Do you feel called to inspire and support nonviolent systemic change?
We would love to connect with you and partner on projects for a more collaborative future!
Start with something small
We suggest looking for something that’s fun and easy for you to do. Or whatever you feel called to offer. See the list below for examples of things we often need. You are welcome to invent new ways of collaborating with us!
To get in touch, you can join one of our open calls, schedule a quick chat with Roni, send us an email, or join our ISC Signal chat. If you are interested in longer-term commitment or joining the collective, scroll down for more information, or jump directly to one of these sections:
Our ways of working | Making a longer commitment | Becoming a member
Ways to support us
Random acts of kindness
- Offer presence: observe meetings, accompany co-working time, add appreciations
- Support the work: gift money, provide emotional support, take pictures, do small tasks
- Spread the word: Invite people to offerings, post on social media
- Give supportive feedback: tell us about inaccurate or outdated info in our materials, draft useful things we might add to our website
Sharing resources
- Share physical spaces: offer locations for our events and gatherings
- Share tools: give us access to technology and services
- Expand networks: connect us with people from different ecosystems
- Raise funds: send us money or connect us with more ways to receive money
Organizing events
- Join an org team: care for logistics, communications, or outreach
- Administer: track tasks, coordinate scheduling, update files
- Host online sessions: offer registration support, care for participants
- Pick up a support function: like conflict mediator, enthusiastic advocate, trusted advisor
Facilitating
- Facilitate meetings: come to any of our meetings and offer to hold space
- Become a guest facilitator: join as a support person for a workshop or intensive
- Guide practice activities: help us support people in small groups (for practices you already know)
Partnering on projects
- Produce materials: offer to contribute to publishing practices and games
- Organize mentoring: create structures for community learning with collective members, like learning circles or recurring coaching calls
- Collaborate on joint offerings: organize a local event or community learning space for your group, organization, or community
- Propose a project: share your dreams for how we could spread integrative decisions together
Our ways of working: Requests
If you feel inspired by the Integration Station vision, practices, or a specific project, we invite you to observe a meeting or offer support with tasks as a way to learn more. This will help us get to know each other and does not require any commitment.
To do this in a way that supports us, we ask that you:
- Take initiative to find out what we are doing and when we meet about what (for example by checking our website or asking someone)
- Almost all of our meetings are open to observers
- We often choose to focus on doing work instead of posting updates
- We don’t mind repeat requests – we are a small group and sometimes lose track of things
- Ask what would help or offer to pick up a task or function (if you want)
- Follow our lead when observing or joining a space for the first few times (of course, you are still welcome to ask for whatever you need)
- Accept our limits – like all people, we can’t care for everything and we sometimes show up in ways that are difficult for others
- Act with care – look for ways to participate that are supportive for you and everyone else
If you want to contribute more consistently or discover that you are already doing that, we ask that you read our core commitments and discern if it would be supportive for you and the collective to become a member.
What do members do?
- Make a commitment to consistently participate for at least 6 months
- Adopt our core commitments and ways of working
- Focus energy on work that contributes to our mission and goals
- Lead decisions, organize work, and respond to challenges
- Take responsibility for specific tasks or projects
- Engage in inner and interpersonal transformation work together
- Get to know others in the community, share resources, and offer support
- Participate in governance meetings and provide input for foundations
- Members may also become stewards or content creators when there is shared assessment of enough capacity and coherence
What do stewards do?
- Make an ongoing long-term commitment to care for the well-being of the collective
- Continue to contribute within projects to stay connected with the work
- Nurture and guide the collective’s direction and values
- Care for coherence (integrating feedback to evolve practices)
- Provide content, offerings, coaching, and mentoring
- Lead governance decisions and attend to collective-wide challenges
How do these agreements support our vision?
We provide opportunities for people who are curious or inspired by our work to learn more at their own pace. We model how to integrate tasks and relationships instead of putting them in opposition: we focus on continuing to care for our work as a way for people to get to know each other and build trust. We increase transparency with open meetings and notes. We welcome people into our space with clarity about what works for us. Instead of putting a lot of energy into conversations about what our agreements mean and what support people would need to adopt them, we just work together in ways that reveal if we share the same vision and values.
Making a longer-term commitment
Joining the Integration Station collective is a process of developing relationships and shared understanding over time. Anyone is welcome to come to our offerings and contribute to our projects without joining the collective. As we get to know each other, we discover together what would serve our shared vision and care for everyone’s needs.
If you feel drawn to joining Integration Station, we ask that you start by picking up a function in our projects. For example, you could help organize an intensive or lead playtesting for one of our integration games. Working together shows us if we orient to nonviolence and integration in a similar way in practice. As we do work, we also find moments to share about our passions, skills, and challenges. When we sense a shared pull to a long-term commitment, we invite you to review our foundations and engage in deeper dialogue about joining the collective.
Reflection questions for anyone interested in joining
- What draws you to integrative decisions? What would your life look like if integration was the core principle in everything you did?
- What is your understanding of nonviolence and in what ways might it be different from that of members of the collective?
- What do you dream of changing in the world and how do you see that change as served by the current ISC purpose, projects, and practices?
- What part of you might want to change the collective instead of joining what is already there? Are there any commitments that you cannot wholeheartedly embrace as your own?
- What support would you need to track and apply our core commitments and practices?
Becoming a member
Because we operate in distributed leadership and don’t use force, joining the collective looks very different from joining a mainstream organization. There is no application process and no one with the authority to tell you what you should do. Instead, we think of joining as an organic process that involves people slowly doing more work to care for the collective, building relationships, learning our values and practices, and at some point deciding together to make a longer commitment.
To support us in keeping the essence of our collective and staying in integrity with our values, some decisions require agreement from people who steward the collective or hold related functions, and some collective resources are only shared with people who complete our onboarding process.
| If you want to | We ask that you… | We will likely… |
|---|---|---|
| Get to know us | Come to our events, read materials, watch recordings, observe meetings | Greet you warmly, stay focused on our purpose during meetings, ask you to contribute if you want to learn more |
| Contribute to projects | Just do it, use our core practices | Call you a partner and not a member, only involve you in making decisions that are directly related to your work |
| Commit to hold a long-term function | Agree on the decision with other project team members or with ISC stewards (for collective functions) | Ask you to use our decision-making agreements and templates, talk to you about functions and our ways of working |
| Join the collective | Get invited by a steward, review the foundations, engage in dialogue, agree to commitments | Share some internal documents with you, check carefully that we are sufficiently aligned, give you limited access to collective infrastructure and resources (partial shared risk) |
| Become a steward | Get agreement from all current stewards | Ask you to become deeply familiar with our Foundations document and agreements, ask you to complete a capacity assessment matrix, talk to you a lot about shared vision and strategy |