Trust the process: the story of New Constellations

Caroline McGinn

“We are at the wrong level of operating systematically. We are doing a lot of tourniquet work, it is important, we are excellent at stopping the bleeding, but we need a full investigation of what makes the heart sing and why are we bleeding so much? The Constellations journey met me at a moment when I was trying to create this in myself, and was ripe to be having a conversation at a higher level than the ones I was having in work and in politics.”

Tara, Wayfinding Journey

Participants on a walk at New Constellations’ inaugural gathering in spring 2019.

Running Up That Hill

One spring afternoon five years ago I found myself squelching up a steep green hill in Kent with 22 extremely impressive people. Some of them were thinkers whose works I’d read and admired. Like the economist Kate Raworth, whose ‘doughnut’ theory models how all humans can meet our needs within the boundary of our planet’s limits, and the social care expert Hilary Cottam. Also climbing were pioneers in bio-leadership, ecology and sustainable food, activists in the fields of democracy and community, strategic thinkers and moral philosophers, and organisers of new cultural and sacred spaces – by which I mean arts, large-scale festivals and the Unitarian church. Many were well-garlanded in their own sector yet frustrated with its limits. Some were quite maverick and already working beyond the ‘norm’ horizon. They were without exception, exceptional. And they were mostly feeling very very tired. 

“Everyone was trying to build against the grain of current systems,” recalls Cottam, whose painstaking work on care has documented how something which is “complex, beautiful, painful, human” has been industrialised and reduced in public discourse to an expensive and failing service. “I don’t know what took me there because it’s very hard to persuade me to say ‘yes’ to anything. Everyone there was doing important work and everyone was exhausted. They didn’t want to talk about a bigger project. They wanted to be nourished to do that work.”

In that raw spring of 2019, things were starting to look worrying for humanity fans. Trump was in the White House, Brexit was on the negotiating table, and Cambridge Analytica was still in the news. Inequality and hate politics were on the rise in Europe and America. Climate change was threatening the longevity of our species. Disruptive tech was extending and pressurising human experience in the wealth and power centres of the global north. Anxiety was rising everywhere, especially for the young. And a growing number of people had lost trust in the freedoms - free elections, free media, free markets, free movement - that were supposed to reward individuals, manage change, contain harm, keep us safe. 

Back in 2019, we hadn’t yet caught Covid, Extinction Rebellion had not captured then irritated the popular imagination, and rumours of our incoming AI overlords were mostly confined to Silicon Valley futurists and Arnie movies. But there was already a creeping sense of disquiet; a feeling that we and our institutions, languages, ways of working were just not cutting it.  

That’s why the pioneering folks in Kent had all said YES to an invitation from a newborn organisation – to help dream up something that could. 

Over two days, they fermented: talked, kvetched, scribbled and shared insights on what was needed to turn the old hollowed-out capitalist systems into a nurse log for the new. There was so much to do! How might individuals and groups orient themselves to make better futures, when the present was so distracting and every new existential threat seemed exponential? Our pop cultural ideas of the ‘future’ were as dystopian as the climate projections: could we tell more hopeful stories? Many people were doing good and important work but they felt lonely and disconnected. How could we nourish the brave when those old broken systems were still such a drag? 

At this point, perhaps I should explain what I was doing there. Full disclosure: I am not an activist or a leader or even a committed vegetarian – I am merely a journalist whose natural scepticism has been honed by many years of writing critically from a so-called ‘objective’ perspective. This story is different for me, I am writing from a place of affinity not distance. Like most of the folks on the hill I was present because I had been invited by my friend Gemma Mortensen to help her found an organisation called New Constellations, and I trusted that whatever Gemma was doing would be good.

Gemma and I first met as undergrads. Our generation came of age during the ‘End of History’, dancing to drum n bass, high on millennial optimism about the new world wide web and indeed the world-wide world beyond it. Perhaps that was why the brightest and kindest political talents in our Oxbridge generation, like Gemma and her friend Jo Cox, didn’t go into UK party politics, but gravitated towards international work in the burgeoning NGO and charity sector: Oxfam in Jo’s case; and for Gemma, Crisis Action, the rapid-response coalition-building organisation. By June 2016 Gemma had moved to Silicon Valley, for a big job with the biggest most optimistic techno-democrats on the global internet, Change.org. In contrast, Jo had decided to try and make a difference at home, returning to her roots as the MP for Batley and Spen. 

Many words have been written about Jo’s murder by a far-right sympathiser during the toxic build-up to the Brexit vote. It had a profound impact on Gemma personally as well as politically, and you can read about Gemma’s intellectual formation and emotional radicalisation while trying to raise two tiny children amid the giant redwoods, Techtopians and singularity prophets of Silicon Valley in her blog on the topic. When Gemma returned to the UK after Jo’s death, Britain felt deeply divided.

Hopeful, connective narratives were not connecting with voters. Politics was becoming identity politics, deepened by the outrage fostered by the algorithms which dominated most people’s access to informational and emotional content. Gemma and climate activist Iris Andrews undertook extensive research, interviewing pioneering thinkers, makers and doers, finding shared disquiet but also many examples, practises and models of radical hope. As you can see in the invitation which brought many of those people to Kent, New Constellations spotted and articulated the polycrisis earlier than most. Their instinct was that tackling a multiple systems failure would require whole societies, whole selves, and a new holistic approach (as Iris outlines here). But what could bond such divided hearts and suspicious minds? Was it possible to bring different and antagonistic people together to imagine a better future, in a spirit of mutual trust, hope and love?

An outdoor exercise at the journey for the Yale World Fellows in 2022.

Trust the Process. A magical, disruptive journey…

“It was a mixture of important and difficult in the best way. Prior to this experience I was scared of being vulnerable, talking about my feelings, even being in the same room. Obviously a lot of trauma comes with our histories and past. But we had strong connections in that group. It’s made it easier to talk about things like that with people I’ve known for a long time, and be comfortable. If I want deep connections I need to build deep.”

Amira, Our Future is Open Journey

I’d like now to give you a brief take on the process that New Constellations – aka Gemma, Iris, Jo Barratt and Lily Piachaud – have developed. 

My account is based on leisurely interviews with the four of them, and with 22 of the 136 people who have journeyed with New Constellations. This is not a comprehensive or exhaustive evaluation; it is a true story informed by my research and told from my own point of view. My intention – and I take my cue from them in this – is to be transparent and fair and honestly reflective, to share what may be useful to others, and to suggest a path through the rich and beguiling complexities of the work they have done. 

Their process, which they call ‘The Journey’, has been honed with several groups of people: locals in Barrow-in-Furness (2020), Sheffield (2021) and York (2023); leaders across the world (2022, 2023) and at Yale via its World Fellows programme (2022), and young people, specifically 18-25 year olds in the UK (2024). It has been funded in different ways by the National Lottery Community Fund, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Yale International Leadership Center, Oak Foundation and New Constellations itself. 

The Journey is a transformational process of collective reflection, designed to help people envision a shared future through the creation of Stars – guiding principles which they will orient themselves to. I think of it as being a bit like therapy, but for groups co-creating their future instead of individuals dealing with their past. 

All of the 20+ participants I spoke to described their journey as a genuinely transformational experience. For some, it even seems to have a quasi-psychedelic or religious effect, producing a sense of deep connectedness to the world and other beings, similar to what Freud called ‘the oceanic feeling’, an ‘afterglow’ that lasts for months. People gushed sincerely about what it meant to them. When I asked them about its impact they did not talk in the technical language of goals and projects, they told me about radical empathy and love, ‘being more mushroom’, taking risks, finding ‘new stars to live by’, bringing their stars to council meetings and property developers, quitting their jobs, getting tattoos. I found it truly remarkable that more than one person chose to tattoo their own ‘Constellation’ or ‘Star’ in permanent ink on their skin. 

When I read back through some of my interviews I worried that they were too lyrical to share in what was supposed to be a clear journalistic evaluation - in the cold light of print the loveliness and the gratitude seemed OTT. I mention this mainly because my feeling of embarrassment is a sign of how stubborn and lingering those bunged up emotional norms that the journey is designed to unblock are. Many of us are alienated not just from the products of our labour, as Marx observed, but from our whole selves and each other – that habitual inhibition that you mustn’t bring your private self to the workplace or the civic square, that the full rainbow of emotions is inappropriate, that people’s motivations must be seen through the capitalist primary colours of hunger, greed, desire and fear. 

Often, discussions stay and stall in the headspace of facts and arguments, a mode which tends to entrench existing forms of power and status. To get beyond this, New Constellations brought a variety of techniques to invite the whole person back in: body, heart, gut and third eye, that farseeing imaginative faculty associated with intuition and spiritual awareness.

“We make it clear that other forms of knowledge and lived experiences are welcome,” says Gemma. “At the beginning of our development, it started off as an experiment about collective imagination and, how do you co-create a new story? As it evolved we learned to trust that everything that was needed was there in the room and it was a question of unearthing that. It was not about telling people stuff, it was about creating a process so that what was in the room could emerge as collective intelligence.”

Billboards New Constellations erected in Barrow to invite the wider community to participate in the journey. Image: New Constellations/Steve Barber

New Constellations’ first journey was created for and with locals in Barrow. They were invited by the council’s energetic Chief Executive, Sam Plum, on the recommendation of Hilary Cottam. “In December 2020 when we did our journey I was a relatively new Chief Exec,” Sam recalls. “Barrow is an industrial town on the edge of Cumbria, edge of the Irish sea. There were a lot of issues to tackle. Health, deprivation, only one major employer, ageing population, lots of people leave at 18 and don't come back. We needed to engage with local people to think what Barrow could be if we dreamt big.”

Covid chucked a spanner in the works. “The original intention was that they would come to Barrow and we'd find a place - perhaps go to our island and build a boat - but we had to switch it onto Zoom, which made it more remote." Unable to connect people physically, New Constellations devised a shared imaginative space online, with its own archetypal journey narrative, metaphorical tools for reflection and inspiration, and a dreamy, otherworldly aesthetic.

The Journey’s main story arc is a voyage: the ‘crew’ visualise embarking from the Shore of their current existence, through uncertainty and darkness (the 'Fertile Void'), to a better future. What stars will they find to help guide them on their way?

“There is lots of visualisation for the crew at each stage of the odyssey”, explains Iris. Visualisation was an essential technique which they devised to enrich that first online journey. Exercising the mind’s eye worked so well, it became the overarching structure for all subsequent journeys. “Early on I was like: Oh God is this naff?” she recalls. “But time and again people gave us feedback that they loved it. Some people are less visual, and other elements speak to them more. But it is a vivid invitation to step out of where we are now and out to a territory of different possibility.”

"We never physically met", says Sam. "But it was so beautifully put together. It felt immersive and we built relationships even on a screen really quickly.” Other participants concurred, telling me it was “brilliantly crafted”, “like a Punchdrunk show”, “like a big hug,” and “gave me metaphoric tools which I use for all sorts of decisions now.”

The cosmic starry trip is underpinned by macro-political analysis and systems change theory: when devising the archetypal voyage, Gemma drew on multiple models of systems change, as described in her blog on the topic. Iris brought process design, and meditative and embodied techniques to flesh it out into practical sessions with the crews. ‘“I had run weekends which were about nature connectedness and holding co-created spaces for enquiry, and done three rounds of yoga teaching training”, she says. “One of the things I'm most proud of is the way we weave rational and systems thinking and theoretical models and ideas and big concepts with embodied practice.”  

With funding and time both limited, it was essential that journeys went deep quickly. Audio, created by Jo Barratt, proved to be a powerful portal.

“Before the journeys, people don’t know what they’re coming into,” Jo explains. "We ask them to respond to some prompts down a phone line. Then they come, and the first thing they hear is their voice in a montage with the others. On the phone it’s completely personal: where do you live? How do you feel about this? But then people hear themselves combined with other, different people saying the same things: the same fears, the same hopes. It’s amazing. Even we, who know what is coming, are still blown away by the power that has. It’s a really important moment in helping the group see themselves as one. Things are not the same afterwards, the genie is out of the bottle. People have cried, we have cried in those sessions.” 

Jo produces a unique soundscape for each journey, and has published 50+ audio pieces for New Constellations, including intimate pandemic portraits with many of the thinkers, makers and doers who influenced their formation. Innovatively, the audio is employed as a tool of reflection for individuals and groups. Video is usually touted as the medium of accessibility but it is also the medium of narcissism, body anxiety, attention-capture and screen blindness. To close your eyes and listen can bring you back into soft focus; a voice in your head, associated with meditation and quiet time.

“I loved that it was a complete 'lanyards off' experience" says Barrow council worker Natalie. "The audio was beautiful, a lovely piece of social history actually. It comes from a really dark place and starts low and then the momentum builds and the light seems to flow through that.” 

An aesthetic of mystery and wonder was consciously cultivated in the journey’s visual design, from New Constellations’ spacey, ethereal website, to the handwritten letters and audio prompts wrapped in brown paper and string, like posh cheese. The ‘stars’ which the Barrow crew came up with to orient themselves to were combined in an artwork showing their future. It’s worlds away from the hollow and generic ‘values’ exercise companies and organisations do with marketing consultants. Later journeys would go further, handing creative tools over to the crews who collaged and drew gorgeous personal star-maps and worked together to constellate them into an overlapping whole.

Materials sent to crew on the Barrow journey to support their participation in the process, which had to be taken online as lockdown restrictions were imposed.

Barrow’s Journey and new stars, illustrated by Temujen Gunawardena.

Post-Covid, New Constellations had added embodied practice to accompany the imagineering and the world of sound, catering for all the senses and immersing people in circular, non-hierarchical spaces such as tents, and in nature. Hrund Gunnsteindóttir was a close collaborator, bringing her work on intuition – in Icelandic, InnSæi. It was vital that people felt safe, and were nourished with time and attention and three meals a day. It was also notable from feedback that this essential care felt like a luxury for many people, who were time-poor or resource-poor or both.

To some, it all felt off-puttingly woo woo at first but it worked. “The process felt very different,” says Manish Joshi, Chief Executive of Strathclyde Student Union and participant in the 2023 Wayfinding Journey. “From the outside it would look batshit crazy and new age mumbo jumbo but the things that made it different were being in the elements, ancient things, swimming in the lake, sitting round the fire, hardcore rave music, sauna, the coming together of people’s interests and culture. I think all of that made it a very special time. It was a beautiful place but the ultimate thing that was different was the process. We worked through something collectively and there was a real sense of breakthrough. I was in bits at the end of it. I needed this journey for myself, I was at a nexus and needed something to unlock within me a sense of where I was going. I found it hugely beneficial but also that group of people. We were all pulled together, but totally separate from all over the world, that connection that was made has been quite lasting.”

What Divides Us. Storming and forming in Sheffield, starlings in York.

“Everywhere I've worked says ‘oh we're diverse’ but we never actually are. I’ve never sat in a group where it is really diverse in age, race, education, occupation, location. It was like: wow yes this is actually what a diverse group looks like. Usually there’s two genders and a couple of races but lived experience is similar.”

Stephanie, Bold Dreams Journey

Beginning to map new stars to follow at the Sheffield journey, 2021.

I feel it is important to explain a bit more about the ‘diversity’ of the groups. ‘Diversity’ is so often a vague banner signalling good intentions or concealing lack of action. But New Constellations did thoughtful and important work in finding genuinely diverse groups then constellating them together. 

After Jo Cox’s death, Gemma had helped set up More In Common, named after Jo’s belief, expressed in her maiden speech in parliament: that “we have far more in common than that which divides us”. In 2020 More In Common concluded a huge survey (10,000 interviews over 18 months) which established a new taxonomy of social and psychological profiling, based on moral value theory. Usually, political surveys would ask people to choose between this or that shopworn policy, or rattle several empty government spending buckets and ask them to pick one. This went deeper, analysing people based on their ethical beliefs and aspirations. It seemed that most people did indeed have more in common at this level, and still do, with the vast majority feeling exhausted by political strife, turned-off by culture wars, locally and community-minded, and hungry for change. Contemporary politics, media and corporations were all competitive, shouty and short-term. Could New Constellations find and connect with this mutual emotional core?

Ahead of New Constellations journeys there was an open callout for applicants. As part of the process, applicants answered questions including some drawn from More In Common’s research methodology. Lily Piachaud then drew on their profiles to balance the groups so that they reflected wider society in terms of values and social psychology, as well as demographics. ‘Progressive activists’  made up the majority of applicants but only 13% of Britons. So Lily actively sought people from groups who were under-represented by this measure as well as the usual social and demographic markers. “I did a lot of legwork and research to make sure we reach people who have not been heard, not just the usual voices” she explains.

This is extremely unusual. Most people I talked to told me they had not been in a conversation or a place which brought together such genuinely different people. Place-based groups were microcosms of that place and its tensions. And real diversity produces real discomfort.

In Sheffield in 2022, New Constellations’ dreamy futuristic aesthetic and heartfelt language set off bullshit detectors on local social media.  This was also a challenge in the groups. The core team were aware that they were less diverse than the groups they worked with, skewing progressive, white, middle-class and southern. In their place-based journeys they would always have to work to overcome the perception of being ‘woke outsiders’. “It seemed airy fairy, very pie in the sky”, says Mahara Haque, founder of ethical letting agency My Landlord Cares, recalling day one of the Sheffield journey. “I thought: I don’t know what I’ve signed up to. I am a doer, I want answers now. I don’t sit in a space reflecting.”

Some of the social media reaction to early communications about the Sheffield journey.

Like therapy, the journeys stirred up strong feelings; there could be hostility, and upsetting and difficult conversations around race, class and disability. “There were loads of moments of tension and difficulty,” recalls Mahara, “It was a very rocky ride. There were hard conversations, it got quite heated. As humans we gravitate to people we connect with. We’re never usually put in a situation where we are able to talk openly and honestly. People don’t realise each other’s trigger points. That’s how New Constellations really excel. They bring together people who, despite their age, ethnicity, background and sexual orientation being different, are frustrated that the system’s not working and want to change it.”

Iris and Gemma, and Yasmin El Dabi who co-facilitated the York and Wayfinding 2023 Journeys, had to be highly skilled to hold this tension generatively, without trying to sweep important stuff under the carpet. “Until you’re there,” says Iris, “you can’t really know what it’s like to hold that responsibility. To invite people in to shape a vision of the future you have to acknowledge the pain of the present. People bring all their experiences of trauma, oppression. What’s not working in the present comes into the room.” The team skilled up, ensuring their work was trauma-informed and they were trained in antiracist practice. In groups, there tended to be dynamics of “storming and forming”: usually there would be a crisis which would generate a collective epiphany out of which new Stars would form. The 18-25 year old crew on the 2024 youth journey found it easier to leave the Shore. “It’s noticeable that the young people were a lot less burdened by the baggage of everything that hasn’t worked and isn’t possible,” recalls Iris, “they found it much easier to jump to the future.”

It is obviously a huge challenge to sustain the collective epiphany beyond a carefully held small group. It has worked for some. “The Sheffield group has had a lasting impact,” says Mahara. “If a relationship is awful at the beginning and you’re still together it’s gonna be quite solid. We’ve become strong and we champion each other.” That’s not the case for everyone. Interviewees told me that “people who were most marginalised had dropped away faster, those who stayed had fewer barriers to staying.” Generally, people said that they loved their Stars – but it was hard to follow them. Embedding new living values in industrial institutions such as companies and bureaucracies could feel impossible, like trying to give a tin man a heart transplant. 

Hilary Cottam worked with New Constellations on three journeys. “There is something missing if we think about what would be really needed to move from stargazing. That’s not to underestimate the importance of the stargazing, in so much of my work there is no story making, you just address solutions to problems. The importance of the stargazing is that we don’t know what the story is. It is unique and really really strong. But how could we put it into practice?”

One way is to invest in journeys in the longer term - which is currently happening for the 2023 York crew. Kate McLaven was recruited to hold that group. Her background is in the antiracist sector and in frontline service work. “We have monthly sessions which are well held, we’re trying to meet in a different way,” she reports. “People are coming for the collective joy of being together, not because there is a pot of money at the end. We start with a poem or a grounding session and end with lunch. Biodiversity and poverty are coming up strongly for us, understanding how those two intersect. There’s an idea of us being stewards of the future and we are en route to building a robust sustainable radical community group.”

Is it working? Time is a challenge so the answer is incrementally but mostly, yes. “Nine months later we still have 15 of the 19 really involved,” she says. “You’re tied to all those people for life - whether it’s fractals of what you do afterwards, or deep understanding of one another. In York, whatever those 15 people do afterwards will be a bit like a starling murmuration, always being intertwined and interlinked to each other and the work they promised to do in the city.”

Love And Mushrooms

“I got back and took a cohort of young Black men to Copenhagen to learn about doughnut economics and hood futurism. We began creating co-ops as a form of learning, honouring our own indigenous practice and learning. We rapidly created two hubs and a women’s co-op. We also created a systemic litigation lab, a research lab. We learned so much that we applied within our work. I was the student but my job was to get the learning back to my community.”

Abdi, Bold Dreams Journey

Young people at the Our Future is Open journey mapping their new stars, clustered around different forms of love.

When I joined Gemma, Jo, Iris and Lily again in Somerset this spring, they had decided to pause Journeys and put New Constellations into a ‘chrysalis’ phase. They were debating, vigorously and delightfully, about ‘compost’ versus ‘chrysalis’. It’s typical of their approach: radical, collaborative, with care taken at all its stages. It is obvious that they have tried to work as they want to live, openly, flexibly and generatively. “That wasn’t all easy and wonderful,” says Lily. “Sometimes people disappear, it’s hard. But it is the most extraordinary transformative experience of my life in work.” 

The ‘chrysalis’ idea is also typical, they have constantly looked to nature for metaphors and models. It’s important to emphasise that this is not just a matter of taste, a hippy flourish, or a way of ‘being poetic’. We all live by metaphors whether we notice it or not. They are the foundation of language, and of our perception of the world around us. Popularly and ubiquitously, techno-scientific metaphors are ‘hardwired’ into the way we describe ourselves and our activities, making it harder for us to imagine any world beyond technocapitalism. It is powerful to choose alternatives which suggest ecosystems, spiritual value, and richer, reciprocal relationships.

So five years on, what's changed?

There is widespread enthusiasm for the more radical methods New Constellations employed so early. More 'organic' organisations are sprouting; in life, many people are turning to personal spiritual and embodied technologies to manage the strain of telepresence; on the wilder fringe there is an efflorescence of sacred revivalism meaning a witch lives on your street and there will probably be a cacao ceremony in your local leisure centre this year. But I have never come across any organisation or process which weaves structural, spiritual and embodied tactics so seamlessly and utilises them to bond and mobilise such diverse groups.

In the wider world, we're doing better on climate but not well enough. Here in the UK and USA, big elections are incoming; old system 'either or' positions are already being drawn about whether to spend taxes on planet or people, inequality or existential threats. The material crisis is more 'poly', new biothreats from organic and synthetic disease; old territory wars involving nuclear weaponised nations; AI which is putting pressure on what it means to be human. There's a lot of fast reaction and sharing - hot takes! graphs! - but our biggest challenges are both self-made and philosophical: who are we and what do we want to become?

We need to wake up our inner Ents and consider this question deeply, collectively, and on a bigger timescale than clickbait or the election cycle allows. New Constellations' work contributes to this, and that is rare.

Journeys take investment of time, skills, emotional effort. The benefit of running them with leaders is obvious, these are people who can help change happen, but need to be energised by long-term thinking, brave aspirations, mutual support. There is also an appetite for more local constellations - during Covid, many people reconnected with their local roots, and there is a swell of enthusiasm in hyperlocal activism and citizenship, which tends to be on a hand-to-hand scale which is achievable for radical collectives.

“What requires more thought”, says Gemma, “is what does it mean for people to live this? That’s part of what’s coming back from the feedback: we know it is a genuinely catalytic process and that’s amazing, most things aren’t, but it requires something more, an ecology perhaps, not a community in a conventional way, that enables people to live differently. That’s not just the case of an action plan or some exercises.”

Having honed a model and found customers for it, the trad capitalist thing to do would be to scale it, pile it high and produce it more cheaply. But New Constellations did not want to rinse and repeat what Iris calls ‘heavy lifts for small groups’, much as she appreciates working ‘narrow and deep’. They are asking how they can transform into something new – and nourish their network in the process.

Each of the core group is exploring a chrysalis in their own way. Lily will be working with small organisations, applying what she’s learnt about building organisations that can hold space for transformation. Iris is training in transpersonal psychology, an ‘I, We, Planet’ approach that goes beyond the individual. Jo is exploring new edges of audio documentary. Gemma will sift through the stars which New Constellations’ many voyagers have created, to trace the patterns in their unconstrained wishes for the future, and sketch a constellation of shared hopes. 

The in-house joke is that everybody just wants ‘love and mushrooms’, and judging by my conversations that seems to be true, but there is more to be gleaned: the constellations represent a significant and unique body of free-range research with groups who are microcosms of the UK, its youngest adult generation, urban citizens and leaders. “I’ve kept all the artefacts and I will surround myself with them, like imaginal cells,” says Gemma. “In there is a very good analysis of what we’re facing. My analysis is that there is a frustration that the political stories we are being told don’t speak to the fundamental rethink that people want. That’s not just about the pandemic. It’s that neither the pandemic nor the financial crisis has forced a systemic rethink. It is a huge and grave betrayal and people feel that. Nobody is articulating futures that meet people where they are and bring them to a different alternative. I think we have just scratched the surface of unearthing that.”

I am fascinated to see what brave new wings emerge.

A collage made by a participant of the Bold Dreams for Our Future journey as part of a creative ‘Wayfinding’ session.

In the meantime, there are seeds to scatter, and a Mycelium Fund - an experiment in transformative funding distribution, which New Constellations has endowed. Rithikha Rajamohan, who has a background in civic technology and governance, was one of the designers of the model together with Jo. It is inspired by mycelium, the fungal network which connects and nourishes the plants and trees above it, collaborating not competing. Feedback and support passes from peer to peer. 

Rithikha tells me that the first funded applicants are also the seed community for support, and for deciding who to fund next and why. “We were inspired by examples of cooperation in nature, trees talking to each other and sharing resources,” she explains. “The hope is that good actors will come in and be constantly rebalancing the system. It will be interesting to find out how people’s experiences line up to the design principles. It is a very intuition based approach for me but it is also a mathematically proven way of operating in complexity: to get to the best solution faster you need to be trying a bunch of different things at once.”

There is also a living network in the form of the journey crews. Seeds have been planted and propagated. Crews are in touch - warmly and supportively. New Constellations has actively found and evangelised examples of good and inspiring work. In the language of the Journeys these are called ‘Glimmers’, meaning both glimpse and illumination, and strongly suggesting hope. 

I think it is fitting to return to their definition of a ‘glimmer’ at this point. Glimmers are “examples that situate themselves within the system of life and transformation that is needed to keep it in balance; they regenerate; they distribute; they connect; they build relationships and reciprocity; they value lived and learned experience; they contribute to the collaborative commons and they take responsibility for future generations.” Examples to live by. And a fair description of what New Constellations has been.

Tattoos and nail art inspired by New Constellations journeys.

New Constellations’ journeys have of course been assessed in the usual ways with participants, whose feedback is warm and deeply engaged. But our usual language of evaluation - ‘feedback’, ‘engagement’ - tends to be short-term and mechanistic; it does not aim at capturing the sort of value these processes have tried to emerge. In that spirit, I asked everyone I spoke to what new KPIs we should judge New Constellations’ five year cycle of work on. Rejection of conventional bean counting was unanimous. ’Number of tattoos’ was proposed. ‘Tell the story’, was a request I hope I’ve fulfilled. But I’d like to sign off with a very lovely answer, from Abdirahim Hassan, Bold Dreams voyager, community organiser and founder of Coffee Afrique, who summed it up better than I could. Thank you Abdi – over to you.

“Without going on a huge rant, our work in our seven hubs in east London is rooted in healing people. How do you capture love? How do you capture healing? Friendship? Joy? We have changed our impact report, inspired by New Constellations. When I heard all our voices recorded, I thought wow, what a great way to capture impact. We still have the capitalist western global north approach as well but we would like our own way too, telling stories of transformation, including my own recovery story from deep trauma and burnout to joy, earth, family love and friendship. We are not products. We need stories, rooted in humans. I would love to see joy, healing, love and belonging measured. New Constellations embody that and those principles are what we desperately need in our world.”

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Caroline McGinn is an award-winning journalist and publishing strategist. She was Time Out’s Global Editor in Chief, has led numerous media launches and transformations, and has deep experience of creative leadership. As a critic, she writes on contemporary culture. She is currently focused – personally, professionally and intellectually – on what it takes to live and work regeneratively in a fast-changing world.