Transforming
Practices
In these pages we share our learnings and questions about what practices collaborations can use to build Collective Power. If you have arrived at these pages without first engaging in what it takes to cultivate the individual and collective conditions for these practices, we urge you to go there now. Without the required enabling conditions, the practices shared below will be limited in their ability to build Collective Power, and - at worst - harmful.
Our frame
Returning to CCL’s frame, we have spent the last four years seeking to more deeply understand what relational practices best enable collaborations to build Collective Power. We have codified the most promising into our emerging Collective Power framework. They are:
Building trusted relationships - practices that foster new trusting, authentic relationships that are pluralistic.
Enacting collectivist values - practices that support a feeling of shared values to guide solutions among diverse stakeholders.
System storytelling - practices that develop inclusive system narratives of past, present, and future, that hold complexity and nuance, and reframes dominant narratives to elevate diverse lived realities.
Collective healing - practices that create and sustain space for healing.
Who we learnt with
Below we share more about these practices. These learnings were generously created in community through the sharing of case studies and practice wisdom, and by engaging in shared sense making. We honour our co-learners, the collaborations they work within, and the communities they strive for change with. They are leaders in the global field striving to learn what practices build Collective Power that is strong enough to transform systems.
Practices that foster trusting, authentic, pluralistic relationships within collaborations
Key learnings:
Collective Power requires relationships between us to be transformed; where collaborations:
relate to each other in new ways
see with collective & diverse wisdom
see conflict as a normal part of the work and engage with it constructively
respond from a collectively different mindset.
Building Collective Power requires us to actively dismantle oppressive structures and consistently question who benefits from the current system and how to redistribute power more equitably.
Snap back to old, engrained patterns will happen. These moments can strengthen trust if we commit and act quickly to interrupting harmful dynamics when they arise.
When responsibility is taken for the harm caused by trust being broken, AND for the necessary repair - healing is possible.
When we engage in sustained, genuine relationships, our perspectives and our understanding of power evolve. We move from a fragmented, tension-filled view towards a sense of interconnectedness and wholeness.
Maria Lucia Mendez L - Rebuilding trust through action
Maria Lucia (MaLu) shared a powerful case study of the work of Ideas para la Paz where in Buritica, Colombia the local community and a multinational mining company changed the social and economic landscape of the region. MaLu’s case study was a powerful story of what is required to build trust when trust has been broken, power in unequal, and distorted perceptions of power prevail. Trust was tangible defined and measured as: honesty, belonging, good faith, good treatment and cooperation. In intentionally building trust, participants were supported by::
Equally accessing information
Developing skills through open dialogue and empathy-building exercises
Engaging in shared learning experiences designed to foster a deeper understanding of their differing perspectives.
Shared action, being collaborative projects between the community and the company, that built trust in an interconnected future.
This holistic methodology led to a significant 11% increase in trust between the communities and the company over three years, ultimately leading to unprecedented collaboration between the two groups that benefitted the entire region. You can read the full case study here.
MaLu’s sharing enabled the community of practice to distill the following learnings:
New ways of relating within the collaboration.
For systemically oppressed groups, there exists a social contract that expects obedience and conformity – traits that are antithetical to trust.
New ways of relating become real where trust is cultivated, tested, repaired, and sustained. This requires emotional labor and vulnerability, which is often by some professionals as outside the agreed boundary of the work: I didn’t sign up for this.
The connection between healing and trust
Working with oppressed people requires a multi-level healing journey of the personal, community, and system. Without centering the role of healing, any solution found within the community rests on unstable foundations.
You can read more about MaLu’s work at Ideas para la Paz.
Alison Grubbs - practices that foster trusting, authentic, pluralistic relationships within collaborations
Alison shared her practice wisdom that she applies in her role at New Pluralists - funder collaborative investing in a growing ecosystem of people, organizations, and ideas working to bring pluralism to life in communities across the U.S. She framed pluralists as a belief that diversity is enriching, rather than threatening, to our society. Alison shared her approach to fostering pluralism is grounded in:
You can read more about Alison’s work at New Pluralists.
Magdalena Pochec - practices that foster trusting, authentic, pluralistic relationships within collaborations
Magda shared the story of FemFund - a Polish philanthropic collective that supports collectives who resist patriarchy and oppression, ossified structures of power, and capitalism.
Magda shared FemFund’s approach and her learnings to creating and funding collectives that are transforming systems towards equity and justice. Magda approach is grounded in:
You can read more about Magda’s work at FemFund.
Together, Magda and Alison’s sharing enabled the community of practice to distill the following learnings:
Leadership for transforming systems
transcends the accumulation of power; it's about an active commitment to shifting power dynamics and dismantling oppressive structures, consistently questioning who benefits from the current system and how to redistribute power more equitably.
Requires leaders to utilize their roles to bridge gaps, facilitate connections between diverse perspectives, and amplify marginalized voices, all while remaining accountable to the communities they serve and prioritizing their needs.
Requires courage and commitment to build the capacity to relinquish power that serves us but harms others requires, and a willingness to engage in uncomfortable but necessary collective learning processes
Governance for transformation systems
necessitates a shift from centralized to shared decision-making models.
demands continuous evaluation and adaptation of governance structures to ensure equitable participation and influence.
Conflict in inevitable
leaders must embrace humility, flexibility, and transparency to navigate disagreements constructively. This involves fostering a culture of shared learning where conflict is seen as an opportunity for growth and deeper understanding rather than something to be avoided.
Preparing for snap-back
Even with the best intentions, individuals and groups can unconsciously fall back into old patterns of behavior, particularly those rooted in systemic oppression. Breaking free from these ingrained habits requires ongoing self-reflection, collective accountability, and a commitment to interrupting harmful dynamics when they arise.
Practices that enable collaborations to cohere around shared values
Key learnings:
Shared values that are strong enough to guide decisions and solutions among diverse stakeholders enable collaborations to exercise agency and shape their future together.
Shared values link different types of power together through shared purpose and trust, and enable that Collective Power to be used to influence.
Shared values are the foundation for collective accountability.
Yussuf Sane on shared values
Yussuf spoke about how Tostan International centres shared values as a practice to empower communities to develop and achieve their vision of dignity for all. Yusuff particularly spoke about Marième Bamba, who ignited a movement of change for women in Senegal.
While the goal of Tostan’s Community Empowerment Program is gender equality, the focus of the Program is on enabling shared values to emerge in whole communities, with both men and women. Tostan’s practice is to:
focus on collective education, individual and collective values reflection, and creating a container for shared vision to emerge.
see men as crucial partners in the community, both as participants in the Program and as members receptive to the human rights, health, and educational information being disseminated by the women in the group.
enable personal and collective deliberation about the discrepancies between our actions and our beliefs. These moments of reflection empower our communities to align their practices with their deepest aspirations, paving the way for transformative change and collective progress.
You can read more about Yussuf’s work at Tostan.
Salvador Lopez on the power of lived experience in creating shared values
Salvador shared his experience leading a collective impact initiative focused on housing security in Kent County, Michigan, USA.
Salvador shared that K-Connect has been able to achieve large-scale impact by redefining the housing crisis itself. This occurred because K-Connect centered the lived experiences of those directly affected by housing insecurity. This shift in power changed the approach from being problem-centric to solutions-oriented and community-led. The shared values that emerged were communicated in shared language and shared frameworks, all of which fostered greater inclusivity and enabled broader participation in the movement. Ultimately, by prioritizing the voices of those most affected and redefining the issue, shared values mobilized a wider coalition and achieved meaningful results.
You can read more about Salvador’s work at K-Connect.
Together, Yussuf and Salvador’s sharing enabled the community of practice to distill the following learnings:
The power of lived experience in building Collective Power. When those directly affected by power imbalances are given a platform and their voices are genuinely heard, they possess the unique ability to challenge the status quo and catalyze transformation.
Shared values fostering a sense of shared responsibility among all stakeholders, recognizing that everyone has a role to play
Practices that enable collaborations find transformative narratives
Practice guidance: Storytelling as meaning-making
Separate and alongside CCL’s work on Collective Power, we have been convening, learning and sense-making about the power of story to transform systems. Our Systems Storytelling Project uplifts non-dominant traditions, methods, and techniques that foster collective meaning-making and healing-centered approaches to systems transformation. Click here to learn more.
Key learnings:
Shared narratives, woven from individual stories, empower us to create shared purpose, Collective Power, and a meaningful and sustainable future together.
System storytelling allows us to make meaning together, which strengthens our bonds, fuels our collective imagination, and ultimately enables us to take collaborative action towards a world that reflects our shared values and aspirations.
Stories that challenge the dominant narrative of a system open space for dialogue and reflection, prompting a reevaluation of cultural values and societal expectations.
Stories in the form of myths and metaphors create a ‘third space’ for people and make the relational work of systems change more possible.
Stories allow us to reflect on how we as collectives are behaving and either perpetuating or disrupting the power dynamics we are trying to shift.
Masarat Daud on storytelling to shift entrenched power dynamics
Masarat shared her experience with grassroots education campaigns in Rajasthan, India, where she created an initiative called the 8-Day Academy where local community members built skills that helped them excel as teachers and students. The idea being that a total of 24 hours (8 days, 3 hours per day) were enough to teach the basics of any skill. Her work addresses issues of gender inequality, cultural barriers, and socio-economic challenges, highlighting how storytelling empowered women in her village and surrounding communities to seek education and challenge entrenched social norms. By bringing the TEDx experience to Rajasthan, and creating one of the largest TEDx events globally, and learning to work around “middle-men” who served as reinforcers of the existing power structures, Masarat was able to engage with over 7,000 women and demonstrate the role of storytelling in transforming power dynamics in communities.
Masarat’s practice sharing powerfully illustrated how:
Social culture perpetuates narratives that instill fear and shame into the women of the community, discouraging them from seeking education for themselves and their daughters. By removing the middle person and making people accountable for their own learnings new narratives were able to take shape.
Storytelling emphasizes other lived realities that often contradict the dominant narratives. Masarat emphasized the importance of not creating a values-based duality between different norms but instead centering healing and understanding when considering what holds them in place.
A deeper understanding of people’s fears enabled stories of men to be highlighted, helping the entire community recognize the widespread harm caused by patriarchal norms. Stories of men reclaiming their emotional well-being challenged the dominant narrative of stoic masculinity – a necessary shift that melted away shame and led to higher school enrollment for girls.
Masarat’s sharing enabled the community of practice to distill the following learnings:
How important it is to intentionally tell and share more individual stories that challenge the dominant narrative of a system. When enough stories diverge from mainstream narratives, they open space for dialogue and reflection, prompting a reevaluation of cultural values and societal expectations.
Storytelling allows room for nuance and complexity within systems that often tend to oversimplify and disempower. It creates a space to wander deeper into what is true rather than accepting a dual-natured version of the world.
Storytelling is a remedy, enabling us to feel compassion for those whose power is being challenged; to see the humanity in those who possess more power than ourselves. It allows us to understand that even those who hold more power also struggle in different ways.
Developing and sharing one's story is an act of reclaiming power. At a cultural level, storytelling serves as a repository of collective wisdom and heritage, preserving and transmitting values across generations. When stories challenge stereotypes and highlight the multiplicity of human experiences, they contribute to a more nuanced understanding of identity and can be extremely healing.
Tien Ung on how collective cultures view and build Collective Power
Tien shared lessons from Vietnamese history and culture - in the form of two myths - in order to build a shared understanding about Collective Power as a way of being. Tien’s opening frame was that many of our community conversations about Collective Power have roots in individual concepts of power. Tien invited us to think about our work and movements through a different lens - a collectivist lens.
Links to the two Vietnamese myths that are shared below:
Tien shared that these myths to allow her to talk about diversity, sacrifice, silence and interdependence in the work of transformation - things that do not easily sit within dominant culture. The myths create a ‘third space’ for people to navigate borders and boundaries. Tien also spoke about the amount of effort she and others needed to do in order to move from a stance of negotiation and agenda setting, into this ‘third space’ - where ‘the real work’ becomes possible; the work of understanding, relating, having relational safety, and collective accountability.
Tien’s sharing enabled the community of practice to distill the following learnings:
Collective Power needs deep connectivity - places and pockets that:
Allow for both interdependence and independence - freedom to speak and act as one, and as many.
Do not carry judgment between those who are ready to be visible and those who will carry the visible ones in less visible ways.
Collective needs fluidity of leadership - where leaders rise and relinquish. This is an Indigenous way of being - when a community comes together and self-determines their needs, and leaders emerge from that community. Governance develops around those leaders, and once the community finds balance again those ways of relating and governing cease and those leaders go back to being community members.
The power of story - myth and metaphor - allows people to
try, adopt, play with, and ground in values that might not feel immediately familiar... and slowly locate themselves within that story
reflect on how we as collectives are behaving and either perpetuating or disrupting the power dynamics we are trying to shift.
Practices that enable collaborations to engage in collective healing
Practice guidance: Collective Healing
Throughout CCL’s year-long community exploring how Collective Power can transform systems, the thread of healing was with us. Many stories of power called for healing.
Separately and through the community, CCL was beginning to understand collective healing as the most transformative practice collaborations can use to transform systems. We were connecting with people globally, calling for healing-centred systems change, documenting stories of collective healing in action. These resources are all gathered here.
Key learnings:
Creating a space for movement towards collective healing by openly acknowledging and discussing individual and collective trauma within our systems can transform how we address social problems. By creating spaces and capabilities for leaders and teams to understand the impact of trauma on themselves and their work, we can foster more transformative solutions..
Kerry Graham and Laura Calderon de la Barca - Collective Power and Healing
The last time our community of practice met we focused on the relationship between power and healing. To resource that conversation, Kerry Graham sat down with Laura Calderon de la Barca to explore the question: What do you do when the only way to transform power is to heal the perpetrator? Kerry and Laura are both Senior Associates with CCL. We share this conversation here as an edited video and below is a refined transcript. .
Our invitation to others to learn
Over the last 2 years we have partnered with others to publicly invite leaders with dominant power to ‘do’ the individual and collective work required to use their power differently.
The first article we co-authored was published in February 2025. It was called How do we help todays stuck systems become unstuck? and 11 co-authors invited leaders to the individual work of:
Cultivating mental models that value equity, diversity, shared humanity and the transformative power of community.
Exhibiting leadership that publicly commits to relational work.
This outwardly looks like:
staying in the work even when it gets ‘hot’
judiciously leaning into difference
embracing pluralism
being willing to engage with complexity rather than simplifying it for order, measures and impact.
Developing personal practices of being radically honest about our intention, and growing our capacity for mutual accountability, self-reflection, and self-care.
Appreciating our own need for ‘healing’ from past trauma, acknowledging the systemic and historical trauma inflicted on our communities, and learning how to foster accessible and welcoming spaces and places for collective healing.
In the same article, the co-authors asked leaders with dominant power to recognise their own fear of change, and - more importantly - recognise that releasing that fear requires individual work. The authors called out:
This personal work is both an opportunity and a responsibility. By doing this work, you will show up in collaborations using your inherent power in ways that don’t repeat the harmful patterns of the past. You will help create opportunities for wider groups to gain power, and surface and heal hurts carried in our families, communities and lands.
In linking the individual work to the work of the collective, the co-authors closed by saying:
We ask that when you step into the collaborative space, you lead by being curious about who the collaboration are, where we all come from, what assets we bring to the table, what forms of knowledge we steward, the types of power we have or don’t have, and how we draw on all of these things into collaboratively solving problems. Leading this way will change you. You will grow a deeper appreciation of how your roles and mental models uphold inequitable and unjust systems. And you will foster openness — in yourself and the collaboration — to let go of old patterns, grow new ones that ripple far beyond the collaboration, and achieve things in the name of justice and equity that you could never achieve alone. Leading in this way will allow you to stay long enough in discomfort for new ways of being to emerge, and, ultimately, for systems to heal and transform. We wholeheartedly invite you to step into the relational work required to transform systems towards equity and justice.
Our ongoing questions
Our most expansive learnings about how to cultivate conditions in ourselves and our collaborations came from being in community with fellow learners. So did our most challenging questions. We share them below. If you too are walking with these questions and feel comfortable to share, we invite you to write what you are sensing, doing, and learning.
What does transformative leadership look like when it values solidarity, power-shifting and justice? What is the least complex way to build capacity to give up what serves me but harms others?
What is the relationship between dismantling white supremacy and Collective Power building? To what extent can we rid our minds of our colonising mindset at the beginning so as not to replicate and repeat the very patterns we are trying to change?
What would make leaders with dominant power choose to do the individual work required to play their part in building Collective Power that can transform systems towards equity and justice?