Since it was founded in the early 1990s, The Berkana Institute has been a source of inspiration for people looking for a way to think about leadership and building healthy and resilient communities that helped them increase the effectiveness of their work. Berkana’s use of a living systems approach to leadership and its commitment to working with emergence in a rigorous fashion has help us develop a grounded perspective about how sustainable change happens in communities. Some of the core ideas that have guided our work at Berkana include:
• Every community is filled with leaders.
• Whatever the problem, the community itself has the answers.
• We don’t have to wait for anyone. We have many resources with which to make things better now.
• We need a clear sense of direction AND we need to know the elegant, minimum next step.
• We proceed one step at a time, making the path by walking it.
Those of us who have had an opportunity to work in many countries and many contexts with these ideas have now come together to create the Berkana Collaborative, offering consulting services and learning events based on the work of The Berkana Institute.
This website is a beginning for the work of the Collaborative. We hope you will find the ideas and resources we share here to be of value on your journey. We provide consulting and learning services which are based on the principles, values, beliefs and experiences of The Berkana Institute. The Collaborative was formed in late 2009 in response to a growing number of requests for help. Many of us know we’re in a time of massive shifts. Across the board existing systems are stressed beyond belief: whether it banking or health, prisons or schools — we’re increasingly unable to cope with demands. At the same time, exciting and creative work is bubbling up all over the place: inside of, outside of and instead of those existing systems. And, just to make sure things don’t get too easy, we’re like frogs in water that is coming to a boil, desensitized as we get hit with wave after wave of catastrophic news!
We work with individuals, organizations and communities who know they have immense and unused capacity to work with the demands and opportunities all around us. The people we work with know they must
- develop new processes which unleash that capacity,
- embrace new practices which connect people as they act and learn,
- articulate core principles, values and beliefs to guide their work
–the Berkana Collaborative
berkanacollaborative(at)berkana.org
