Support our experimentation towards a future of nonviolence

“Good Girls Don't Make History” wrote Elizabeth Kiehner and her co-authors in their graphic novel of the same name, inspired from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s writing in the 1970’s. Contrary to popular belief, this phrase is not about breaking rules but about challenging the status quo’s deeply ingrained habit of making invisible women’s contribution to history.

Why am I telling you this? Because I care deeply about what is happening in the world – war, environmental degradation, and impoverishment – and I am part of a community that is taking on changing what is happening at the root of it.

I’m a founding member of the Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL) learning community. In the text below, I lay out an invitation for you to contribute towards NGL taking the next steps in establishing our next generation of leadership. In total, we are seeking to raise €29,863

And who is this “NGL community”, and what is the significance of all of this? Well…

The Nonviolent Global Liberation community (NGL) was started in 2017 by Miki Kashtan so that the same would not happen to all that she had learned and developed, as it did with Mary Parker Follet, with whom Miki felt a particular kinship. Now, in 2025, we are inviting you to support us financially and otherwise so we can carry forward as our own the lineage she started as well as the lineage of those on whose shoulders she stands.

Pictured: Some of those who plan to attend the gathering

We are the first generation of people within NGL who feel called to do so. Now, more than 7 years in, what we have discovered and the results of what we have achieved, are quite outstanding, even to us, and still we want to be much stronger than we currently are. Our next step towards realising this desire is to hold our first ever Lineage Carrying Gathering in July 2025, and it is for this that we are inviting your support.

Our total estimated need is €42,121 and we have €18,178.2 available to us from previous funds given to us for similar purposes. The amount we are asking your support to raise is €29,863. Read more below to understand better what we are planning to do and how the money will support us.

The purpose of Lineage Carrying Gathering is “To anchor in our individual and collective Hineni in relation to carrying the NGL lineage.” The word “hineni” means “I am here” in Hebrew, in the sense of a deep commitment of service to life.

An immense celebration for us about this gathering is that we have found, for the first time ever, a venue with people who are open to experimenting with us on a gift economy basis. This means that we stand in deep integrity with the life principles we seek to align with as we take further steps towards organising and resourcing this gathering.

I feel a sense of sacredness to invite your contributions in support of this event and excitement to have you with us in making this a reality.

Any amount we raise that is over what we have requested your support with we plan to add to the Lineage Experiment fund in support of future capacity growth.

Emma, on behalf of the NGL community.

Please read below for more details on all of the above.

Mary Parker Follet: Our inspiration for anchoring lineage in systems and people

Mary Parker Follet: image from Wikimedia

More than a hundred years ago, Mary Parker Follet pioneered a tectonic shift in the direction of win-win solutions, which included coining the phrases “power over” and “power with” – and then promptly disappeared from history.

The Nonviolent Global Liberation apprenticeship and learning community was born into the world with the vast and humble intention of subverting this pattern by integrating all of what Miki had learned and developed in the areas of nonviolence, nonviolent communication, organizational systems, liberation, the gift economy, and more into people and systems where the lineage could be carried forwards in practice as well as in theory.

We started up, in 2017, as a group of 20 with deep passion and enthusiasm to build needs-based systems based in this lineage. With a bunch of principles and no financial resources, we gifted ourselves entirely to our creation. Gradually, we started to see changes within us, even though we were not focusing on internal healing or liberation work: we began to experience more empowerment, more freedom to design and to engage in decisions collaboratively, and over the years more capacity to stay together even through major, ongoing conflicts.

Gradually it became clearer to us that this capacity is what we need as a human species, in the world as it is now, if we are to survive: to find ways to come together and stay together to reconstruct how we live.

Applying life principles: Our discoveries and achievements

At the forefront of our discoveries is the power of vision. We mean it very literally in the sense of seeing how life functions and basing human social life on those principles. Just as a forest is able to thrive based on life principles, humans also can thrive when we get to a point of functioning from these principles. At the same time, we are aware that humans have strayed from these principles in devastating ways and we need to adjust for that, and to do so by finding principles that slowly align the means with the ends we want to reach. Below are three of the principles we have discovered on the way to realigning with life and what we have experienced as outcomes of them so far:

Flowing resources to where there are needs with the least unwanted impact: We exist 100% through willingness and gifting. There is no coercion, no bosses, employees, or board, and all of the money we receive comes through those who support our work. Ten of us depend 100% on our gift economy system for our living, and more than twenty others depend on it partially.

Bringing tenderness to engaging with power differences and coalescing our collective capacity: We give one another feedback to support liberation from our socialisation, especially in relation to sex, class, and race, and the ways in which these augment or diminish our access to our power and external resources. We have a “global sisterhood leadership programme” where women from marginalised groups within NGL support one another in their leadership. Three of them are going to be the next ones after Miki to offer introductory events about the NGL framework starting in April.

Women in the Global Sisterhood leadership programme

Drawing from shared purpose in times of conflict: We have been walking our way through intense conflict by using it for learning about how to build systems that care for more needs. Within this, we are constructing a capacity-based process for membership and we practice and have developed tools that support groups to stay together and integrate rather than disintegrate when there is challenge, such as Convergent Facilitation, Vision Mobilisation, the capacity lens, and rigorous yet gentle feedback processes.

It is clear to us that what we are practising has the potential to be a huge gift to humanity.

It’s also clear that Miki won’t be with us forever.

With her ageing, there is a deep desire within those of us who have been stepping into more leadership to deepen our integration and capacity to hold and move NGL forward into the future, even beyond Miki‘s death.

Anchoring in our Hineni: What does it look like?

The degree of commitment that Hineni calls for is not something that can be taken lightly. Coming to a place of truly standing in that commitment for the long haul necessitates anchoring into why we are doing what we are doing from a place of being deeply rooted in community, because it is not possible to walk this path alone. The 12 days we plan to be together for the Lineage Carrying gathering are oriented to strengthening us individually and collectively in this way by focusing in the following areas:

Grasping the difference between stewarding NGL and carrying the lineage: While the activities of moving towards Lineage Carrying, e.g. working with organisations, coaching others, stewarding NGL, looking towards holding NGL into the future, etc, are something that many of us who are invited to the gathering have been doing for some time, the connection between these activities and the responsibility of carrying the lineage, which needs to happen before and after Miki’s death, is something that is relatively new. Wrestling out what this means and grasping it together in real-time is paramount to us being able to take tangible steps together towards the next phase of co-holding NGL’s future together and towards carrying the lineage for the next generations.

Preparing all of us to take the next steps from where we each are towards carrying the lineage from a deeply embodied and empowered place: Given the pervasive disempowerment that humans inhabit, and given the power of the overarching systems that we live within, embodying a lineage that seeks to subvert life as we know it is no small feat. Yet this is what we are saying “yes” to: creating, experimenting with, and passing on to others ways of being that we have found support life’s thriving. We are orienting towards understanding together the different places we each are on this journey, what support we need to be able to take our next steps, and where we can source that support from within us as a path of enabling us to move forwards in ways that optimally mobilise each of our capacities towards our collective purpose.

To cohere as a group across our differences: With the degree of separation that humans live within now on the planet, we see being able to integrate across differences as integral to being able to walk, again, in a different direction from what we have already experienced so we can realign with life. Our group is no different than other groups, other than in the depth of our shared commitment to purpose and the capacities we have developed for weaving togetherness within and around us. The more we have woven across our differences, the stronger we have become and with more capacity to stay together through challenges. During this gathering, we plan to find co-holding around several gnarly topics such as: degree of untethering from the current system, impact fields, degree of integration, degree of commitment to outward facing work, or degree of commitment to doing Vital Functions

People being supported to share impacts with one another

Accompaniment and Coaching: Skill Building

The second element of this overall event, and an important aspect of carrying the NGL Lineage is the skill we have to be able to guide others in likewise building the necessary capacities. Following the Lineage Carrying gathering, we plan to invite a few more people who we see as on the path to lineage carrying to join us for 3 days of focusing on skill building. We anticipate emerging from this time not only with some new and enhanced skills under our belts, but also more awareness of our collective capacity making it more possible for us to coordinate collective mobilisation towards our purpose.

Accompaniment to move through a trauma response

Mycelium Global Gathering: Building capacity from living together

Finally we are planning 3 days of the first ever Global Mycelium gathering. The Mycelium experiment is oriented towards the creation of a global network of physical NGL communities, so that those of us who are doing this work have the option of living within regenerative homes, from where our deep, lived integration of this work can emerge. The Mycelium experiment has been in existence primarily in Europe for the last 3 years. With the emergence of community nodes in the U.S and in Australia in this last year, this is the first time that the need for a global gathering has arisen. The confluence of people coming for the Mycelium gathering and the Lineage carrying gathering means this is an opportune meeting from both a purpose and resource perspective. We are excited to see how the energy of the Lineage Carrying Gathering can nourish next steps for the Mycelium Experiment, and vice versa

A group chopping veg for dinner

Supporting Children’s Leadership

An integral element of our work is what we call “all ages collaboration”. We envision, and are taking steps to create, a way of being where people’s wisdom, of all ages, is welcomed with reverence and integrated as a necessary part of the path towards a nonviolent future. During the Lineage Carrying gathering, we plan to run a parallel programme for the children where they are supported to connect with the impacts of the current patriarchal systems and to learn how to step into leadership from where they are to respond to it, how to make decisions collaboratively, and how to deal with conflicts.

Overall: How our plans look

Overall the event is planned to span 23 days, as below.

28 June - 30 June: Arriving and setting up at the venue

1 - 12 July: Lineage Carrying Gathering

13-14 July: Break

15-17 July: Accompaniment & Coaching Skill Building

18-21 July: Mycelium Global

22-23 July: Take Down

Argoumbat: Forging a relationship based on gift

The people who live at Argoumbat, the venue, do not function in Gift Economy, and for us, in order for this event to be in integrity, it was super important for it to be in gift as much as possible. This is primarily because when we are in gift, we are functioning within what we understand to be one of the principles of how life functions, and then more becomes possible.

Based on their usual pricing the rent of the lodgings and venue would have come to €30,000. Through engaging with them they agreed to experiment with us in needs based resource flow and gift economy. What this has meant in practice was that we proposed an amount that felt most accurate and in flow to offer them as a gift, and they let us know whether or not they felt that amount cared for their needs in relation to hosting us.

We made them an offer of 3 amounts that intuitively moved from us as a gift: what we have, €17,000; what we imagined we’d be able to raise overall, €23,000; and what we would love to give, €27,000. Sharing these numbers brought them some unease, which we took as an opportunity for us to enquire about their needs.

This uncovered that the person who manages part of the lodgings would be particularly impacted by us doing it all in this way, in the gift economy, as she needed more security. From there we made a shift, together with the community, towards guaranteeing her the money she needed, €8580. In their monthly meeting the rest of the community discerned that the minimum that would cover their needs for the remainder of the lodgings would be €12, 500. In addition, they asked us to pay the cook for the days we have asked for their support, given they would likely not want to stretch into the unknown with us. For the rest, they were happy to experiment in the gift economy.

This outcome is a HUGE celebration for us as it means that the event is going forwards with the most integrity that we could have imagined, and a deep sense of solidarity with Argoumbat.

Here's what people at Argoumbat said about working with us so far:

"Being part of the negotiations with NGL has been an incredible human experience. The meaning of this experience lies in the trust we are building between our organizations. This way of orienting to money has brought clarity and ease to often complex conversations. It has shifted the focus from transactional exchanges to a deeper sense of cooperation and shared purpose. It has not only strengthened our collaboration but also brought us to a greater awareness of our own needs, both as individuals and as a collective."

Here are some of the things people from our group have said about this process:

“How Argoumbat has responded has given me hope that what we are doing can spread. I see this gathering as strengthening our commitment to liberation, interdependence, and our capacity to model and support others to create ways of being that work for all.”

“I feel a great joy at being joined in our vision of needs-based resource flow. It increases my trust and hope that we can actually make these shifts together with others and find steps to that vision that are within capacity. I am also really celebrating that these conversations with the venue are happening and that the needs of each person impacted are known and held. It cares for everyone, it feels less like us coming and ‘using’ a place for a certain purpose and more like connecting to the needs and vision of others as well.”

“I imagine the experience of this experiment in gift, and the ripples of it, lingering in Argoumbat’s cells, as much as it does in ours. In a tiny, yet significant way, I see this as an action that realigns humanity from exchange to gift because we are all orienting from within those principles.”

Our request: The details

We still would love to be able to offer Argoumbat the full amount that would most care for their needs and to be able to cover the other needs that this event is creating.

One of NGL’s commitments is to full transparency in all that we do. In keeping with this, we are sharing with you what these amounts are, including what we already have.

We invite you to see whether there is an amount that you are inspired to give as part of this next phase of NGL’s growth and maturation.

What we already have:

The minimum we need to raise in addition:

Total = €42,121

Therefore the total we are asking your support for = €29,863