Yvonne Cuneo, co-focaliser of Findhorn’s New Story Summit, shares the new story of the Foundation and Community one year on….
The idea of a new story is not exactly new for the Findhorn Foundation and Community. For 53 years the community has been exploring, experimenting with, demonstrating, learning about a new way of being, living, working together – co-creating with spirit, with each other and with the rest of nature. As the Chair of Foundation Trustees recently wrote:
….the reality of life as partnership with all that is. That, in essence, is the new story.
Together, we’ve built a strong, potentially transformational energy field and use the word ‘unfolding’ to describe our organic evolution… yet there has been a sense that some things are stuck.
As the organisation of the summit gained momentum in 2014 the mood in the community was infectious and it was generally felt that a new story was needed in many areas of the community.
Holding the summit was definitely a catalyst, and as we co-created a crucible for change for participants and webstreamers, our own new story gained momentum.
Since the summit, the community has created a Community Change Working Group with representatives from the Foundation and the New Findhorn Association (NFA), to consciously consult, design and facilitate community evolution. The group’s mission is to clarify roles and processes, to find better ways to connect and engage within a quite complex community, to evolve a more decentralised structure and to encourage the emergence of a truly planetary 21st century village. And the process has begun…
Meanwhile, and in parallel, the Findhorn Foundation, the community within a community which holds the programmes for experiential learning, began an across-the-board enquiry and reconfirmation of our vision and purpose, seeking new ways to embody this in our daily lives. We have put aside one week each month from November to March to ground this exploration.
Simultaneously we have begun a series of co-ordinated departmental restructurings, looking at the extent we want to use sociocracy within the organisation. We are re-examining the work of the Findhorn College, New Findhorn Directions, our trading arm, the Universal Hall company and our fundraising area. We are creating a comprehensive longterm plan to fund asset management and development and have introduced practical ways to bring young people to the community and to support them staying if that is appropriate. We also have a dedicated New Story Follow-on Group to consciously build relationships of collaboration with like-minded centres, groups and individuals. The group aims to highlight the current new story nature of our programmes, develop further new story content for future Foundation initiatives and to support the strengthening of the New Story global movement through partnership, social media and the New Story Hub website. We are also using the best of the footage from the summit and associated interviews to create a film which will excite, inform and promote the idea of living the new story.
One specific example of a new story in the community is that the summit brought such a wonderful influx of youthful people and intergenerational richness that a community member was inspired to apply to a local funding body for money to support Mind the Gap, an initiative to consciously bring together the ‘youngers’ and ‘olders’ in the community. The funding allows 16 events over 12 months and there has already been joint dinners, film watching and creative afternoons.
The Findhorn Foundation and Community is a living demonstration of the integration of spiritual principles into everyday life and, as a centre of service, we continue to work to create new models for individuals and communities that seek to embody inspired forms of ecology, economy, culture and spirituality.
We are by no means perfect but engaging with and seeking to live a new story for humanity sits at the heart of all that we are and all that we do.
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