For us, an Emergent Strategy gives us space to embrace uncertainty and messiness while rooting our work in creativity, collaboration, and diverse perspectives. We do our best to model consensus decision-making and create the conditions to step into our power while encouraging collective action. We are learning to trust our intuition as a crucial way of knowing and that trusting each other is a practice of solidarity.
An emergent strategy underpinned by systemic action research encourages us to plan, act, reflect, and adapt before going again. Small actions with ongoing harvesting and sense-making enable us to follow the emerging threads.
Adrienne Marie Brown: ‘The crisis is everywhere, massive massive massive. And we are small. But emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies.’ From Emergent Strategy
Greater Manchester Systems Changers is a network of grassroots organisations, collectives, activists and artists. We organise from a place of solidarity with working-class women and young people (predominantly of colour), towards collective liberation. Here is our current ‘Emergent Strategy’:
Our aims for the last two years were:
- To liberate/distribute resources to under-resourced people in communities, organisations, and networks, challenging injustice and creating the conditions for healthier systems to emerge.
- To continue to centre working-class women and young people of colour but not exclusively.
- To support critical connections between changemakers who want to, know how to and are free to contribute towards a Greater Manchester liberated by healing, justice, and equity.
- To resource spaces and infrastructure for us to be in community together.
- To learn alongside and from each other.
We are still working out our objectives for the year, but some initial thoughts are that we really are focusing on these aims:
- To create spaces where the community reimagines the infrastructure required to support our individual and collective ‘path to liberation’
- To transform ourselves into a self-organising community
- To resource the healing of each other and the communities we support and belong to.
- To learn alongside and from each other and spread this learning.
