Building a threefolding movement

Upcoming opportunities to help grow the work

There are a couple basic ideas I think are essential for healthy social change in the future:

1. Our social issues won’t be solved by experts in far-off places; our social issues live between us and we’ll need to solve them.

2. If we want to bring health to the whole of society, we’ll have to learn to see society whole.

These two ideas drive much of my work and lead me to believe that, if we’re to renew society, we need a broad-based movement of people striving to perceive and bring harmony into the whole.

So this year, besides my writing for The Whole Social, I’ll also be engaging with people directly around movement building. This will happen in a handful of ways (and if you’re interested in getting involved in any of them, email me at threefoldsun@gmail.com):

Affinity groups

One way will be by organizing around specific vocational fields and social issues. So for instance, a group of teachers and concerned citizens might take up the issue of education. We’d then work to identify its threefold aspects (the ways it interacts with the cultural, legal, and economic dimensions of life), assess where its relationships to these realms are unhealthy and how they can be brought to health, strategize a path forward, and collaborate with others to walk it. The same thing will happen with medicine, agriculture, housing, etc.

Workshops

There are a number of workshops planned for this coming year, including one this November in Philmont, NY, and a series of workshops that I’m co-leading with Robert Karp in Viroqua, WI, this December, March, and May. Some of these workshops are connected to a threefolding “kit” we’re developing and that will be a useful tool in the movement building work. (Get in touch if you want to know more about an existing workshop or help organize a workshop where you live.)

Youth internships

In connection with the Y Project, I’ll also be working with young interns this year (ages 16-26). There are a number of areas where interns might engage — for instance through research into the social health of particular fields and through on-the-ground organizing of events. Some aspects of this work can happen from a distance, while other aspects will be in-person in different parts of the US. (Please reach out to the Y Project if you’re interested.)

Study groups

Alongside these other activities, I’m also holding study groups around the 12 lesson course I created – “Transforming Society.” I held groups this past year, meeting monthly with folks in the US and Australia. This year participant-led study groups will be offered, which I’ll visit and contribute to on a quarterly basis. Such study groups can happen anywhere in the world.

Again — if you’re interested in getting involved in any of these activities, let me know at threefoldsun@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading The Whole Social and for your ongoing engagement with this work. I look forward to growing it with you. All the best,

Seth