I’m a particular fan of the Coaches Training Institute so I would recommend that you look at www.coactive.com . You’ve also seen that “presence” is a quality that I think Modern Elders embody. There are a couple of programs that specialize in presence and embodied leadership: Strozzi Institute ( www.strozziinstitute.com ) and Leadership Embodiment ( www.leadershipembodiment.com ).

For many people, personal fit can mean the best way of contributing is through donations: you work in a career you love and excel at, and even if the work itself is not hugely impactful, you can make an enormous difference with your giving. This was true of John Yan. After learning about effective altruism and thinking about his career options, he decided to continue as a software engineer and donate a significant fraction of his income to effective charities as a member of Giving What We Can.

You can do this by writing, organizing, talking to people you know, or getting involved with organisations such as 80,000 Hours and the Centre for Effective Altruism, where movement building is a component of their work.

Beyond Team to Community…

There is something incredibly special about being part of a community. It’s how humans are supposed to live. Community is more than just sharing resources or hanging out now and then. It’s showing up and investing in the ongoing creation of one another’s lives. Being in that kind of community is a great way to live, and we highly recommend it as an ongoing practice, not just when making big plans or starting new things.

Identifying what sustaining practices will help keep you growing and enjoying your well-designed life is an important part of the formula, and community is an important piece…

Kindred Purpose. Healthy communities are about something—not just getting together to get together…

Meets Regularly. Whether at the same time every week or month or quarter or not, the community must meet regularly…

Shared Ground. If possible, in addition to a kindred purpose, it’s helpful to have other shared ground.

To Know and Be Known. Some groups are all about the content or the process, and some groups are all about the people. We are talking about a community that’s at least in large part about the people. You can be in a really great book club, where people do the reading and show up prepared and have thoughtful discussions on writing, narrative, and the state of civil society plus a little wine tasting on the side, and you all really like one another, and it’s great. But that’s not a community as we mean it. It really is great—don’t get us wrong…

What makes an effective community is not having people in it with the right expertise or information. What makes it work is people with the right intention and presence. It is most helpful to be with people who are trying to connect the dots and live in coherence with themselves and the world in an honest way.

Tools for Increasing Interdependence and Decentralization

Study Groups/Learning Community

This one seems so simple and old school, but having community to learn with is actually really crucial for human development. It means we learn to see ideas, not just through our own singular and limited perspectives, but to see how different experiences create different ways of thinking about things, of comprehending and applying ideas.

Loretta Ross teaches us that, “When people think the same idea and move in the same direction, that’s a cult. When people think many different ideas and move in one direction,

that’s a movement.”...

The more people who grow understanding and vision together, the more people who will feel at home in the resulting experiments. Right now we are living inside the results of other peoples’ imaginations—people who couldn’t imagine Black people being free, fat girls being sexy, disabled people being leaders. People who could only imagine their own power and dominance. When more people imagine together, and then step from imagining into thinking through the structures and protocols of a society together, then more needs are attended to. Responding to common text is a great way to do this. And it doesn’t have to be just a reading group—it can be a group that watches films, listens to music, or compares experiments in changing movement practices.