ECOLOGICAL BELONGING FELLOWSHIP
Client: Georgetown University & The Wellbeing Project
Dates: November 2023-January 2024
Departments: Interconnection, visioning
The Invitation
The Solvable team was invited by Georgetown University and The Wellbeing Project to design and facilitate a process for students from four global universities to explore how ecological belonging could be embedded into higher education.
Context
The Ecological Belonging Fellowship is a two-year program to deepen the understanding and transformative work of embedding ecological belonging within cultures and systems. We brought together over 50 Fellows along with University Coordinators from Facens University (Brazil), Georgetown University (USA), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), and University of Hawaiʻi (USA) for five synchronous Zoom sessions between November 2023-January 2024. This first phase focused on surfacing knowledge, understanding, and the current states of ecological belonging between and within the four Universities. Our unifying inquiry for the sessions was “how can we live in right relationship with all of life?” We used three structures to orient into this question—narratives/stories, rituals/practices, and learning/knowing.
SOLUTIONS
The cohort surfaced 8 elements of ecological belonging that could be embedded within universities through curriculum and cultural reform.
The 8 elements are:
Acceptance - Acceptance is the state of being with all that is present and real, even that which is undesirable, painful, and counter to one’s own worldview. A state of acceptance is also an acknowledgement of unknowing, which invites deeper relationality.
Ancestral Memory - Ancestral memory is the calling forward into the present that which was and might be. It is a recognition that memory is inscribed and can therefore be found within ecologies and bodies.
Co-Creation - Co-creation is the participatory act of collaborating between humans and/or other-than-humans. The process of change is a way of co-authoring that brings relational accountability.
Interconnectedness - Interconnectedness is the realization that humans and non-humans alike are all connected. This way of being creates what Thich Nhat Hanh described as “inter-are”: an acknowledgement that everything relies on everything else.
Invisible Elements - Invisible elements are those non-material bases of ecologies that can be felt but do not constitute themselves in physical form. This category is distinctive and mutli-faceted ranging from silence to historic time to care. These invisible elements can be sensed through intuition and attunement and sometimes through the five senses.
Levels of Consciousness - Working across and between different layers of knowing acknowledges the complexity of simultaneous and parallel relations. Often beginning at the individual level, the consciousness expands to family, institution, community, society, planet, and cosmos.
Material Elements - Material elements are composed of the physical elements of ecologies that can be seen, touched, and sometimes heard. This includes structures, lifeforms of all types, and outputs of earth systems such as weather and fire.
Shifting Points of View - Expanded subjectivity enables someone to sense around an ecosystem from the perspective of other humans and non-humans. Rather than create a unified or singular way of viewing the world, shifting points of view invites belonging through difference.
