The process of deep social change begins, not when we try to change the world, but when we come together in engaged communities and move towards being the change as a collective.

Cohere supports schools, organisations, and communities that want to be the change together through a process we call a collective leadership journey.

What is a collective leadership journey?

A collective leadership journey is a series of capacity building workshops, activities, and retreats that helps a community of people become the lived embodiment of the possibilities they sense are possible. It is an opportunity for community members to walk alongside one another and have shared experiences that transforms their ways of being and acting, and moves them towards their highest collective potential.

Our inclusive and holistic approach to hosting collective leadership journey’s is grounded in the practice of Theory U, and can be described as being:

Awareness-based: Building capacity for deep listening and transforming areas of social absence into social presence.

Emergent: Engaging in an emergent peer-learning process that is led by the community, as opposed to learning pre-prepared content.

Healing-centred: Supporting the community on its healing journey, including the restoration of relationships, and the integration of personal, collective and intergenerational trauma.

Wellbeing-orientated: Strengthening wellbeing through ever widening circles of care and concern, including self-care, community care, planetary care, and intergenerational care.

Transformative: Letting go of past patterns and creating the fertile conditions for the emergence of new paradigms and possibilities.

Intersectional: Reckoning with power, privilege, and inequality, and decolonising the self from unjust and unsustainable social conditions.

Embodied: Forming an engaged community of practice that is experimenting with and embodying new ways of being and acting in the world.

Along the way, community members will engage in a range of awareness-based practices including; deep listening, empathy interviews, case clinics, generative scribing, 3D systems modelling, and vertical social prototyping.

A collective leadership journey typically runs for 3, 6, or 9 months, and can be renewed on an annual basis. Sessions can be held in person or hosted online. The name of the journey is also flexible, and can be changed to suit your preferred focus, such as a collective healing journey, a collective wellbeing journey, a collective transformation journey, and so on.

If you would like to gain a sense of what a collective leadership journey looks like in practice, check out our collaboration with the Berry Street School.

Let’s work together

Is your school, organisation, or community ready to go on a journey to discover how you can be the change as a collective? Book a call with Ash to explore how we might be able to support you in this important collective work.