The GLEN Social Change Model
Phase I.
Activating Awareness
When people with shared intention step up to face real challenges, start talking to each other, dream a bit, find out about families, and competencies, and friends, and thinking, and really listen to each other...then seeds of hope emerge, not unlike like small children and plants...and if this aliveness lands in a good hosting environment, these beginnings, nurtured by mutual awareness, grow stronger...
Step 1. Is facing up and reaching out.
Phase II.
Facilitating Generative Exchanges & Learning
To have real impact a network needs to understand the bigger picture and link it to real situations on the ground. Generating a field of commitment and action happens when cycles of learning and involvement embody both. Out of this understanding arose the three key elements of the GLEN learning ecosystem.
Step 2. Networking
Supported by a communication platform, people begin linking and communicating spontaneously around their shared interest.
Step 3. Exchanges
Facilitated meetings and conversations where people can pool experience and knowledge, ask edgy questions, and be inspired by people who have visions begins to develop a shared bigger picture.
Step 4. Collaborations
Real involvement in tangible projects brings learning to life, and pushes everyone into figuring out what really works now and what must be left behind. This embodied knowing is what is needed most now.
Phase III.
Partnering Cross Culturally for Social Impact
If the core group persists in supporting action learning on real projects, involves young people, tracks emerging solutions, and actively shares tools and resources, a growing field of interest begins to attract others.
Linking with these other networks can start a movement, and a movement can support policy and systems level change.
It is not a neat , linear process, but a persistent looping and learning, harvesting and sharing, linking and staying on purpose.
Step 5. Facilitate On-going Action Learning
Action amplified by real learning and sharing is the driver of transformational change—if projects are inclusive of different generations and cultures, track emerging solutions, and are persistent.
Step 6. Share Generative Tools & Media
Designing and publishing tools, media, and other materials that others can use to replicate key processes is a rich kind of action learning. The GLEN believes this is necessary for paradigm level change.
Step 7. Catalyze Linked Networks Worldwide
Worldwide there is genuine interest in change, reflected in rapidly growing networks of interest and impact. Networks learning to network will vastly expand the "WE" space of reciprocal respect and interconnection.
"All improvement has to be made in the outlaw area. You can't improve humans, and you can't improve their situation where they are. But when you've made things so good of there in the outlaw area that they can't help being recognized, then gradually they get discovered and assimilated."
R. Buckminster Fuller
Address:
The GLEN
c/o The Grove Consultants International
275 Bell Marin Keys, Suite B
Novato, CA 94949