be started by 3 different people from 3 different member organisations.
  • Cross-borough collaboration (Islands of Sanctuary) will continue as a group
  • Existing groups like IDS, Food Sovereignty, and ULI might continue under GM SC
  • Circles can request funding/support and may have budget lines on GM SC account with Social Change Nest
  • No consensus on original roles proposed
  • Decisions on roles will be made in May
  Read more
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  27th of March 2025, by the Temporary Stewards

  The Temporary Stewards agreed to pick up different parts of the commitments made to members for the handover phase.
  There was a request for a smaller group to work on draft roles to bring as a proposal to Wigan, which Afshan, Viv & Vi volunteered to do.

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  20th of March 2025, Members' Forum

  • GM SC will continue as a member-led network
  • New vision, mission, and red lines have been agreed
  • All 72 existing partners will be invited to become members
  • Members actively commit to GM SC’s vision and mission, have voting rights, decision-making power, and the ability to work on proposals based on the themes from the world cafe forums.
  • No fees or funding attached to membership at this stage
  • Members will decide if and when to open the network wider
  • A new governance structure, the Weaving Team will be voted in by members by June for 2-year terms
  • Some Temporary Stewards will support the handover until June
  Read more
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  February 2025, Temporary Stewards

  • We agreed that to make decisions based on that report, we needed partners’ input, and so we decided to organise a new wave of forums in February/March but this time all in Manchester and accessible remotely.
  Read more
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  January 2025, Temporary Stewards

  • With tensions around some temporary stewards doing more work than their hours and others not doing their share, we agreed to develop an accountability process
  • We adopted a transformative justice–inspired accountability framework
  • We decided to implement peer accountability triads
  • Gil and Carrina were established as escalation and support roles
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  December 2024, Temporary Stewards

  • We agreed that, while we may not all fully align with everything in the report, it was important to honour and include what partners shared, rather than shaping it around our own priorities.
  • We agreed to send the report to partners, called Seeds of Our Future.
  Read more
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  November 2024, Temporary Stewards

  • We agreed to review the forums’ findings and do sense-making of them collectively with partners
  • We also agreed to compile it all in a report to send to partners by the end of December 2024
  • Each Temporary Steward is in charge of drafting a part of the report for Vi to compile together afterwards
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  August 2024, Temporary Stewards

  • With Northern Soul no longer there to take minutes we agreed to no longer write blog posts to communicate monthly with partners on our progress
  • We agreed to hold 4 forums across Greater Manchester to gather the collective needs and priorities of our communities, review GM SC’s structure, dream together what GM SC’s future will look like, and explore how you could be a part of this new GM SC
  • The Temporary Stewards are no longer working under specific Organising Themes but under several sub-groups to hold the communication, facilitation, logistics and learning for those forums and the work afterwards
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  July 2024, Temporary Stewards

  • Ruth to step down from her weaving role to become Temporary Steward for the organising theme of young people
  • Viv, Afshan and Virginie stepped up to co-lead on facilitation for the next stage of the process
  • We created a decision-making structure to categorise what needs to be decided by a core team, all temporary stewards, the whole GMSC network,  or specific people
  • A new group was created, made of volunteer temporary stewards to lead on admin, governance, finance, processes and communication. The group was named SMORS
  • Since most theme-based partner consultations were not completed, the group agreed to organise a series of events (inspired by Dream Weavers) to gather partners’ perspectives
  • All Temporary Stewards to follow GM SC social media and sign up to the newsletter to stay informed about our communication
  Read more
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  June 2024, Temporary Stewards

  • We agreed to address tensions in the room around organising themes and differing views on vision, mission, and ambition for GM SC
  • We agreed to return to the fundamentals of “what is a stewarding group?” and “why are we doing this?” to reground ourselves as a group, voice our doubts and remind people that they can step out of the process
  • Northern Soul to step down from the Temporary Stewards process by the end of August 2024 due to capacity
  Read more
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  May 2024, Temporary Stewards

  • We want to meet outdoors as much as possible to be in connection with nature
  • We want to embrace a holistic view of money, shifting from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance
  • We will draw on insights from community-led investment initiatives and people who have experience in it (like Jo Ram, Esther Foreman, and Cameron Bray) to inform our understanding of how to shift power toward communities and move from grant funding to participatory budgeting
  • Our definition of investment centres people through administrative, technical, and capacity-building support
  • Temporary Stewards who are available will meet to draft a proposed mission and vision for GM SC
  Read more
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  April 2024, Temporary Stewards

  • We will intentionally build a culture where feedback is integrated into everything they do
  • We want to support the development of GM SC as a structure that allows for healing, creativity, and intuitive responses to conflict
  • We want all of our policies and processes to be accessible and clear to all partners
  • We want to develop a dialectical and interactive feedback process to support mutual accountability and learning
  • We will try using Deep Democracy as a method for decision-making and conflict resolution
  • We are collectively responsible for resolving conflict and holding each other to account
  • We will have a solidarity fund for childcare and transport so all partners can engage with this work
  Read more
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  March 2024, Temporary Stewards

  • GM SC will be a flat structure where every Temporary Steward has as much power and responsibilities as others
  • Our governance model will include decision-making mechanisms, information flow, resource flow, feedback mechanisms, conflict resolution and a support framework
  • We will differentiate operations vs strategic decisions as well as regular and significant decisions.
  • We will check with partners if they would be interested in attending regular community catch-ups every six weeks
  • We will invite partners into collective reflection
  • We will prioritise regular, transparent communication via our newsletter and social media
  • We will organise smaller working groups for deep dives into key questions
  • We will treat the Emergent Strategy framework as a working guide
  • We will create and update a live FAQ based on questions sent by partners
  • We will create a network map of our partners
  • Partners will not have to engage with this work if they don’t want to
  Read more
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  January and February 2024, Temporary Stewards

  • We will explore and define GMSC’s future beyond Lankelly Chase.
  • The Core Team will expand with the recruitment of Temporary Stewards.
  • Afshan, Rose and Ruth will be the named contacts for our account with Social Change Nest.
  • The Temporary Stewards will support and steward different Organising Themes (such as food sovereignty, land and housing justice, healing justice, etc.)
  • The group will shift sense-making outward to engage the wider GM SC community over the next few months.
  • A collective visioning process will start to explore what binds us beyond money.
  • With the network, they will explore alternatives to philanthropic funding, questioning whether GM SC can survive without philanthropy and what other funding or organising models might be possible for us
  • Our core values for future decision-making and organising will be transparency, shared ownership, and inclusivity
  • Temporary Stewards mapped their individual offers and needs for each other and the network.
  • To deepen their political education, the Temporary Stewards will take part in the Learning into Liberation programme led by Rachel.
  Read more
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  How the Temporary Stewards organised

  All details of how the Temporary Stewards organised themselves between January 2024 and May 2025 can be found here.

  Read more