Many movements, one direction

It’s not a competition.

In fact, competing is exactly the thing we are working to move away from.

You may have come across multiple movements lately.

Solarpunk. Post-capitalism. Feminist economics. The wellbeing economy. Community wealth building. Mutual aid. Matriarchy.

It might feel confusing, as if you’re supposed to pick the right one and worry the others are competitors.

This scattering is completely normal though, and it’s often how knowledge works. Researchers in different disciplines tend to work in silos, studying the same underlying phenomenon, noticing the same patterns, and giving them different names, rarely realising someone three departments over is describing the same thing using a different label. Whole movements do this too.

The wellbeing economist Jessica Friday has done a great job of gathering these movements together in her piece The 300+ Movements to a Fair Economy That Works for All of Us. Yes, there are over three hundred and counting! That number might feel overwhelming. I find it promising. It means we are not a lonely few, but a majority (albeit uncoordinated), all leaning the same way.

Underneath the different labels, the direction is the same: a fairer economy, a fairer system, one built for all of us to flourish rather than for a few to accumulate. The differences in goals and priorities are real but small. Honestly, I don’t much care too much what we call it. I’m drawn to matriarchy specifically because I believe it offers the most complete blueprint: not just an economic fix, but a political, social, and cultural one. It also addresses the gender element that many other movements skip past.

Whatever we call it, many of us need to do the psychological and relational work to make it a success: unravelling patriarchal conditioning from our minds, developing inner resilience and the ability to community consciously. Improving our ability to manage conflict in community and lead without recreating dominance hierarchies.

If you lead or belong to an organisation or community that uses none of these words (e.g., you’d never call yourself matriarchal), yet you still prioritise care, reciprocity, shared power, and want to build a system that lets people thrive, I have just the thing for you. I’ve been developing a programme to support the human foundations underneath all of these movements to enable them to flourish.

I’ve created a workbook for individuals and a live-facilitated programme for organisations. If you want to know more or want a sneak peek before it gets released next week, reply here or DM me.

Let’s start building.