This powerful conversation explores the relationship between decolonization and consciousness. Ashanti is a systems change agent focused on helping organizations deconstruct dominant narratives of colonization and replace them with life affirming narratives that support a regenerative future. She believes that true transformation must begin within, guiding leaders to embrace spiritual coherence and walk their talk.

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Jenny and Ashanti discuss:

• How to define what is right and good
• Why the inner work is imperative
• The consequences of the narratives we have internalized
• Rethinking our understanding of leadership and power
• Taking responsibility for ourselves and what inhibits us from doing so
• The relationship between deconstructing our stories and spirituality
• The importance of walking the talk and the harm caused by misalignment
• Love as praxis: moving from fear to love
• The role of fear in white supremacy
• The Zulu concept of Ubuntu
• Loving each other through our ugly
• Love and spiritual growth
• Love, consideration, and diversity in systems change work
• Open and honest communication
• The importance of expressing emotions and creating emotionally safe spaces
• Calling out vs. calling in
• Spiritual accountability, personal integrity, and coherent leadership
• Spiritual discernment
• Paying attention to our thoughts and language
• Self-love

Resources

• Learning 2 Unlearn, Ashanti's website
• "White supremacy lives in the mundane" Ashanti on Social Transformation
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paul Freire
• We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, adrienne maree brown

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

This episode builds on many prior conversations exploring work that we can do on ourselves, including living authentically, trauma and the nervous system, nonviolent communication, transforming relational conflict, and optimal zone resilience. It demonstrates how the work on ourselves extends upwards into the organization context, and further amplifies our impact at a systemic level.

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In this conversation Jenny and Diana discuss:

• What Diana means by conscious when she refers to conscious leadership
• Being above or below the line: reacting from fear vs. responding from trust
• The four different types of consciousness from which we might lead: to me, by me, through me, and as me
• Taking radical responsibility
• Staying curious and growing in self-awareness
• The problem with wanting to be right
• Our relationship with our stories and willingness to consider the opposite is equally true
• The importance of feeling our feelings and seeing their value
• Why candor and safe emotional spaces are essential
• Why gossip is pernicious and the how judgement reveals our shadows
• Integrity, both with ourselves and with others
• Making clear agreements using a whole body yes
• How to handle broken agreements
• Regarding all circumstances of life as an opportunity to learn and grow
• Moving from scarcity to abundance with a commitment to experiencing having enough of everything
• Committing to win for all solutions
• Operating from our zones of genius and realizing our full potential
• Being the resolution rather than assigning blame to others
• The importance of rest and play
• Subconscious commitments

Resources:

• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success, Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Warner Klemp
• The Conscious Leadership Group
• WholeBodyYes.com
• Conscious Loving: The Journey To Co-Commitment, Gay Hendricks, Ph.D. and Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D.
• Terrance Real: https://terryreal.com/
• Man's Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl
• Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power, Carolyn Elliott, Ph.D.

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

Ethnocide is a word Barrett both coined and resurrected, referring to the destruction of a people’s culture while keeping the people. From Barrett’s point of view, Trump’s re-election is not cause for disbelief, but a glaring reminder of what America has been since its inception: a country founded by white men for the purposes of wealth accumulation, whose rhetoric of freedom and equality has always been tenuous alongside its prevalence of white supremacy and patriarchy.

In this conversation Jenny and Barrett discuss:

• Why Trump's re-election did not surprise Barrett and how it reflects something fundamental about American politics
• The bad faith and lies underlying American democracy
• The distinction between freedom from and freedom with
• The importance of language in addressing systemic oppression
• What ethnocide means and its origin
• Capitalism and ethnocide
• Existentialism and the notions of existence vs. essence
• White essence in the United States
• What identity means to Barrett
• Why the Hegelian dialectic and critical theory are essential to understand and combat ethnocide
• What culture means to Barrett
• Ethnogenesis: creating and birthing culture
• Barrett's Altars of American project: a ritual to combat ethnocide
• Eŭ-topia: a sustainable, good, nurturing place
• How we can transcend systemic oppression by cultivating Eŭ-topian spaces

Resources:

• The Crime Without A Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America
• The Sustainable Culture Lab
• Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

Melanie Rieback is a cybersecurity entrepreneur and the founder of Nonprofit Ventures, an organization dedicated to supporting post growth entrepreneurs.  She runs an incubator to support post growth entrepreneurs and teaches a course at the University of Amsterdam on post growth entrepreneurship. Her lectures are available on YouTube, linked below.

This episode builds on a long series of conversations on this podcast exploring economic reform: stakeholder capitalism, steward ownership, co-ops, post-growth economics, to name a few. While it's called pot growth entrepreneurship, really this conversation is about non-extractive entrepreneurship. PGE rejects the typical silicon valley model of capital, scale, exit, in favor of bootstrapping, flat growth, and non-extraction.

In this conversation Jenny and Melanie discuss:

• Melanie's path from cybersecurity entrepreneur to post growth entrepreneurship
• Why not all forms of steward ownership ensure profit serves purpose
• Why Melanie believes business is one of the most effective forms of activism
• Defining post growth entrepreneurship (PGE)
• Why PGE is a leverage point for systemic change
• Issues with the Silicon Valley model of capital, scale, exit
• Issues with status quo social enterprise and impact investing
• Principles of PGE: bootstrapping, flat growth, non-extraction
• Asset locks and stable steward ownership implementation
• Policy initiatives in Europe to create a steward owned business entity
• How to think about fair compensation when implementing PGE
• Thoughts on the cultural component of this work
• Business as spirituality

Resources:

• Nonprofit Ventures website: https://nonprofit.ventures/
• Post Growth Entrepreneurship: three minute explainer video
• "Putting Post Growth Theory Into Practice" Medium post
• Melanie's post growth entrepreneurship course at the University of Amsterdam; 8 YouTube lectures

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

Consciousness is one of the six themes of the Denizen podcast and the role of psychedelics is an important subset of that inquiry. It's an honor to bring Rick Doblin to the podcast with this episode; he has been at the forefront of the movement since founding the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986. Rick is joined by Nirvan Mullick, filmmaker and founder of Interconnected Media, who has been working on a documentary about Rick and MAPS for ten years.

This episode extensively explores the role of storytelling in the psychedelic movement. Rick takes us back to the cultural context of his childhood and shares his own experience of awakening through experimenting with psychedelics as a young adult. We discuss MAPS’s strategy and how storytelling complimented their data-driven approach with clinical trials. We talk about MAPS's corporate structure and how it evolved over time, with its incentives slowly corrupted as MAPS was forced to bring in venture capital to continue its work. 

Rick shares the story of the year leading up to the FDA's response letter, and how MAPS's leadership inhibited his ability to contribute to a more balanced narrative about the treatment of MDMA for PTSD. We then look forward to what comes next, and how storytelling is critical for the movement to succeed in bringing psychedelics to the mainstream to enable a global shift in consciousness. Throughout, Nirvan shares his insights as a filmmaker documenting Rick's story over the last ten years.

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

Ferananda Ibarra is the CEO of the Coventina Foundation, co-founder of the Metacurrency Project, and expert in utilizing the decentralized web to enable economic innovation, collective intelligence, and the commons.

In this conversation we explore the role of currency innovation in economic innovation and regenerative economics.  Fernanda has such an incredible range of experience and knowledge that she brings to bear with her work — from her expertise in technology to her love of nature and study of indigenous wisdom to her deep foundational understanding of  the commons and collective intelligence.

While the headline for this conversation is currencies, ultimately it’s abroad ranging discussion that explores money, wealth, currencies, why flows are so critical for healthy living systems, what’s wrong with blockchain and the familiar cryptocurrencies out there, and more.

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

This episode citizen’s assemblies, which are similar to jury duty, but for policy. Over the course of several months, a representative group of everyday citizens comes together to understand and deliberate issues, ultimately making policy recommendations. They’re very compelling as a compliment to traditional policy making processes, as citizens do not face the incentive challenges that elected officials do.

Citizen’s assemblies have been gaining traction around the world for the last decade, and our guest Claudia Chwalisz is at the forefront of this work. We cover the basics, but then we also get into things at her frontier, such as how technology and AI can improve the process, how citizen’s assemblies might help us regulate AI, and moving beyond human-focused governance models.

Resources:

• DemocracyNext website: https://www.demnext.org/
• DemocracyNext's Citizen Assembly Guide
• OECD Report: Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions
• Valuing Uncertainty and Curiosity: Lessons from physics for politics
• Tech Enhanced Citizen's Assemblies: Toward a more healthy and constructive democracy
• More than Human Governance Experiments in Europe (Claudia’s paper)

Specific Examples:

• How A Permanent Assembly in Paris passed a bill into law (July 2024)
• In Oregon assembly, Americans show another kind of politics is possible (Oct 17, 2024)
• The French Citizens' Assembly on End of Life, Explained
• How Ireland Transformed Democracy with Citizens’ AssembliesIn Their Own Words: Deschutes County, Oregon USA Civic Assembly Members

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

Resources:

• Development in Progress: https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

If you’re wondering how we might reform capitalism to be less extractive and more regenerative, this conversation is for you.  Our guests Chelsea Robinson and Jay Standish have just published a book, Assets in Common, sharing recent research on what is happening in the most progressive corners of the current economic landscape.  

We discuss shared and stewardship governance models, which yield a more equitable, more purpose-driven economy.  Chelsea and Jay relay key findings from his research on how forward thinking entrepreneurs can address constraints they face, which  enable a more progressive economy to scale.  This isn’t a theoretical conversation that leaves you questioning what’s realistic, it is tactical and grounded in case studies.

Resources:

• Assets in Common: Stories of Business and Community Leaders Remaking the Economy from the Ground Up

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

Over the last few episodes we’ve been exploring work that we can do on ourselves and in intimate relationships. This conversation builds on those by extending that individual work into the group and organizational level.   We explore power and examine the patterns that show up at all organizational levels, from teams to organizations to coalitions to movements.

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In this conversation Jenny and Ted cover:

• Power and it's relationship with agency and responisbility
• The distinction between power-over, power-under, power-within, and power-with
• The importance of individual work
• The concept of multi-level selection and the need to balance autonomy with alignment
• The Principles for prosocial behavior
• Various models for decision making and why Ted believes consent is the only collectively minded decision making method
• The importance of trust and psychological safety in organizations
• Organizational structures and processes that enable coherence alongside decentralization
• Sources of legitimacy in organizations
• What blobs are and how to avoid your organization becoming one
• Coalitions
• Movements
• Challenges in implementing these ideas in the default legal and cultural context

Resources

• Collective Power: Patterns For A Self=Organized Future, Ted Rau

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.