SECTOR: Philanthrophy & Social Change
FOCUS: Alternative Futures Building & Systems Transformation
PARTNERS: Joseph Rowntree Foundation | 28 Pathfinder organizations
REACH: Representatives from 28 organizations building liberatory and regenerative futures across the UK
THE CHALLENGE
When Coalition Building Outruns Relational Infrastructure
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s (JRF) Pathfinders program has accomplished something remarkable: Securing £25 million over five years to fund regenerative futures work, with participating organizations co-creating a proposal that shifted decision-making power from traditional top-down grantmaking to ecosystem-led governance. Yet as the two-year learning cycle drew to a close in 2024, a critical tension emerged. The speed and urgency of moving resources had outpaced the relational infrastructure needed to hold the complexity of coalition work across 28 diverse organizations.
Participants experienced the cost of this imbalance—fragmented participation due to capacity constraints, communication gaps reinforcing power inequities, harm toward Black and Global Majority-led organizations and those in stewardship roles, and a pervasive sense of disorientation despite a shared commitment to transformative change. As JRF prepared to transition into the “Unfurling and Learning Infrastructure” phase, leadership recognized that rushing forward without addressing these relational foundations would undermine the very liberatory principles the work aimed to embody. They needed a reflective process that could slow down urgency culture, surface unspoken dynamics, and build the collective capacity required for sustainable coalition work.
THE APPROACH
Embodied Reflection as Foundation for Transformation
JRF contracted Lumos to design and facilitate a reflective process grounded in embodied practices and collective sense-making, led by founder Nkem Ndefo. Nkem offered a framework that recognizes stress and trauma responses as adaptive reactions to oppressive conditions, and foregrounds building individual stability as the foundation for collective care and transformation. The process unfolded across two virtual gatherings in May and June of 2025 and a two-day in-person gathering at Bore Place, a 500-acre organic estate in Kent, England, a setting that allowed participants to engage with reflection through movement, land connection, and more-than-human relationships as well as traditional discussion and writing. The process was structured around three reflective arcs: What? (raw experience without interpretation), So What? (meaning-making), and Now What? (implications and next steps).
The virtual sessions established essential groundwork. Participants co-created 20 relational agreements through participatory decision-making, distinguishing “coalition spaces,” which naturally involve divergence and negotiation, from “refuge spaces” that offer ease and familiarity. This reframing helped align expectations, acknowledging that Pathfinders was a coalition workspace where discomfort and difference were part of the process rather than signs of failure. Each session opened with somatic arrival practices, and agreements became living documents revisited at every gathering to integrate new voices and evolving needs.
The in-person gathering activated what Lumos’ Resilience Toolkit framework describes as the pathway of awareness to discernment, then coherence, and, ultimately, transformation. The process worked directly with participants’ nervous systems and whole bodyminds, not treating them as obstacles to overcome, but as sources of wisdom that informed the process.
Key elements of the process included:
Somatic Mapping of the Two-Year Journey: For seven critical time junctures from December 2022 through June 2025, participants engaged in guided embodied reflection. Rather than immediately interpreting events during the reflective process, they located sensations and emotions in their bodies and jotted them on sticky notes to create a collective somatic and emotional map. This revealed patterns invisible to purely cognitive analysis: The pervasive sense of unsureness, shifting power dynamics, missing relational foundation in the first year, and tension between pace and relationship-building.
World Café Meaning-Making Circles: Participants moved through three rounds of small-group discussions exploring personal, relational, and collective meaning. The spaciousness created by the somatic work allowed people to hold their stories more lightly, making room for alternate narratives to emerge. Themes crystallized: The impact of different entry points, divergent understandings of purpose (reparations vs. future-building vs. both), communication as power, and reparations as living embodied practice rather than a fixed concept.
Resilience Toolkit Practices: Each session opened with somatic arrival practices to support transition into the reflective space. Before meals, Nkem facilitated the therapeutic tremor, a core Toolkit practice that activates a mammalian reflex which helps the body reset stress and trauma responses. Growing numbers of participants joined each time, noting feelings of deeper relaxation, presence, and heart-opening. These practices weren’t supplemental wellness activities, but core methodology. They created the nervous system stability required for the group to stay present with complexity, conflict, and transformation.
Facilitated Whole-Group Synthesis: Nkem offered critical observations from a somatic lens: The strong focus on what hadn’t worked might be symptom of collective urgency states; there was a need for explicit clarity about whether JRF’s “holding loosely” approach meant participatory grantmaking or funder-led initiative; the realization that without clear responsibility structures, important relational and governance work gets left unclaimed. This analysis helped the group move from individual narratives to collective understanding.
THE RESULTS
From Urgency to Intentionality: A Roadmap for Collective Transformation
The reflective process achieved what traditional goal-setting work could not: Building embodied capacity for participants to stay with complexity rather than collapse into reactivity. By working directly with nervous system states and somatic experience, the group developed a shared language for dynamics that had been unspoken, creating conditions where vulnerability, divergence, and structural power realities could coexist.
“We are torn in our cares” —this phrase, offered by participant Indy Johar, became shorthand for the reality of fragmented participation. Rather than treating participation challenges as individual failing, the group recognized it as a structural condition requiring intentional design to account for varied engagement levels.
Key outcomes included:
Clear Sequencing and Prioritization: The group reached strong consensus on an order of operations that directly challenged urgency culture:
- Begin with relationship repair and harm acknowledgment, particularly toward Black and Global Majority-led organizations and stewardship group members;
- Focus on reparations, governance, and field-building capacities as part of the Learning Infrastructure initiative;
- Only then revisit and implement Unfurling governance proposals and funding structures.
This sequencing recognizes that rushing into design or funding decisions before addressing relational foundations would reproduce the very patterns they were trying to transform.
Explicit Naming of Harm and Commitment to Repair: By creating conditions where people could speak from embodied experience rather than strategic positioning, the process surfaced specific harms that had been unnamed—financial, relational, and wellbeing harm toward organizations stewarding the process. JRF offered to hold an intentional harm repair process with Nkem facilitating, establishing this as prerequisite work rather than something to address “if time allows.”
Learning Infrastructure as Foundational: Participants identified concrete topics requiring collective study before finalizing governance. These included decision-making processes, relational agreements, embodiment and somatics, clarifying strategy and mission, reparations scholarship, and understanding where money comes from. This reframed learning not as nice-to-have professional development, but as strategic muscle-building essential to the work.
Distributed Leadership Models: The group recognized that smaller working groups and pods were more effective for holding trust, depth, and complexity than full cohort spaces. This led to proposals for governance structures that would keep roles clear, prevent power from concentrating informally, and allow for different levels of participation.
As the final report from this reflective process concluded, “The insights and commitments gathered have laid important foundations for participants to roll into the next phase of collective work with greater trust, clarity and intention.”
CONCLUSION
Slowing Down as Strategic Practice for Systems Change
The Pathfinders Reflective Process demonstrates that embodied practices are not soft skills or wellness add-ons—they are core methodology for groups navigating the complexity of systems transformation. By creating conditions for nervous system regulation and somatic awareness, the process built capacity that typical organizational processes alone cannot create, including the ability to stay present with discomfort, to witness both self and others without collapsing into urgency, and to make decisions from coherence rather than reactivity.
This work revealed that the gap between liberatory ideals and funding realities isn’t primarily a design problem. It’s a capacity problem. Moving into “power-with” paradigms requires what the Toolkit describes as “building steadiness, restoring connection, imagining new possibilities, and creating the world we long for.” The reflective process didn’t resolve all tensions or answer all questions, but it began to create the relational ground and embodied capacity necessary for the group to hold those tensions productively rather than being fragmented by them.
As JRF and the Pathfinder organizations move into the Unfurling and Learning Infrastructure phase with £8 million in committed funding, they carry forward a critical insight: The pace of resource movement must be matched by investment in relational infrastructure and embodied capacity-building. The model created here, centering investing in learning before governance design, centering embodiment alongside strategy, and prioritizing harm repair, offers a template for philanthropy attempting genuine transformation. It proves that slowing down in service of depth isn’t a luxury when systems are burning; it’s the strategic practice that makes sustained, collective action possible.
