Partnership Work
The Working Well Network partners with other networks, projects, individuals and organisations who feel their work would benefit from our approach to deeply sustainable working cultures.
We can support you in your work if you are facing a particular set of tensions, a time of transition or wishes to undertake a discernment process, for example. Alongside governance and culture work, we also offer facilitation, coaching and strategic design.
The idea for our Partnership Work grew out of a desire to make an offer that accompanies people in their own settings, alongside the existing Network meetings which aim to create safe spaces to retreat to.
In some ways this partnership looks like traditional culture consultancy. Jo and Peter, our Network conveners, have an abundance of experience birthing, growing, redesigning and closing organisations. They are also experienced facilitators and coaches with specialisations that include ecological distress and systems thinking.
In other ways, the partnership works very differently from traditional consultancy. Because nothing happens in isolation, we aim to make conscious the value flow that happens between the Network and the wider system beyond an exchange of time, knowledge and expertise for financial resourcing.
Each partnership is seen as a flow of resource that is of value not only to the partner organisation, but also all the Working Well Network members, and to the environmental movement more widely.
The Network itself can learn from the experience and insights of partners, and equally when partners enter into a working relationship with the Network, they receive the insights of the Network community as a whole, rather than just Peter and Jo alone.
How this works itself in practice looks a little different for each partnership, balancing, for example, the partner’s needs for confidentiality and the particular learning interest of the Network at that time.
Our Partnership Work is also part of how we fund the Network as a free resource, meaning that the value flow between partners and the Network as a whole is also reflected financially, and the reality of where money exists within the system is reflected in the design of our approach.
If you are interested in finding out more about our Partnership Work, please fill out this contact form with as much initial detail about your work and any questions you have as you think helpful .
A Little More About Our Approach
As with all our work within the Network, there are three core values that we bring to our Partnership Work.
The first is to welcome more of ourselves. We invite all of ourselves to the work, such as our emotions, intuitions and bodies, as well as our minds. Our doubts, fears, failures and not-knowing are also valued as vital to the work we are doing together.
The second is to make time for each other. We take time to build our relationships of trust, which in turn enables us to be more authentic, collaborative, creative and, ultimately, effective. This also means making time to face into the challenges of our working together where we find difference, trusting in what could be learned from those experiences.
The third is to live what we hope to create. We experiment with embodying the kind of changes we hope to see in a more sustainable world, including a fairer distribution of power, and respecting the limitations of our personal and collective resources.
You can read more about how we developed these values and how they are lived out in practice in our report, Working Well in a Climate Crisis here.
How do we work?
To give life and clarity to the sometimes abstract value that partnership work can bring, we have attempted to summarise our approach using more precise language:
Working with systems
We can define a system as an interconnected collection of things (people, cells, organisations, fungi) that, together, has a behaviour that the individual parts do not have on their own. It is usually also a behaviour that persists over time, characterised by boundaries, patterns, and feedback that brings stability (or, sometimes, instability).
Visible systems
Working in or with organisations, the systems that are often most noticeable are the ones where the feedback loops are clearest. Systems of governance, for example, that explicitly affect our relationships with power and risk. Or social systems that give us cues to make sense of our interactions with others.
Invisible systems
At larger and smaller levels of scale, however, there are other systems at play. Within the environmental movement, for example, vast systems of power and privilege play out in dynamics between funders and those in need of money. Without recognising these systems as deeply ingrained patterns, we can often feel responsible for them.
At the other extreme, our bodies are an amazing array of systems which exhibit wonderful and surprising behaviours. Our nervous system, for example, can dramatically affect how we bring ourselves to, or respond to, the visible systems we interact with on a daily basis.
Finding balance
Our work starts with a recognition of the systems at play within your particular context, and the patterns that show up as a result.
We are already culturally attuned to some systems, but others, such as our nervous system, can take time to lean into and notice. We can never truly know the full scope and impact of any complex system, but by balancing a deeper awareness of how our experience of the world around us is shaped by these patterns with an ability to hold and navigate uncertainty and the limits of our control, we can often find a more easeful path.
About the Working Well Network Facilitators
Jo Musker-Sherwood
As a deeply feeling human, Jo found the challenges of running a fast growing environmental organisation took an unbearable toll on her physical and mental health. After stepping down from the role and wondering if she was cut out for environmental work at all, she was fortunate to receive funding to use her personal experience of burnout as living research into sustainable working practices.
Jo came to see individual burnout as an expression of our collective state under late stage capitalism, believing that our most courageous acts of resistance start from within ourselves, rippling out.
She was the original founder of the Working Well Network back in 2020 and has enjoyed exploring what it means to share responsibility and inspiration across a growing network, in stark contrast to her initial experiences of leadership.
Alongside co-convening the Working Well Network, Jo now teaches and consults on burnout recovery across the world, drawing particularly on the wisdom of grief tending practices and nature/ body connection. You can find out more about her work, The Rest of Activism here.
Peter Lefort
Peter’s background is in infrastructural systems, such as governance models and network dynamics. He works on environmental action across different contexts, including civic systems, climate research, and international adaptation.
Through the Working Well Network, he is learning how to bring his experience of social systems in balance with an awareness of the systems within us. He is also working on his own role as a man in spaces of wellbeing, and what it means to do that well.
Peter also works a facilitator, coach, and network builder for organisations and individuals working on environmental and social change. You find out more about his work here.
