We are excited to announce that we are working on ‘Cohere+’, a research and education project co-funded by the European Union, in partnership with: The Hague Center (Netherlands), the Institute for Integral Studies (Germany), Emerge (Germany), and the Ekskäret Foundation (Sweden).

The purpose of this 3-year project is to uplevel the collective capacities of European change agents and learn together how to transform ‘metacrisis’, moving together towards a regenerative, cohesive, and healthy Europe. Our focus is on the field of ‘transformational’ change agents in Europe: those who can be identified as taking whole-systems, integrative approaches towards paradigmatic societal transformation. Cohere+ combines research, events, technology development, and educational offerings in order to map the European ‘transformational change’ field, engage with agents to build community and coherence within the field, and develop the collective capacities of change agents across Europe to co-create regenerative systems and societies.

This project builds on Life Itself’s previous ecosystem mapping work, which you can read more about here.

Background to the project: a field of transformational change in Europe gathering strength

European citizens are living through a time of multiple crises: ecological destruction, polarised societies, threats to freedom and democracy and more. We need major shifts in our economy, governance, and infrastructure to improve the health and wellbeing of European citizens for generations to come. A growing field of people, organisations, and initiatives already recognise the deep interconnectedness of global crises and deep insufficiencies in contemporary ways of living and working. The actors in what we call the European transformational change field are responding with whole-systems approaches to social, cultural, political, and economic change. We have outlined what we see as some of the core characteristics and commonalities among actors in this field here.

However, many societal change pioneers are struggling to change systems on their own. Unsupported by financial and academic norms, their activities and responses to our crises are often overlooked by mainstream culture. And yet true innovation often happens in the margins. Meanwhile, lack of resource, communication, or understanding between related organisations means that efforts are often duplicated or not as strategically aligned as they could be to work together towards common visions and goals. Currently, there is also an education gap: traditional education systems are not empowering citizens with the collective knowledge, skills, capacities, and values we need to work together to transition beyond current, complex crises.

Therefore, field-building and capacity-building for greater collaboration and coherence among change agents are key in paving the way towards a more regenerative, cohesive and healthy Europe.

The overall objectives of the Cohere+ project are:

To increase and enhance the self-knowledge and self-awareness of key actors and organisations in the European transformational social change field, so that the field is more visible to itself and its effectiveness in strategic alignment is improved;
To support and facilitate greater connections and more effective transdisciplinary and transnational collaborations within the field;
To increase the visibility and accessibility of the field to broader European society so as to increase participation and boost its potential for impact;
To educate change agents and citizens within and beyond the field, to build the field’s spheres of influence and thus leverage our collective power to co-create the future Europe we want to live in.

Plan of work

The project runs from September 2022 to August 2025 and is divided into 4 delivery work packages. These are:

Mapping the Field and Sensemaking of the Map
Communities of Coherence and Capacity-Building
Digital Tool and Experience Design
Field in Action: Making Co-creative and Collective Skills Accessible

A brief summary of the activities for each work package are as follows:

Mapping the Field and Sensemaking of the Map

Research and data collection; Creation of an interactive digital map
Gap analysis to identify key training and education needs
Horizon scan and bringing the map alive through "real people"
Engagement of network actors with map and sensemaking with multipliers

Communities of Coherence and Capacity-Building

Strategic relationship-building via three annual gatherings
Online summits, Tales of Synergy, colloquiums, etc.
Harvesting insights and creating learning resources
Taxonomy for learning journey arising from research and mapping- formulating building blocks

Digital Tool and Experience Design

Design user experience
Develop prototype digital tool
Conceptual design of learning journeys
Feed into and link existing materials and resources

Field in action: Making Co-creative and Collective Skills Accessible

Deliver three learning journeys
Follow up feedback from learning journey and software; capture and make impacts visible
Results analysis and communication

Life Itself are leading the work package on ‘Mapping the Field and Sensemaking of the Map’, in collaboration with our partner organisations.

The specific objectives of this work package are to:

Identify and cohere the ideas, methods and tools scattered across the field, so that these can be used for the education and capacity-building of European citizens;
Provide actors in the field with access to a coherent stock of strategically useful information - such as the identities, activities, strategies and values of potential collaborators and aligned change agents - which can inform their efforts to improve European society;
Make the activities, missions and values within the field more visible to mainstream society so that citizens are empowered with greater knowledge and awareness of alternative forms of learning and ways to participate in civic society to co-create social change;
Map the needs and training required for transition to a new European civic culture so that this knowledge can inform educational resource creation and training design in other work packages. Gain a preliminary understanding of how these may be met using tools, methods and ideas within the field, ready for further analysis in later work packages.

Life Itself’s share of the work is led by a team consisting of: Catherine Tran, Matthew McCarthy, Boaz Feldman, and Rufus Pollock.

More about the partnering organisations

Life Itself: Life itself is a community committed to practical action for a radically wiser, weller world. We create coliving hubs, start businesses, do research and engage in activism to pioneer a wiser future.
The Hague Center for Global Governance, Innovation and Emergence are an organisation and a co-creative collective, serving the emergence of a conscious, harmonic humanity. They innovate for heart-centered, planetary governance with all domains of life, visible and invisible. They listen to spirit, lead from the heart and activate the mind for the purpose of co-creating a new world.
The Institute for Integral Studies (IFIS) is an independent research institute based in Freiburg, Germany. They are a transnational, inter- and transdisciplinary think tank based on an integral understanding of science that recognizes the uniqueness and significance of a multitude of perspectives, relating them to each other and seeking overarching structures between them.
Emerge is a non-profit media platform sowing the seeds of a new civilization. They are a global network of networks, seeking to connect and make visible the individual and collective social change pioneers who are exploring dynamic solutions to our planet’s greatest challenges. They do so by showcasing insights and profiles on their website and by holding regular annual gatherings, meetings and events as well as local events in a growing number of major cities around the world.
The Ekskäret Foundation is a Swedish non-profit organisation which aims to facilitate the co-creation of a more conscious and sustainable society. The Foundation was founded in 2009 with a focus on the connection between life-long personal inner development and growth and societal development.

Want to know more or get involved?

Are you interested to know more or want to get involved in some way? We would be glad to hear from you. You can:

Share with us suggestions of organisations working for transformational change in Europe that you find innovative or inspiring.
Share feedback with us, including reactions, critique, ideas, and questions so we can learn from the field and go further together.
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