Transcript: Orienting Futures: Emerging Culturally and Ecologically Responsive Practice

Music: Home (Instrumental Version) via Epidemic Sound/VEED

Toad Dell: Before we begin this work, it's crucial that we acknowledge Country. I'm calling in from the Widjabul Wia-bal Country of the Bundjalung Nation. I want to acknowledge their Elders, their past and present, their emerging young leaders. The ways in which they are continuously generous with community and engaging in community and constantly trying to help others move towards right relationship.

This program of Orienting Futures, every session which we acknowledge Country, was a constant practice of coming back to: how do we reorient around First Nations sovereignty, First Nations ways of being and uplifting those voices and supporting that leadership? I want to acknowledge any First Nations people in this room here today, and the lands that everyone is calling in from. Always was and always will be Aboriginal land. Thank you. 

Guy Ritani: Thank you Toad. So in lieu of acknowledging Country, where we're coming in from, the obligations to how we interact with knowledge, how we move forward with knowledge, and where knowledge comes from as well, we want to also Mihimihi. Which means thanks to where this knowledge has come from and how it has arrived here in our learning community today.

I want to start by acknowledging the ancestors of this work, in their many different forms. The shoulders of giants that we stand on, the countless books, online series, Elders, discussions, clips around the ears and aunties telling you off, all so that we can show up in this space and contribute to the space in a meaningful and right way.

I want to acknowledge the many different communities that contributed to this body of knowledge. The ongoing community consultation in our queer regenerative design and our other community engagement that contributed to these frameworks. That refined these insights that enabled us to arrive at this Orienting Futures in this way.

I want to acknowledge Social Enterprise Australia for commissioning this wonderful deep learning community, and specifically Sherryl, for championing us and supporting us the whole way through. To be able to elevate this to what it has become.

I want to acknowledge the federal agency that funded this as well. It's really important to ensure that resources go to places where they can be meaningfully used, and we really hope we can exemplify what that can look like. 

I also want to acknowledge Joa, our incredible artist who made the visuals that will take you through the beautiful image of Orienting Futures that so much intention was poured into. Also our incredible participants that breathed life into our learning community. Without you, without your insights, learnings, perspectives and your lived experiences we couldn't have generated the knowledge that we have. So huge mihimihi to you all and to everyone that has contributed to this body of knowledge. 

So as we slip into this, in all Orienting Futures fashion, we'll slip into our bodies as well. I want you to become aware of your breathing. If you feel comfortable to do so, take a deep breath in through your nose and out through the mouth. I want you to become aware of where you're connected to the ground beneath you. Feel through the toes, maybe your hips. Give a little wriggle. Roll your shoulders back. Tilt your head from side to side. Feel a slowness and spaciousness entering into whatever tight part of your body. If that looks like extending your spine, if it looks like rolling your shoulders back. Take a deep breath in and breathe out of your mouth again.

Start rolling our shoulders back, feeling this beautiful body that we have that's in relationship with the air around us, with the food that we eat, wherever that food comes from, with the community around us, all the relationships that we hold, that our body carries us through. Arriving into this space in that beautiful body that we hold. 

Start with some tapping as well. If you're comfortable to do so, bring your fingertips up to your collarbone and feel into that hollow just above the collarbone here. I want you to inquire with the tension in that space, with the softness, with the spaciousness. Feel around what's happening in this little part of our body. We breathe in again and we close our eyes and bring that inquiry to the rest of our body. As we sit through this session in time together, may we inquire in many ways how we move through our space and transform what our approach might look like. Awesome.

Kia ora koutou. Ko Guy tōku ingoa. My name is Guy. I belong to three tribes from Aotearoa, New Zealand. I am Māori, from the bottom tip of the North Island and the top tip of the South Island. I am one part of the network of PermaQueer, and I'm super happy to be here. I'll pass over to you, Toad. 

Toad Dell: Thank you Guy. Toad here. I use they/them pronouns. English white settler who grew up on Turtle Island and then grew up a lot on so-called Australia. I'm one of the co-founders of PermaQueer. I'm a youth ambassador for Permaculture Australia, community organiser, permaculture educator with just a real focus on regenerative design. What does regenerative design in these kinds of wider food movements look like outside of just white middle-class backyards? That's really my special interest. 

We were supposed to have Sticks here today. Sticks has had some health stuff come up. So we are sending them love from the future, from the past in the recording. And I'll hand over to you Guy. 

Guy Ritani: Here at PermaQueer, we believe in transformation, and we believe in intention, and we believe in how to show up to a space really impacts how we move through and move beyond that space. So for us, that looks like a Brave Space Agreement. What is that? So for us, there's a very big difference between brave and bravery and safety. A lot of people talk about safe spaces. However, any environment of meaningful diversity where people come together from different backgrounds, different understandings and different lived experiences, safety does not look like the same thing across everyone's experience. So instead of asking for a safe space, we ask for a brave space.

We ask that when we cross these thresholds, we are brave in how we interact with each other. That looks like brave questioning. That question: should I ask it? Can I ask it? Or do I understand what they're saying? It looks like asking that question. It looks like radical compassion when you see people doing that. It looks like radical compassion for yourself when you maybe have feelings about being brave. It also looks like radical accountability when you are called out perhaps on your bravery or perhaps on the language or perhaps on something that you've engaged with.

Acknowledging that we're all in a learning community here and we're here to support each other through this bravery. Support and feedback are available. Our emails will be made available and we welcome any feedback. I'll pass to you now, Toad, to talk about brave space encounters.

Toad Dell: Thank you. So we have this idea of these agreements and how we're going to try to act in good faith. But we are human animals with animal bodies and animal nervous systems. We talk about some of the big things that sometimes get named and sometimes don't get named. This idea of triggering content. Talking about systems of violence, which we may either benefit from or we may perpetuate in other ways. I can name some of these things like white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonisation. 

When we are talking about these things, and this idea of bravery is, I spoke about the human animal body a little bit and the way that we approach it is: what does a good stretch feel like for us? If we never engage in this kind of difficult stuff that makes us feel vulnerable, maybe a bit fragile, any stretch can kind of feel like we're dying. Also we don't want people to force themselves to overstretch. When you overstretch, you hurt yourself; your nervous system has a particular response that usually shuts down. 

This is about a bit of capacity building around your self-determination. Where are you at in your level of stretch? That can shift from day-to-day as well. If you come across something that is a bit much for you right now. What we invite you to do is put your camera off, have a little walk around, have a glass of water, do what you need to do to look after yourself. We're engaging with ourselves and with each other in good faith.

For the work that we want to do transforming systems, we have to be a bit brave, and we have to be a bit uncomfortable. What does that look like and what does that feel like? As Guy said, we're available for support or feedback. Send us an email if you want to have a chat one-on-one about anything. Thank you.

Guy Ritani: Thank you Toad. On screen, we have the beautiful imagery that was created by Joa, our artist. A lot of intention was poured into how we arrived in this space. While the image is up there and you can interact with it, we're going to talk a little bit about the intentions of Orienting Futures, our learning community based on emerging culturally and ecologically responsive practice in the social enterprise sector. 

So for us, our intention when convening this was to:

• Convene a learning community of peer-to-peer knowledge generation that builds capacities for social enterprise actors engaging in decolonising, equity-centred and interculturally literate systems-transformation for people, place and for planet.
• Develop relational practices that allow the unlearning of degenerative ways of being and enable critical pathways of social intervention and re-orientation beyond harmful systems within the sector. 
• Through reflection, self/collective awareness and knowledge generation we create opportunities for resources to emerge that amplify practices of interdependency and collaboration across the sector in innovative, queer and transformative ways.

That was our intention coming into the space, and this is how we carried ourselves into our next phase, which was how we engaged with the participants that came along and filled up this beautiful environment. 

We had a pretty long EOI process that involved lots of questions, lots of surveys and frankly it was quite long. That was very intentional because in our approaches we really thought a lot about the systemic impact. Who are the people that can have the impacts in their social enterprise context? What is it that they are doing and wanting, and how can we try and identify where these people are and what it is that they are doing? Through that process we ended up landing with 35 Participants of our Orienting Futures program, which was really fantastic, across so-called Australia, Aotearoa and other regions in the world. Across many different time zones. 

A number of them engaged in this program purely on the recordings, based on their time zones. In terms of live attendance, we had 465 hours of people come along, which we are very proud of and grateful for people offering their time to learn in this environment. From there, we asked the participants what is it that they wanted. And I'll pass to you Toad. 

Toad Dell: Thank you. Some of the participants' intentions that we gathered and collaborated into this set of words: 

• This learning community brings together individuals within the social enterprise sector to inspire ethical change in organisations, communities and selves through critical reflection, collective growth and transformative action.

Guy Ritani:

• To be in right relationship with each other and Country, this work focuses on decolonial, trauma-informed, and justice-centred practices across disciplines and sectors to develop practical tools, cultural awareness and leadership capacities that can be applied in service of equitable, sustainable and regenerative systems.

Toad Dell:

• Guided by the question of what would it look like, in ourselves, our communities and our institutions, if these values and practices were truly embodied. We root our learning in accountability, imagination and grounded action. 

Guy Ritani:

• This community acknowledges that we are living through times of burnout, change and uncertainty, and recognises the need for regenerative pacing, flexibility and ongoing care in how we move together.We invite reflection, creative inquiry and practices that draw inspiration from natural systems and ancestral wisdom, knowing that transformation is dynamic and collective. 

Toad Dell:

• Participants reflect that organisations embracing systems thinking tend to prioritise holistic solutions and aim for interconnected change, often through co-design, asset-based community development, or future thinking and understanding that power needs to be visible and accountable.

Guy Ritani:

• However, the challenges to embed systems thinking more deeply are also significant. Some organisations mentioned siloed structures, lack of internal alignment and difficulty in integrating systems thinking across the organisation. A few members pointed out that their work feels more reactive than proactive, as they struggle with time constraints and resource limitations that prevent them from making long-term, systemic changes.

Toad Dell:

• There was also recognition that organisations often lack the leadership or structured frameworks to fully realise systemic interventions. 

Guy Ritani: So taking into account the intentions that we had, the intentions that the participants had, we really thought a lot about what the experience was going to look like and how to foster regenerative cultural and social adaptation.

First and foremost for us was about slowness and silence. How do we sit in this discomfort and how do we sit with the silence? Our reframing of an awkward silence into a brave silence, not trying to fill up a space just because we don't like that it's empty, waiting until the right thing emerges. For us, song and story sovereignty was central to this. How we can engage in different ways of telling stories, of allowing existence to show up.

Emergent design was also really important. This learning community was an experience. It was not an outcome-based, output-based environment. It was about allowing us to see what came up. And for us, it was also about the content that we delivered directly applied to our learning community's context. What does it look like within all of their environments and the social enterprise sector as a whole? To you, Toad.

Toad Dell: Thank you, Guy. What that looked like in practice, slowness and stillness. There was a real focus on how do we actually foster relationships between the participants who are all doing incredible things in their own context, often in very siloed or very different industries. We made sure that there were at least 24 relational check-ins. Giving people the actual time to speak to each other, connect to each other, relate to each other.

As you might have experienced a little bit, really a big focus on somatics as well. How do we move beyond the endless academic thinking, and how do we pause, come back into our body and embody the work that we're trying to change? We also constantly revisited this idea of a brave space agreement and these brave space encounters. What does it mean to not just have this as a theoretical thing but a very practical and very embodied thing? What are the ways in which we need to be with ourselves and with each other to have hard and big conversations? 

And within this work that we did we had 53 content blocks where we taught frameworks, we shared frameworks, content, knowledge; there was a breadth of work there which we covered and as the participants might know, we stipend some very strange, weird and wonderful things.

Guy Ritani: So for us, it was also about creating structural systems of engagement with this knowledge. We had 39 group activities across the series. These resulted in 24 community-informed resources, which will be made available.

After each session, an audio, visual and written feedback mechanism called Padlet gathered more responses, feedback and insights about what the community wanted. We sent out 140 individual surveys across the whole learning community, and recorded 30 hours of content that was viewed across a number of different continents, to ensure that there were many different ways that this information could be engaged with. Over to you Toad. 

Toad Dell: Thank you. This included having one language glossary because we love a good buzzword. In different sectors, in different spaces we have different ideas when we say process-based; we have a different understanding when we say asset-based. This was one of the ways we could start to put things together and have shared language.

We had a contact list because a number of people wanted to continue to work with each other and connect outside of this course and have gone on to do other wonderful things. We have 12 resources for the participants based on the content that we taught that were delivered according to Spoon Theory, which comes out of disability justice spaces.

The idea is that if you have a lot of capacity and want to absolutely nerd out about trauma- informed design, here are three seven-hour podcasts. To medium spoon, something that you would want to dive a little bit into and read some articles. To low spoon, you want to have a low engagement with that because you have a low capacity. To no spoon, because this is not tertiary education. This is not homework. This is just an opportunity for people to dive into. 

42 breakout rooms because all the content that we taught, we can teach things about ecological design, we can teach things about queer theory, but what was really useful and valuable is the ways in which the participants took it, recontextualised it within their work in the social enterprise sector and shared it back to us. That was really what was exciting to us. 

Guy Ritani: Then through sitting in this space, lots of learnings and insights emerge. So as we said before, 24 feedback resources based across the three different series came out. The spoon resources as well, which we are so keen to make available. 

Five additional convening resources are available on our website. So if anyone is interested in how we might convene something like this or how we might approach it? There are a few resources that we've shared with you. Also there's an open creative response with our participants at the moment to respond to any of them through song, through poetry, which we will be sharing as well. We're very, very excited and grateful for this environment that continues to give and give and give. 

So what actually happened? Lots of talking. Orienting Futures had three series in it. The first one was planetary boundaries. The second one was based on decolonising structures. And then the third one in this series was equitable practice. A deep dive on all of these topics and how they look in different contexts across social enterprises of Australia.

We'll start off with planetary boundaries and I'll pass over to you, Toad, to give an insight about the intention for series one. 

Toad Dell: Thank you. As Guy mentioned, in the first series we're looking at planetary boundaries. We have this clean sentence here for the series intention:

To build understandings of ecological and regenerative obligations to adapt social enterprises within planetary boundaries. 

How do we do the work of purpose and profit? How do we do this work of social enterprises in ways that is not just sustainable, but regenerative to the world around us?

The topics that we covered in this first series were:

• Planetary Boundaries and Indigenous Leadership
• Systems Thinking and Systemic Intervention
• And Queer Theory as Social Innovation.

Toad Dell: Further into the series we looked at:

• Equity and Ecological Relationships
• Ecological Methodology and Applications
• Interdependence and Complexity.

Guy Ritani: The last two topics that we covered in this one are:

• Ecological Design and Permaculture, and
• Regenerative Design and Social Enterprises

So there was a big breadth of topics that we covered in here. The experience of this program was very much, here is a lot of information, here is a lot of touch points. How do they feel? How does the wisdom land to you? How do you respond to that? Then allowing that to emerge between the participants of this program. We focused a lot on sustainable development goals and translating a lot of these things into this context. 

We have spoken for a while, so what we're going to do is invite on one of our wonderful participants to share their experience of this learning community, their experience with series one and how that has gone. I'm going to invite Emeli on. It's amazing to see you again. We've been missing everyone from the learning community and we're super, super grateful to have you here. Over to you, Emeli. 

Participant Emeli: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for inviting me to speak. I feel I got so much out of this, but it's hard to put into words. I feel a very grounded power and I think we throw around the statement "knowledge is power" all the time, but I really feel it. 

I walk into rooms and I take up more space and I sit and lean into more intellectual conversations. That's what I wanted from this community. I wanted to walk away with a sharper tongue. I wanted to get a clearer idea of the practices around power and equity and trauma-informed so that it wasn't fluffy because I've been questioned about that many times. 

I felt as though the process was so gentle and so slow, and you never get time to really sit in this work. I feel as though it's either quite triggering or too much too soon. I felt like you held space for us at every point. For most of our nervous systems, doing things so slowly can be an avoidance, but I genuinely learned a lot from the process of facilitation that you gave us.

I think what I found challenging was my complicity and my privilege as I went through all the different systems, ecology, ecosystems, and environmental. There was so much I learned. Even though I found that challenging, I thought that was good for me to know about my impact and the impact of my social enterprise, our social enterprise, and what we are doing. Chopping and changing between that decolonial thinking and what habitually I've been a part of all my life.

I think I could ramble on for another two or three things, but I know there's two things I take away from this. One, I'm in systems infrastructures every day, big companies, small companies and I'm running culture design. I can even speak to them with a very different lens now. We talk about their stress and their wellbeing or their operating systems design that is missing and is causing friction, let alone in their own lives. 

I know that the feeling, the confidence I have when I speak to them comes from this greater knowledge or lens that I have. I can even poke the bear a bit in these places now and say are we really thinking about your impact on the system you're a part of? I love that. 

Secondly, I've been able to sit in rooms already and say we need a quarter of a million dollars to run this. Because you need to be thinking about the power imbalance. The narrative needs to change and that terminology or that ability to sit there with that confidence, they've said yes. That's not going to happen all the time, but I know that because of the work of the collaborative group that's going to be a part of it. I feel really confident about the impact over time, especially over that year that this program has had on my spirit, and maybe it is my ancestors clicking in a bit more with me, but I genuinely am very grateful.

Guy Ritani: Oh, melting, melting, melting. Wow. Emeli, thank you. No words, no words. That's brilliant. Thank you.

One of the challenging parts for us in this wake of it has been, not even challenging, but we've been having these ongoing check-ins with how these have landed. It's actually difficult for us to process just quite how that has happened. So, thank you so much for sharing that. 

Now we'll shift over to Bridget, who is another of our wonderful participants. Welcome, Bridget. Please feel free to share in whichever way you'd like to. 

Participant Bridget: Hello, everyone. I am calling in from Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country in Naarm. I am gonna reflect a little bit about where I was at when I arrived in to this program, what I was looking for and how it's transformed me. Even in doing this reflection for this process, I've realised how much it's transformed me. 

Emeli, when you were talking about your confidence and your groundedness, I was like, wow, yeah, I can really feel the same thing. Basically I feel pretty green in the social enterprise sector. I'm a horticulturalist and classically trained, as you would, came into it wanting to mix horticulture with community care and community. Like, connection to food growing and basically a community focused application of that.

I was becoming a little, even though I was so green, instantly a little disillusioned with the social enterprise model. I felt burnt out quite quickly from it. Coming in with all my ideals, I guess, and then coming into a system that is really trying to help and really trying to change things and be values-driven. But also grappling with the fact that a lot of social enterprise are still within these systems of violence that we're trying to get out of. The harm that we keep getting ourselves into even though we're trying to stop harm. I was getting really disillusioned and I was like, do I have to just go live in the hills and start a commune? 

Then I found this program and I was like, wow, this looks exactly like what I needed. I didn't really have the language yet to understand what I wanted to learn about, but I knew things didn't quite feel aligned. Basically, this PermaQueer program has given me the language and given me the understanding of how to move forward within social enterprise in a way that we can grapple with these systems of violence.

I think I was getting a little nervous that this is just how it is and feeling those feelings of defeat. Then having this new invigorated language and community and ways of knowing and ways of being, informed by permaculture and queering and Indigenous knowledge, has really blown my brain apart in the best way.

Coming into this space I was really nervous, but as you guys could probably see coming into this presentation the receiving of our nervous systems collectively was done so tenderly and exactly how we needed to feel brave. Maybe one of my fears was that I wasn't going to be brave enough in the space or  I had to be at a certain level to engage. But it was created in a way where we could feel empowered to be brave together. That was really special. 

Some things I'll take out of it are the practices that were embedded into it, like the brave space agreement and the concept of good stretch versus bad stretches. I've already used that in my social enterprise in discussion, in meetings around either when I'm started to feel elevated or others, and okay, this is not a good stretch,  this is not where we grow, and this is not where we learn.

Then stuff around the bio breaks and the somatics and stuff. Even that I've already brought with me moving forward. Other things that I found really valuable as well as challenging. My first challenge was the whole concept of this program being non-outcomes-based. I was doing it on work time, and it was a little bit like, okay, you're going to come to the end of this program with an outcome, and you're gonna present it. As soon as we did the first session, one of the first slides was, there's no outcome, and I was like, how do we engage with this?

I'm living so within capitalism and colonial thinking. Coming freshly out of a master's degree, and the white perspective of outcomes, and I don't know. Coming into it and being challenged with the fact that there may be no outcome, it's about the process was both challenging and so relieving, instantly relieving. That's something that I'm gonna bring forward with my own programs within my social enterprise. It's not always about the outcome. It's a classic adage that it's about the journey. How do we embody that and actually focus on the process? Because a lot of us have to grapple with having outcomes and finding that balance around valuing process over outcomes. That was both challenging and really regenerative for me.

Other things I loved about this whole first section was the concept of queering. We learned about queer ecology and queering systems, and there was a really amazing definition of queering. I'm gonna just scroll up to find it because I want to say it word for word because it was so good.

“To queer something is to question norms and assumptions about it and then build relationships and systems to suit our needs better.” - by Hannah Breckville.

We kept coming back to how we can incorporate queering into our social enterprise settings. As a queer person, I know what queer means to me in my community, but understanding it on a systems and a design level really excited me. That's a definition and a questioning that I'm going to bring forward as well.

As well as a concept that we went into a bit that was about edge theory and the edges. We talked about how in ecologies where two different ecosystems come together, there forms this edge and within that edge is a really biodiverse area, and it's where a lot of innovation and growth and evolution happens, in that edge. How we can use that understanding and use that edge effect to focus on innovation within our own social enterprises. Either within our social enterprises or between social enterprises or at a relational level between two people.

It's really challenged a lot of my black-and-white thinking. There's a lot of siloing and monocultures that are inbred in capitalism and my headspace. So that was just amazing too.

Guy Ritani: Thank you so much for sharing. Something that's really important to us is queering. How do we create a different approach? How do we engage this knowledge in a different way? How do we interact with each other in a different way?

Toad Dell: I'm going to have a little note about play and the importance of play before we move on. We wanted to have a little behind-the-curtains look at why we do things that seem, in professional spaces, sometimes silly or playful. It's a really intentional strategy that we use.Whereas frameworks or tools have a correct way to use them and there's an incorrect way to use them. We really try to reframe these things like toys. 

Children are little scientists and play is a form of scientific inquiry. Play and silliness allow us to get curious and creative and explore these things with the capacity to pick it apart, see what works, and see what doesn't work. When we engage with those parts of our brain talking about the big scary work we're about to talk to next, it allows us to be a lot more creative and a lot less reactive. I wanted to give that framing about why we've gone from silliness to now we're going to talk about decolonising. It was a really intentional behind-the-curtains reason why we did that. 

Guy Ritani: Thank you Toad. Absolutely, as we cover dense topics, as we cover environments that require bravery, ourselves, our silliness, stupidity, joy and how we bring lightness to these environments. So let’s go dark, go deep and go into it. 

Series two was on decolonising structures, getting into the depth of it. The intention for this one was: 

To build practices of decolonial obligation towards ourselves, our settings and the systems we subscribe to.

So we explored what this meant across many different angles, approaches and perspectives in our social enterprise context. 

Some of the topics that we covered in this one, of course, are systems of violence and social disruption. So what even is a system of violence? How do they play out? We are looking at a lot of systems of thinking, systems of engagement, and what are these dominant systems of societal violence?

We looked at a spectrum of cultural frameworks. Understanding how different cultural backgrounds, cultural understandings, interact with these violent systems differently. Having an intersectional lens on how we might engage, decolonising the structures that we belong to. Over to you, Toad.

Toad Dell: Thank you. Wanting to talk about what does lateral violence look like and group coping mechanisms. How do these systems of violence emerge in lateral ways amongst our own communities? How do we unpack systems of violence and power within our spaces, within our structures, within our institutions and communities? And positionality, agency and systemic obligation. Where are we placed within these systems to make the most effective change? What are our obligations and how do we do this well? 

Guy Ritani: Then, obviously, decolonial pathways and cultural and ecological approaches of that. What does it actually look like tangibly? Sometimes this can be a big scary word, and we can feel obligations, but what does this actually look like? And unpacking what these invisible systems are, the unconscious bias that we bring into these environments and how we might navigate through these.

We're going to go through a few of those more tangibly, what that looks like. So, to you Toad, for Macro Ecology. 

Toad Dell: Thank you. With all of this work, we wanted to ground it, because we're talking about systems thinking here, and often what we get grounded in is the ecology of the world we live within.

Talking about the Macro Ecology, these bigger systems, like climate, down to ecosystem, down to bioregion, down to soil, water, everything else as well, and understanding that these systems are like Russian nesting dolls, those little dolls within dolls within dolls. At every layer, at every scale, these systems are touching each other laterally. They're also communicating and relating and playing upon each other above and below as well. 

Guy Ritani: While we're thinking about these nested ecologies from an environmental perspective, we have the same structures within our socials. Our individual, the cells, the values that we hold, the family units or community units, the neighbourhoods, the bioregions, the councils, the states, the countries, these arrangements, if you will, of human relationship and human behaviour.

Economies, organisations, social enterprises, how we relate and the different strata of relating that we have. And just as we have these deep macro ecologies, the sun that we can't move, the seasons or climates that we shouldn't change, our social ecology, our social behaviour is also impacted by deep social ecology, these deep values, these deep views that are reinforced in the social structures that we exist within. That change based on the culture, the community and the context. So exploring how colonialism is informed by these and that shapes our social structure. 

We're conscious of that, or we are subconscious or unconscious of that, and we perpetuate systems that maybe we don't want to continue, and that is part and parcel of decolonising these structures. So over to you, Toad. 

Toad Dell: Thank you, Guy. We're wanting to understand from systems to ecological perspective, how do interruptions interrupt ecology, and what are the pathways in an ecosystem towards regeneration? How do we adapt ourselves off of living systems that are regenerative, adaptive and resilient? 

Guy Ritani: Thank you, Toad. Part of this was identifying common systems of violence and what elephants are in the room. How we understand the patterns of those elephants and how we acknowledge and recognise and interact with them. These are classism, colonisation, capitalism, ableism, patriarchy, white supremacy, Zionism, and these are just a select few from some context, and all contexts change.

These dominant systems obviously have power, and they also have nuance and context in different environments. How can we build those practices of interacting with these systems and creating new and different solutions to navigating them? Over to you, Toad.

Toad Dell: Thank you. When we learn how to design for ecosystems, we have a lot of the answers to how we can design for our social systems as well. The same pathways towards, from damaged extractive and the monoculture systems, towards increasingly complex, interdependent, resilient systems are laid out there already. We're not wanting to reinvent the wheel; we're wanting to model our social systems off of the regenerative ecosystems we're a part of.

Guy Ritani: In this decolonising environment, as we started, are led by Indigenous wisdom. This framework down the bottom right is Mark Yettica-Paulson's Intercultural Framework, which is one of the frameworks that we utilise to understand how to interact across different cultural contexts and how we might approach this work of decolonising the history and the structures of this so-called Australia that we exist within. Over to you, Toad. 

Toad Dell: Thank you. Wanting to understand that this whole pathway to decolonising isn't a binary, it isn't a here and a there. It is a complex spectrum of cultural frameworks. What are the stepping stones moving between really degenerative ways to really regenerative ways? Also identifying ourselves. Where do we sit on that spectrum? What are our queer edges, and what are the ways in which we're best placed along that spectrum to move towards regeneration? 

Some of us are really placed in typically very conservative spaces and can speak to people that others can't. Others of us are close to it in other regenerative ways. Where are we positioned and where are we best able to do the cool work? 

Guy Ritani: That's a little overview of some of the topics that we covered. Now, the joy you're about to be hearing from the learning community. It is my pleasure to invite on Lauren, who has been a brilliant member of our community, and all of the community members have, to share on what their experience of series two was, and what they're up to now. So I'll pass over to you Lauren. Thank you so much for coming and sharing your time and experience. 

Participant Lauren: Hey Gang. So happy to see everybody. I realised how strong those connections were when I started to hear everybody speak. I feel like I know all of you, and I'm so happy to see you all again. I miss you, but also we'll see each other, and I love that. 

This conversation about decolonisation is one that was always really interesting to me. I'm a creative practitioner. I have Jamaican and British ancestry. I grew up in Kulin Land. I say all of this to demonstrate what some of that positionality can look like. 

You talked about navigating the steps of that positionality. One of those big and interesting steps for me is that I very much identify with being this black, Indigenous, people of colour community. I have a black identity, and that sometimes puts me on a different grounding talking to certain people, and particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities. It's a conversation that we are relating on, but I have this other context, and this other context is being the recipient of dispossession, of possessive logic, and being a migrant to these lands. Knowing that I've migrated here, my family migrated here with so much complexity, and we gained so much. It's this strange juxtaposition of wanting to connect with this global black community and also recognising my positionality in the ongoing colonisation. 

Then I cross over these worlds of art and multiculturalism. Some of the challenges in that, I guess, and I'm relating this to the process of learning, are that it's really easy without the process of unlearning and starting to interrogate these things to continue the same logic of possession. To do that without recognising Indigenous sovereignty and Aboriginal sovereignty on this land.

This decolonising structures was really about us looking at and recognising how those structures uphold the ongoing colonisation and the unseen structures that hold these things in place. What are the behaviours and the practices that we have that mean that we perpetuate this lie? And it can be really simple things.

I've been on this mission for a couple of years, this is the steps leading up to connecting with PermaQueer, where I really want to create a different and a self-led education about art that sat outside my institutional learning. Participating in this process I started to realise just how ingrained certain defensive behaviours and mechanisms are in me as I started to learn. One of the really weird things to observe was how an ego or a defensive mechanism made it difficult for me to engage with learning and a learning community.

I think this idea of deep learning becomes so important because we all have these learning injuries. We have these behaviours that we learn in institutions. Sometimes those structures are upholding processes that keep us in certain place and teach us the language of assimilating over the language of being able to think critically and relate and connect to each other. Interrogating those structures is about what you can bring to the surface. I think I've had to grapple with what I have to move through in order to open myself up to learning and to not have those defensive mechanisms.

The reason that I want to do that is that I want to interrogate the things and the behaviours that are disconnecting us from each other, from collective responsibility and from land. All of this stuff is manifesting itself in the way that I work now and move forward in the art that I create, in the community of practices I work with.

A big part of my job at the moment is working with the sex work community and collaborating with sex workers and creating language and liberation. I'm working with stories and narratives that are self-determined, that are written by sex workers about their experiences and also everything outside their experiences. I think the takeaways for me is the fact that we have this capacity to learn and to move beyond those injuries, those ways of being that are destructive to us, but more importantly, that moving beyond that space of just saying colonisation is bad, violence systems are bad.

What do you do beyond recognising and feeling anger? I don't want to dismiss anger and rage because they have important places, but we don't recognise that sovereignty. We perpetuate the same thing, we don't do this self-interrogation, then we distance ourselves from each other and from the rewards. And the rewards, my friends, are great. The rewards are love and connection and not being distorted. Not having a distorted relationship to ourselves, our genders, our bodies, Country, nature, all of those things.

Thank you for affording us a space to get ugly and to do that learning. Thank you for leaning into those possibilities with me, and helping me to move away from those outcomes which really are just differently framed. Outcomes are just expectations of productivity, right? How can anything come through and generate, and how can ideas happen, if we're just leaning into that? I want to encourage everyone and say thank you. Also to encourage us all to keep resisting the colonised voice, so the commodification of the knowledge that we are experiencing here. And leaning into signs of how generative thought can manifest and ignite our curiosity, because that's the point. What do we do next? How do we seek wisdom? How do you let your curiosity thrive? 

I thought I'd just end really quickly with one of the processes/projects I was working on with an artist called TextaQueen, you'll see what I mean. This is one of the parts of the project, this ongoing project about bringing communities of artists together. I thought you might recognise the elephant. That's our elephant in the room. The words read; Crowns with stolen jewels wash away, growth remembers loss and legacies meld here. Because the elephant never forgets.

Guy Ritani: Tears fell from my face just then. I am so grateful; I have no words. I'm gonna pass to you, Toad.

Toad Dell: Oh, my goodness. Thank you. I think I stifled a scream when I saw that there was an elephant there. I want to thank you, Lauren, and I really want to thank the participants because this work, people are the experts in their own context. We just facilitated and convened something. The juice, the meat, the deliciousness, everything that happened came because people allowed themselves to get messy and do some cool and big stuff. We just got to help steward, the facilitating and the organising of the times and that stuff. I really do want to shift that to gratitude towards the participants. Thank you so much, Lauren, and thank you so much, everyone. 

I'm losing my train of thought. I'm going to hand over to Guy. 

Guy Ritani: And I'm going to hand over to Mehak and cry again.

Participant Mehak: Thank you, and thanks, Lauren. That was really nice to just listen and remember the feelings that came up in the process. 

Hi everyone. I'm Mehak. There's so much I want to share. Do I share specific moments or the whole experience? I don't know. 

I came across this work because I was talking to Sherryl from Social Enterprise Australia, and I hope that it was what I was saying, and trying to ramble and find multiple threads of what I want to do and what I'm seeking. She was like, I think I have a place for you to go to find community. I was very lucky to get through  towards the end of the EOIs. I just made it basically, and so very grateful to have done so because the whole experience, more than anything else, gave me a sense of not feeling alone. Which I think happens quite often in my head or in our heads when we are sitting and thinking about these systems all the time and witnessing them and witnessing our bodies witnessing them and us feeling through what's going on. Then also learning about them and knowing, and I'm like, is anyone else thinking about this? I'm constantly asking that question. So it was really reassuring there's other people here. It’s a relief to say there's other people who care about this and they're thinking deeply about it. That's probably my biggest takeaway on a very personal spiritual level. 

I felt like I was quite familiar with the content coming into the series. The content, its introduction wasn't what I was looking for, but what I got from it was how to talk about it in a way that is accessible and invites people into the conversation. I've been in the left, progressive sector, social justice sector for a while now, and you're basically shunned if you don't have the language, is my observation. To be able to realise that there's a way to invite people in that doesn't expect them to have all of this theory and language, which I felt like I had to pick up on really quickly early in my years so that I could “fit in”. I love that that was taken away. The inner child is 17-year-old Mehek who had first entered the social justice space was being cared for, because there was no expectation to know it. Which was amazing. 

Also, it has taken me to my own learnings of how I then invite community. I got really sucked into this sector and started regurgitating the same ways of being that were probably unhealthy or ostracising me. It was a good reminder for me to go, wait, if you want to invite people in your local community into a conversation about what are the systems that are existing and causing oppression. It's not about you and your experience only, but it is a collective one, so we could collectively get through this. I need to be able to make sure my language is inviting and warm and welcoming and centred in love. Which I think the whole program did really well. I was inspired by that and learning from it.

Was this a silly takeaway? I don't know. But there was a particular slide about the digestive system, which has stuck in my brain like no tomorrow. I love talking about systems, but it's always so jargony and theory. Then, Toad, I think you ran that one, and you talked about the digestive system, oh, my gosh, the number of people I can now talk to about this making something really relatable. So thank you for that. I have used it twice since then, and it has worked. Actually once was with an auntie who I was like, I really want you to be able to feel like you can talk to me about this stuff, and I don't want you to feel like you're not welcome in this conversation. I was like, yeah, just like the digestive system. She got it. It was great. 

I guess the final note I want to make about my experience is I'm really inspired, or I feel welcomed to lean into who I am. I think the facilitators lean into who they are, and it reminds me over and over again that the world we want to see, is in the example we set ourselves. It's from small things like how we open the space, or use of language, your own ancestral language, or use of connection to different cultural, I guess, points of reference. Its almost like permission for those of us who sometimes have to be really careful, or feel like we have to be careful in how we lean into who we want to be and the kind of world we want to be.

I've seen this in the years of my time in the social justice space. It's probably a lot more prominent in non-profit or more corporate-type setups of non-profits and social enterprises where you have to shy away from yourself. 

The most recent example I had was in a social enterprise space that I was in, there was conversations happening about land having spirit and trees having spirit and air and water having spirit. It was so relatable because in my Islamic tradition, there is a lot of reference to land having spirit, and all that it grows from it. But I was feeling a bit hesitant to make reference to that because I fear that I might be looked at strangely because I make reference to God or to faith. Then I'm reminded of the experiences I've had of yourself Guy and other incredible facilitators who are like, no, no, no, you lean into who you are because that's how we create the world we want to see. 

Thank you again for the experience and for letting me through that last minute. Thank you.

Guy Ritani: Such a joy. When I received that email from you, I could feel you. I was like, yes, you need to be here. You filled out that EOI, which was not short. You did that. You were committed. Oh, my heart is so full. My heart is so, so full. Thank you. 

Again, back to our participants. The joy is, as Toad said before, we get to be custodians of something, but really it's about how it's interacted with and where it goes. Endless gratitude for what you've all shared. My heart is so full hearing you all say this. 

Series three, Equitable Practice. The focus on this series was:

To identify inequities that exist in the work that social enterprise actors do, and shift our way of seeing, doing and being towards intersectional equity and trauma-informed practice. 

Coming in and trying to understand: how do we approach relationship? How do we approach ourselves? How do we understand ourselves in this environment? And how do we relate to other people? So over to you, Toad, into the topics. 

Toad Dell: The first thing we kind of jumped into is:

• Trauma Informed Design and Intervention Points
• Intercultural Literacy and Ecological Succession
• Diversity of Capital, Privilege and Resource.

We're looking at the ways in which people work, landscapes work, from a trauma-informed perspective and from an ecologically regenerative perspective. 

Guy Ritani: Then we had:

• Functions of Capital and Privilege in Social Change

So privilege is often seen as a bad thing. It's a thing, like everything in a system. It does something, and we're interested in what it does, what is the function of it? And if we're trying to create change, if there are only certain people that have the function of this, how do we create that happening? How can we relate to that?

We looked at:

• Equity and Collective Nervous Systems

As we talk about communities. How do systems of violence or equity exist in the collective nervous system? What's not okay. We don't talk about that; we don't do that; stop doing that.

Then understanding:

• Positionality, Agency and Systemic Obligation

Who are we? Not just who you think you are, but what are the systems behind you? What are the privileges behind you? What are the resources behind you? What are the paradigms behind you? How does that change how you might interact with other people? How does that change your obligations based on what privileges you do have and the positionality you hold? Toad, for the last topic here. 

Toad Dell: 

• Bravery, Knowledge, Pleasure and Transformation

This comes into play as well. How do we get the really big things through the door? Often it's not using really inaccessible language and performing this level of academia to say that hey, I need to be here. How do we make this work sustainable? How do we make this work so that it's not just something that we can show up for in our early 20s, while we're studying something full time, and then it falls away in our life. How do we make this work as something that is a lifelong commitment, a lifelong practice? That builds regeneration, connection and interdependence and doesn't just end when we run out of capacity. 

Guy Ritani: There's a whole bunch of the different visuals and frameworks of what we went through in series three.

Due to time and wanting to have a discussion space, we're going to share this one here. Which was an important recurring theme in series three as we had gone through this big relational space together of what this online environment of bravery, of vulnerability, of transformation, of yearning, of discomfort, of many different experiences that you've got a glimpse into now. And one thing that's really rejected by society at large, and that is death. The dying process. The ending of something. And perhaps because we're so avoidant of ending things, that's why new things aren't starting.

We had a repeated interrogation of what does this dying process mean for our learning community? What does it mean for us? What does it mean as we arrive? I'm not sure that we came up with any definitive answers, but things did emerge in that space. Things that emerge out of what that experience could feel like and what yearnings could feel like in the environment. 

I think it's something that in our personal lives, especially in the West, the dying process is not something that's particularly interrogated and especially not within corporate or social capital structures. There's a very specific formula as to how that process unfurls. I want to express a deep gratitude for everyone sitting in the stickiness of that and sharing what those dying processes were, which were really beautiful.

If people want to look at some of them, they were put into one of the feedback resources. I'll pass to you, Toad, if you wanted to say anything else about series three before we go to the sharing. 

Toad Dell: Yeah, thank you. We had a very strong kind of idea of what we wanted to do in series one and two. Approximate containers around, ecological limits, planetary limits and decolonising structures. A lot of series three was led by what the participants shared, where they wanted to see things go, and what could we lean more into based on the participants' feedback.

There is a lot of dreaming about, well what are the ways we want to do? How do we practically take these into a workplace? What does it mean to make this sustainable work and not something that falls off the end of the cart. I really want to speak to that element of the design of series three, which was really heavily based on the learnings and the feedback and the experiences of the participants in the first two series.

Guy Ritani: Thank you, Toad. A lot of these practices and the findings and the landings, even though it wasn't outcomes-based, there were all these creative ideas. They can be found, as we said, in those feedback resources which will be linked.

For now, we are going to pass to our final learning community participant to share on their experience. It's with great joy and a full heart that I invite Erin on to share whatever it is that you want to share about this.

Participant Erin: Kia ora. Hi. G'Day. I wish to acknowledge the stolen lands that I have the great privilege to create culture and community on. The Merri Merri and the Wurundjeri-willam people of the Eastern Kulin nation.

I also want to say what a deep privilege it has been, by default, by knowing Guy to find out about this amazing learning community. This is exactly what floats my boat. A non-colonised boat. 

To introduce my history, I am a fifth-generation-ish settler. That, essentially, the cultural amnesia that seems to be the bread and butter really worked in my family, which is quite tragic. I've got nothing better to do than turn it into a play in my future just to make that the tragedy, also a comedy. I work in academia. I have been teaching into the built environment for 20 years, but my research is my practice. So I love the parallels there and the opportunity in the sector. Essentially showing the students how I take on the philosophies within the realm of the built environment. 

It's a corporate institution, so I work with the big three. As Mehak mentioned, it can be a very lonely place. The irony of language being a tool, but also very elitist and classist. I'm late-diagnosed with dyslexia. So I basically worked out that I've been masking like a professional for 20 years. No doubt, that was exhausting. I see it as not a disability as it's framed in our culture, but actually a superpower. It definitely causes lots of fun in class discussions. The language has long been used as a tool for maintaining patriarchy. I like to print these resources off. I have a tab continuously open, as many neurospicy people do, of all of these amazing resources that I slowly chip away at and re-re-re-remember. 

Finally, because a lot of these mission statements for these corporate institutions talk about sustainability, but they really only mean cardboard is environmentally sustainable for your model making. But really, the passion I have for the social, political and social sustainabilities are often hardly touched on and definitely not practised. So finally there's a cultural competency within architecture that I'm thrilled to report. It's very simple, unfortunately. Chapter 101, whose land are we on? But then that's an accessible and therefore necessary engagement which is already causing quite a few students to scratch their heads well before I introduce great resources like Crime Scene Australia, and essentially talking about the seemingly invisible genocide happening here, tragically.

Learning is a privilege, but I also tell my students that it's an activity; it's not a service. I definitely take note of those who don't join in the belly laughs around that idea. In parallel to my own practice, which is investigating how screens incorporated within architecture can activate audience. I also have had the wonderful experience of creating social cultural studios with my husband here on the sacred Merri Creek. As such our family is immersed in our bigger warehouse that hosts 50 other creative practitioners, and a dance studio, which we timed a little bit strangely just before the award-winning lockdown.

Suddenly we're a broadcasting room. Nonetheless, we use that great resource, which around here, with apartments popping up that simply don't have enough space for even an AGM or a meeting for more than three people. We host cultural events often much richer than an AGM. Who knows what we can introduce into those corporate community gatherings. 

Also life drawing, and platforming the First Nations community that I've grown to admire beyond comprehension. My relationship with Uncle Robbie Thorpe has enriched my life on a personal, cultural, political and social layer. To host Q&A's around the progressive no vote has just been some of my delightful experiences that I get to pull along with me in this lifetime and share for all those who want to lean in.

What I found challenging was being held with love. Who knew that that's a really important thing to do when we're learning: to acknowledge emotion. That you can't separate it like the medical science departments might like because it's so easy. So confusing to study women's bodies with all those hormones. Basically, that the tears were held, the joy, the laughter, the silliness, the stories we're telling each other. This is such an experience to continually feel inspired, seen and heard. 

Also the spoon theory, thank you Toad, I had no idea you could say no sometimes, there's limits. Who knew we're just merely human animals. Also queer theory, as mentioned here in this space, as a social innovation. I've always been rainbow because I love that transformative moment that is fleeting and full of beauty. One of the things I've learned over time is that to appreciate beauty, sometimes it's the hardship that we contrast it with that can really open our eyes and our hearts to that joy. I feel like it's always been on the edges of this non-core society that I've existed in, and having more frameworks, and more language to perhaps defend myself or to further question the conservative people like my parents, I often come back to. I figure if the revolution could happen, it could happen in my family. It's proven not to be successful quite yet, but I'm gonna die old, so there's time. 

What an ecosystem to thrive in. Finding out that permaculture is political. I mean, I knew architecture is, even though my father can't quite see that, but he can't quite see patriarchy. We just keep moving forward and trying to share these nuggets. Even if it's through humour that we might again hit some core truths and normalise what actually needs to be seen.

So, surprisingly more controversial than First Nations liberation is perimenopause and menopause. I'm inspired to lean in and share the very, very inconvenient truths around perhaps the medicalisation of our pre-menarche, so coming into puberty, and then the exit is a problem, maybe. How do we support each other with these awkward, emotional and often, because of the anti-socials, quite simplistic and non-deep discussion modes of communicating?

It feels like everybody feels judged if I pull out some facts. Like I didn't know that there are five animals on the planet that go through menopause. Four are in the oceans, one's a killer whale, and one is humans and a very small mob of chimpanzees in Uganda. Why don't we know this? Then scientists are perplexed: what is the purpose of a woman not having babies? Oh, I could offer some suggestions. But yeah, are they listening? 

So thank you for trusting in things that I could offer. For offering me a microphone off mute. And deeply respect all of you and feel so privileged to spend some of this precious life, even on a virtual platform, in your orbits. Thank you so much, PermaQueer. Thank you, Social Enterprise Australia for knowing that financial sustainability is also pretty cool. Thank you. 

Guy Ritani: Thank you, Erin. That just fills me with giggles. Giggling the whole way through. This is brilliant, so brilliant. Thank you.

Joy. Let's do it all again. Can we do it all again, Social Enterprise Australia? That's a great plan. If you wanted to respond to that, Toad. 

Toad Dell: Thank you, Erin. It's funny because I'm in my facilitator brain, I'm having a hard time with my autism, swapping between holding the space versus talking in the space. Which is something that I really try to uplift. I'm just acknowledging that today I'm having that real blind spot. 

Thank you, Erin, for sharing what you did and participating. I'll keep coming back to it, same thing I said with Lauren. The reason this program was so excellent was because everyone was willing to step into a queer space, which is risky. It's a little bit, I don't want to say the word dangerous, but there's the risk of knowing ourselves, knowing each other and stepping into that possible tension and that risk and something really beautiful came from that because people were willing to step into that. Thank you. 

Guy Ritani: Thanks for sharing, Toad. Awesome. The feedback resources, note that these are one of three sets of resources that emerged out of this non-outcomes-based space. Those are the ones that are direct community responses to the activities, to the discussions, to the insight, to the desires and the dreams. We also will link through the spoons resources. So this is after we finished all of the topics and the content; this is further readings, learnings, videos, meditations, dances, massages, a whole range of different things in those resources to engage people in different ways. Those will be available through Understorey and also through our PermanQueer website as well. I'll pass to you, Toad, for this next one. 

Toad Dell: Thank you. Please follow the works of our learning community participants linked on Understorey for updates about their programs. As I said, this program is so amazing because the participants and they're all doing really cool things. So please follow up on what they're doing. 

Guy Ritani: Also on our website, at the beginning of the year, put a sign up just in case people wanted to do another Orienting Futures in the future. We have maybe 12 or 13 EOIs for the next one. If people are interested, please jump on. If there is interest, we'll find a way. There's a will, and there's a want, and there's a joy.

If anyone wants to collaborate on any of the feedback resources as well, because there are some quite tangible blueprints and strategies in those feedback resources. If people want to try implementing them or try whatever that might look like, please feel free to reach out to ask for anyone in the learning community about how they might go about doing that. I think a lot of the process was refined in this learning space. Then to you, Toad, for the last one here. 

Toad Dell: Shameless plug. Please follow PermaQueer on socials. Join our mailing list and keep updated on further learning communities, programs, and resources. We do a bunch of weird and wacky stuff from grassroots community organising to these big systems thinking convening and organising. We love to get weird. Please reach out to us. We love to collaborate with people and run strange programs. Our whole ethos is how do we break these silos down and get people who would never work together to do something really cool together. 

Guy Ritani: Thank you all so much for coming along and thank you to those watching the recording in the future. Wherever the time is, I hope the world is slightly more regenerated than the time that this was recorded.

In all Orienting Futures fashion I'll pass over to you Toad, to close us off. 

Toad Dell: Thank you. You're welcome to close your eyes or not, but just remember we've been talking and thinking about these things that make us feel and step outside of ourselves and think about the other. To return back to your body and notice if you've been sitting for a while, any kind of tension in your body, what does it mean to soften and gently move that body around a little bit. Maybe you run your hands over your face, over the top of your head, the back of the head, down the chest or the side body, down the legs, even giving the feet a squeeze. One more time, taking all those busy thoughts, all that too much thinking, too much talking and kind of pulling it down into the body. This achy body which needs to be fed. That might need a nap or a snack or a step outside. One final time taking all of those thoughts, and just pulling it all down. Maybe giving yourself a little bit of a shake. 

Thank you everyone. 

Thank you so much.