Our Community
Our community is primarily composed of people with post-conventional worldviews who work in the area of international development or social change.
"Post-conventional" refers to people who 'see' and recognize the value in traditional, conventional, and pluralist perspectives in the world today, yet who choose to craft meaning at a place that honours and includes them all. This worlview has been termed 'integral', 'vision-logic', 'post-postmodern', etc., although the terms matter less than what they attempt to describe.
In terms of organizations, our audience ranges from those involved in NGOs, community development programs, and multilateral agencies, like the UNDP or the World Bank, to public and private aid agencies; from those in socially responsible corporations to various government officials.
The programs we are involved in or consult on may range from poverty alleviation, economic development, and environmental sustainability projects to community development, girls’ education, and HIV/AIDS initiatives; from rethinking corporate supply chains to confronting issues of global climate change. Although we are not a thematic-centric organization. Instead, we take as our starting point the very context that is arising in a particular place and moment, and from there align to where development is stuck and how it might better flow.
Our team, and the practitioners with whom we work, engage cultural centers of gravity that range across the spiral of human development, and our intent is to have IWB assist us all to engage, and participate in, the global gestalt of evolution more consciously.
The essence of this community of practice:
- Thinking globally and thinking locally, acting integrally.
- Working through circles of inclusion, always situating in the bigger picture, while attending to the present needs as they arise.
- Skillfully identifying areas to target, but without the illusion that there is a silver bullet—we simply work with our consciousness and the integral map to show up as best we can, to lead by being able to see a little more clearly into the future.
- Staying curious and critically self-reflective on what we don't know that we don't know, as well as seeking to see that which remains shadow in our practice or in our mental models.
- Being a community of practice where practitioners can engage with peers at the leading edge of the field.
- Providing learning resources (written, audio, and video) which articulate, explain and provide exemplars for integral praxis in global development
- Working in the remote, impoverished regions of the world, as well as in its capital cities, while helping the global mainstream move forward through conscious capitalism and responsible consumption.