Brief description of your organization and your work:

Holon Perspectives is working towards strengthening the systems thinking ecosystem in India. We envision a world, where stories of development are based upon a holistic paradigm, with people aspiring to do the right things. Our mission is to develop systems thinking mindset in 21st-century organisational leaders and sustainable development practitioners, in order to equip them with skills to solve wicked problems. We engage with a variety of stakeholders through three core areas: Research & Consultancy, Innovation Lab and Training.

We are sector agnostic and have been working on projects which help organisations look at the systemic aspects of problems they are trying to solve. We help them find the leveraging points. Our projects have been in the area of agriculture value chains, renewable energy, livelihoods, etc. Our interests lie in applying systems thinking practices to social entrepreneurship and The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Brief description of your luminary goals and vision:

Many social entrepreneurs especially in the Global South lack exposure to concepts, approaches and thought partnership to aim for systemic impact. We aim to facilitate a series of workshops for social entrepreneurs to enable them craft their systems change story. Social entrepreneurs will benefit in terms of:

• Gaining access and awareness to systems change resources and tools

• Identifying opportunities for networking with ecosystem partners

• Gaining competence to identify root causes of the problem space

• Becoming aware of other entrepreneurs’ work related success stories

Brief description of your organization and your work:

I have been engaged in work which aims to regenerate our planet and our societies for the best part of 15 years, from the jungles of Borneo to the hills of Aotearoa NZ, and lately I reside along the banks of the Birrarung Yarra River on Wurundjeri Country, in Australia. My interests are wide ranging, with influences ranging from Social Labs, Systemic Design, Adaptive Strategy, Communications, Facilitation & Hosting. I see myself as a complexity practitioner, a collaborator and a catalyst.

https://samrye.xyz

Brief description of your luminary goals and vision:

I'm interested in the enquiry "How do effectively communicate systems change initiatives in order to make them accessible, fundable and more impactful?"

Through Luminary I want to explore a few threads:

• who else is joining the Luminary cohort, and what's possible if we exchange ideas and collaborate on mutual goals? What is greatest opportunity for embracing the diversity of the cohort, and contributing to one another's work and understanding of the space we're working in?

• how does communication vary between different contexts, backgrounds and geographies?

• what is the role of mixed mediums in communicating systems change initiatives? (e.g. role of video, illustration, etc)

• what is the role of metaphor, analogy, narrative and story in both communicating systems change, as well as influencing change itself?

• what methods of communication best serve different audiences and goals? (such as accessibility, funding and project impact)

Brief description of your organization and your work:

We believe we can not only perceive but we are part of the deepest expressions of the essence of the territories we belong to. Our inspiration for this work is to listen to the diverse nature of the expressions of our -territorial beings- through the awareness level of several active communities.

Brief description of your luminary goals and vision:

Through our participation we want to co facilitate spaces where we can hear/perceive/touch/smell/realize the different territories beings and how they relate with the communities that belong to them. To explore how they hold and recreate life at different scales. We will do these by applying various social technologies ranging from system maps to narratives creation and story telling, inviting in all our processes the possibility to listen to the expressions & become part of a new realization of our territorial beings.

Our vision is to share and communicate what we discover, at different levels, and how this experience makes sense or relates to other experiences across the globe. We want to explore how, by sharing our experience with other knowledges and wisdoms from different places and schools of thought, we as a whole can interpret if there is a meta language that its manifesting throughout multiple initiatives across the territories and our planet.

Our goals is to have this exploration in three different active communities in the territories we belong to, during 2022.

Brief description of your organization and your work:

Berivan is the co-founder of Impact Hub Ankara which is a social enterprise and one of the newest members of the global Impact Hub Network. Prior to Impact Hub, Berivan was the manager of the Center for Social Innovation at TED University where she led the work on programme development, partnership building and policy dialogue. Berivan has a cross-sector background primarily focused on social entrepreneurship and social development related with youth, accessibility, gender, and human security areas. She has extensive experience in research and training. She devotedly volunteers in many information-activism projects.

İstem is currently pursuing a graduate degree in the Strategic Design and Management Department at Parsons School of Design. Until very recently, she has been the co-director of Ashoka Turkey where she contributed to Europe-level and global strategies empowering social entrepreneurship and changemaking ecosystems towards system changing solutions. In her previous role with Ashoka as the Director of Social Entrepreneurship Programs, she designed and implemented strategies to build an impactful social entrepreneurship ecosystem in Turkey and a community of high impact Ashoka Fellows. Before joining Ashoka, she was the Volunteer Coordinator at Greenpeace Mediterranean where she re-designed the volunteer engagement structure opening opportunities to a wider audience.

Zeynep has been building capacity over the period of ten years for the development of civil society and philanthropy in Turkey, working in the fields of infrastructure to create and implement innovative models. Zeynep created the first comprehensive research study on civil society in Turkey, advocacy activities for a more favorable legal and property infrastructure, donors, foundations (community foundations), social enterprise and social finance; She has experience with innovative approaches to the above, and has written many publications and articles to this end. Before joining Ashoka Turkey, Zeynep was with the Third Sector Foundation (European Foundation) serving as Program Director. She also participates actively in the women's movement. She was a member of KA-DER, where she was on the board between 2009-2012, Mor Çatı and KAMER volunteer. Zeynep is a member of the Board of the Support Foundation for Civil Society. She received her BA in Political Science and Cultural Studies from McGill University in Canada, and she is still continuing her thesis study in the Human Rights Law program of Bilgi University.

Berivan, İstem and Zeynep have been actively collaborating for the last 5 years to build an inclusive social innovation and social entrepreneurship ecosystem in Turkey.

Brief description of your luminary goals and vision:

Our previous work in the social innovation ecosystem in Turkey brought us together with many women that share the need to spare time for slowing down, reflecting and learning, unlearning, relearning together as they find understanding and ‘solace’ in each other. We assume that if these women have an intentional space to be together and to exchange strategies and methods, then they can uncover more strength and resilience to push or pull for social change. Our participation in the Luminary Cohort will facilitate building and sustaining a community of learning and practice among women systems change practitioners in Turkey. We imagine a social change ecosystem where actors have safe spaces to discuss and share their failures and learnings while being nurtured by their peers. We imagine a safe, participatory, diverse learning environment nurtured by the ideas and experiences of its participants and peers around the world. We also imagine this learning community to be a space for celebrating change at all levels.

Brief description of your organization and your work:

Roberto “Tito” Soto-Carrión (he/him/él) is an equity-centered facilitator, strategist, educator, coach, and researcher, living and working at the intersection of anti-racism, systems change, and emergent strategy. He has worked with leaders, organizations, and networks on the front lines of social change, educational equity, anti-racism, and youth power for nearly two decades.

Tito previously held director roles at The Center for Racial Justice in Education and The International Youth Leadership Institute. He is also a previous Restorative Justice Coordinator for Make the Road New York and Youth Development Coordinator with The Committee for Hispanic Children and Families. Most recently, Tito served as an Equity Transformation Specialist with Pacific Education Group, where he provided training, coaching, and consulting services for racial equity leaders around the world.

As a consultant and strategic advisor, Tito supports racial justice advocates to build political analysis, skills, and leadership for dismantling structural racism and oppression. Grounded in relationships, he co-creates pathways for organizational change and actionable opportunities for equity.

Tito has partnered with institutions in a variety of contexts, across industries, including education, film and television, the performing arts, architecture and design, advertising, philanthropy, government, corporations, and nonprofits.

Brief description of your luminary goals and vision:

I am imagining a series of emergent inquiry sessions bringing together a diverse group of racial equity practitioners. This includes facilitators, trainers, educators, researchers, healers, artists, strategists, and storytellers. This group would have spent time working to dismantle racist systems designed to oppress people of color.

Many equity practitioners work independently as consultants, partners, and advisors to schools, universities, non-profits, businesses, government, corporations, communities, and diverse networks. I would like to set intention in these inquiries sessions to ideate around what an embodied system of antiracist equity practitioners could look like. How do we co-create living systems of support that are grounded in relationship-building, interconnectedness, collaboration, healing, shared learning, and ideation?

Holding space for a series of facilitated inquiry sessions, I hope to gather insight and wisdom from this newly forming network to support the ongoing development of an anti-racist practitioners network of systems change thinkers.

Key questions in this project include: :

• How do we co-create living systems of support that are grounded in relationship-building, interconnectedness, collaboration, healing, community accountability, shared learning, sustainability, and ideation?

• What are ways you center liberation your systems change work?

• What does an anti-racist systems change field look and feel like?

• Drawing on emergent strategy and living systems as a guide, how can we apply these frameworks to the formation of anti-racist practitioner networks of care and ideation?

• How can these networks support co-creation (spaces, ways of being, resources, funding models, etc.)to move/challenge/push/transform the dominant status-quo of the systems change field?

• How do we create and sustain a self-regulated network of racial equity practitioners within a system of capitalism?

• How might we leverage a systems change approach to explore spaces beyond the non-profit model for equity and movement work? For collaboration and shared learning? etc.

• Systems exert influence and are impacted by the systems within which they are embedded. As we think about the field of DEI work embedded within various institutions informed by white-supremacist systems, how does this frame the work of racial justice? How are you impacted?