HOW WE WORK

With the leadership of Gigi Coyle, and our growing intergenerational team, we continue to listen for new expressions of Beyond Boundaries. We listen for ways to serve, ways to offer our gifts, ways to support local/global community efforts dedicated to regenerative living and care for all relations.

We work collaboratively with partners and only where asked and it is a win-win for all involved.

As Beyond Boundarians, we raise funds and receive gifts to be able to offer our time and energy to these people and places, in service and support of both longtime and modern-day stewards. In this way, we water the best seeds we find and the “watering holes” that attract those committed to systemic change. When asked to do so, when we feel deeply they will serve, we offer our gifts, our experience, and best practices gleaned from years of community stewardship: council, quest, rites of passage, and bearing witness.

We are small, allowing at first, perhaps, for a tiny impact, and then like an acupuncture point, we see effects rippling out, contributing to and leaving behind a healthier cell within the body. We continue as students ourselves ready to learn from each community and situation we meet.

We see Beyond Boundaries not as an organization, but rather as an organizing principle. That means, on some level, anyone can join in to the work that lies ahead.

PROCESS BEFORE PRODUCT

Our goal is process and discovery, not the usual focus on outcome or product; to truly move into the world with open hearts and minds, and to listen for what serves and what is deeply needed.

Too many times people, especially Americans, go with a formula, a pre-determined outcome, and miss the genuine opportunities that arise along the way. With each collaboration, we sit in Council, listening to the vision, knowledge, dreams and experience held therein. We feel there is something important to go and listen to practicing council with the land and its people and letting an exchange emerge that will reveal the future outcomes. Thus, rather than pre-determining outcomes, we have generated a commitment to bring our learning home and forward in the best possible way given what we witness, learn and experience, collectively and as individuals. We work between the worlds at times, across organizational lines, job descriptions, and/or institutional or community loyalties — bridgepeople, contributing to common intentions and dreams.

The gifts we share include council, rites of passage, the best community practices we’ve experienced, organizational development, permaculture teachings, and whatever seems to be needed within our capabilities.

We are forever grateful for the support of the process, the willingness to operate a bit differently than NGO’s, the commitment to nature’s way and changing movements, each year confirming what is essential and right to do. And, with time, we are seeing some true products appearing, in the form of:

  • More collaborations, bridges, between organizations, communities and people around the work.

  • More communities deepening their trust and cross-pollinating seeds of knowledge and experience.

  • More sharing of resources on all levels between cooperating peoples and places.

  • More open, listening, caring, connected, truthful players.

  • More councils serving as home base in relationship for couples, families, institutions, and community.

  • More awareness of the value of being witnessed, as a step towards healing, conscious community, and new stories.

  • More people awakened to the gift and importance of rites of passage and markings of all kinds, from youth initiation to elderhood, from honoring the naming, the beginning of a work, to the ceremony of a divorce.

  • More of a lived sense of global community, along with increased focus on local connection and regeneration.

  • More willingness to live in the unknown, to respond when called, and to continue to learn what cooperation means, e.g. being part of nature, little story/big story, spirit, the divine.

There are few dynamics more potent and alive than the awakened relationship between youngers, “middlers” and elders. Each elicits the wholeness of the other—a wholeness that goes unexpressed when either the young, with their fire and imagination, are not given the chance to engage, or the “middlers” aren’t acknowledged for the load of work they often carry, or the elders are marginalized, forgotten and/or retired in the worst sense of the word. As BB, we continue in the experiment of exploring what creative wholeness might be elicited from us all in a world of true intergenerational collaboration.
Gigi Coyle, Beyond Boundaries