Some of our current work

and collaborations.



OpenEdge is part of an exciting new SKYLARKS collective, bringing together nature connection and power and privilege work: FACILITATION FOR TRANSFORMATION 
www.changeinnature.org/facilitation-for-transformation​
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“A life-changing & life-affirming, soul-opening adventure”

CALLING EVERYONE WHO LONGS TO BE PART OF DEEP AND LASTING CHANGE IN THE WORLD: Are you making the impact that you want to in your life and work? Do you find yourself using the same approaches and having the same conversations with the same people? Do you need more expansion and inspiration?

This is an opportunity to step outside your normal ways of doing things, discover what might be getting in the way and see with new eyes. It is a unique collaboration between four facilitators from different fields and lived experiences, all committed to integrating polarised approaches to change. We believe that all environmental and social challenges are inter-linked and the necessary paradigm shift happens when their shared origins are revealed. By meeting the roots of disconnection together in increasing awareness, we can begin to access more honest, equitable and effective responses.

WHAT IS THE COURSE? This course will shift how you think, feel and embody the practice of transformation. Through experiential learning, we will bring awareness to the nature of change and the relationship between the personal and the systemic. We will reveal power dynamics that separate and learn capacities that reconnect. You will leave with new skills, embodied experience and greater confidence to apply this learning to group settings - enhancing your ability to create meaningful change.
The programme is comprised of a seven day residential course in a beautiful natural setting with practical experience applying the learning (both during our time together and afterwards).

WHO IS IT FOR? This course is for you if…
  • You want to support deeply rooted change in your groups, communities, workplaces and society 
  • You are new to facilitation or have an existing facilitation practice and want to deepen its transformative potential
  • You have a hunch that how we work, relate and communicate with one another is essential for addressing the social and environmental crises
  • You are aware that social and environmental issues are not separate and want to increase your understanding of how they relate and intersect. In fact, you may often feel uneasy, for example, in spaces that address environmental issues without acknowledging power dynamics, identity, difference and systemic issues. 
  • You want to learn how to include difference and challenge power in your life and workplace
We have found that people from a wide variety of professional backgrounds join our facilitation programmes and all of them find creative ways of applying the learning to their work, activism and personal lives.
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WHAT CAN YOU DO AFTER THE COURSE IS FINISHED? It’s up to you! We intend this course to inspire you to work for a more caring and connected world, and provide you with sufficient training, confidence and creativity to pursue courses of action and projects that are both life-affirming and genuinely transformative. Our intention is that you will leave this course feeling equipped and empowered to expand your existing work with new ideas, practices and approaches. Above all, we hope that you will be empowered to embody and create something profoundly different.

For more info and to register: www.changeinnature.org/facilitation-for-transformation​
OE is currently supporting Newcastle University in its long term journey of decolonising and developing their anti-racism strategy.

​Working with key leaders, with students and trainees, and with academic staff, OE is supporting awareness, analysis, action and accountability with a very keen team leading their journey of institutional anti-racism.
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For the last year, OE has very much enjoyed working with Treesisters in their courageous journey to decolonise their organisation and their activities at a personal and organisational level. 

Through training, coaching, strategy, and conflict support, from OE Treesisters are working to be leaders in whole organisation Transforming Inclusion.
treesisters.org
OE is part of an exciting new Collective Anu Priya, Laura Miller, Scarlet Hall and Sarri Bater, supporting members of the Environmental Funders Network with a new series on Power, Privilege and Racial Justice in Environmental Philanthropy. 

Join us for an opening session on Friday 26 November, 10:00 - 13:00. Register here. 

Environmental philanthropy is a powerful thing. It can effect policy change, protect people and wildlife from harm, and help create whole new ways of doing business. (See our collection Environmental Philanthropy: Stories to Inspire for an abundance of evidence of this power.)
It’s a great privilege to be able to use one’s power to such important and needed effect. But power and privilege are complicated. While they can be used for good, they can also cause harm, even unwittingly (perhaps especially unwittingly). Increasingly we have seen these ideas come up in EFN conversations in a range of forums: at the annual retreat, during last year’s learning circles, in interviews we conducted recently with some of our members. Deeply bound up in them is a sense of ‘who’: who has the power? Who gets to decide? Who benefits? Who doesn’t? In starting to ask those questions, the question of racial justice becomes tightly bound up in the question of power and privilege.

Just as these themes of power, privilege and racial justice are coming up more and more in philanthropic circles, they quite often don’t come up in spaces where perhaps they should. Often this is because we are blind to it: what doesn’t affect us doesn’t occur to us. Sometimes it’s because it’s just too uncomfortable to talk about. 
What would happen if we looked these issues in the eye? Is it possible that by coming together as a group of funders -united by a sense of concern for the environment and a desire to be as effective as possible- we can learn how to create philanthropic processes and practices that will be much more impactful, through a reckoning with power?
We are launching this year-long series to help facilitate that process. Please join us for an opening session on Friday 26 November (10:00 - 13:00) to see if you would like to be part of it.  
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Sagacious Youth Lead Consortium (SYLC), Sri Lanka.
Before the Covid pandemic and political tensions prevented our work in Sri Lanka, OpenEdge trained and coaching the SYLC core team to develop applied peace, reconciliation, justice and transformation knowledge, skills and capacities. Using a combination of the Otherness Lab, Festival of Conflict, and Transition Lounge, SYLC are practicing their learning in their community-based activities and projects.
Public Events UK: This year OpenEdge is running For more information, see what we offer
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