“Without inner change there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.”
— angel Kyodo williams
Why Wolf Willow?
We understand the Wolf Willow Institute to be a community of practitioners and an experimental palette of offerings masquerading as an educational organization.
Wherever we look, we see ordinary people doing extraordinary things as if they were born for this moment - practical visionaries who have dedicated their life and work to re-imagining and building a flourishing future for all. Our work is to support them, remind them they have a pack, and stand in solidarity with all who hear the howl of their own breaking hearts and sense the fierce urgency of these times.
Our intention is to offer value to real world leaders, volunteers, activists and organizers working at the frontlines of change. People who are committed to engaging the complex systems that shape their world – but know they somehow have to go deeper and work from a different place within themselves if they are to be vessels of lasting influence. People who love and care for the living fabric of this world and all those who call it home. People who are open to the emergent edges of their own becoming and the patterns of possibility for a new way of living on this fragile, beautiful planet together. People who are building the kind of world we most yearn to live in.
People like you.
We are not neutral. We’re unambiguously committed to the transformation of unsustainable systems that result in patterns of harm, injustice, suffering and the erosion of beneficial complexity.
We draw from the term relational systems thinking coined by Anishinaabe complexity scholar Melanie Goodchild as a way to not only bridge conventional systems science and Indigenous ways of knowing and being, but to understand and center the deeper ethical considerations that ensue. She describes relational systems thinking as an eco-centric way of both sensing and intervening in systems that privileges relationship and centers mutual benefit.
An eco-centric approach reminds us to see beyond our habitual anthropocentric bias; we must consider relationships, reciprocity and responsibilities not only between people, but between people and all beings. To truly know a system is much more than simply an academic exercise. It is to be embedded in a living network of kinship where the well-being of all is a responsibility.
Framed in this way, systems leadership - at its most expansive and least partial – holds a deep ethic of liberation and care for all beings. Practitioners work towards their own awakening to serve the liberation of others. And they undertake both at the same time precisely because neither can happen independently.
For as Elders, activist-sages, quantum physicists, feminist psychologists, systems scholars and socially-engaged mystics alike remind us – self and system are not separated in any absolute sense – we only experience them that way in a relative sense. Our tendency to see only distinct ‘parts’ – atoms/countries/races – along with our sense of separation from others is illusory. A relational systems perspective reminds us that we are all related – that the hurt of one is the hurt of all, that we are ‘many faces of one spirit’ and that we emerge from a fundamentally unified field of existence.