“There's so much untapped potential of what people could do to support one another.”

Learnings from the Berlin Microsolidarity Project

The Berlin Microsolidarity Project was a hybrid live/remote programme of workshops and gatherings that introduced Berlin’s community weavers to Microsolidarity in Spring 2023 by Jocelyn Ames, Nicki Endres, Karl Steyaert and Felipe Pereira.

Jocelyn and Nicki shared their unfiltered learnings from designing and running this program in an open session at the Micrsolidarity Winter retreat. I loved the session as it was so practical, candid and action-biased and I wanted to share it with the wider community in an easily readable and lightly edited form.

The origins of the project

Jocelyn  - When I got to Berlin, at first I was like, oh, amazing. And then when the sparkle dust wore off, and it became winter, and life circumstances weren't so great, I felt a bit lost. 

And I realised that the places that I felt most belonging were the ones, where I have actually contributed something back to the place, actually created something, and offered my gift to the place where I lived. 

I went to meet Nicky, because he ran a microsolidarity workshop at the Imago Space , a co-working space which he founded. He showed this slide of his vision, which was a hosting crew, surrounded by six hosts and six crews, which is like this beautiful hexagonal beehive model. It just clicked immediately, and we had like one meeting over lunch and I thought this was a nice way for me to feel more belonging in the city

Nicki - The initial idea or need arose when I saw all these lovely people in Berlin in these communities. There is, for example, Imago Space, which is the co-working space, the Church of Interbeing, which is a lovely project of creating kind of sacred rituals every Sunday and now it's kind of branching out and it's just such an amazing space. Then, there was the Life Itself hub. There were people from Beehive. And also Löwenherz, a residential community just outside of Berlin.

And so the question was, how can we cross-pollinate these communities even more and get more support for each other? The second question from the start for me was, how can we enable people to do meaningful work together and get also paid for it? 

A common denominator of these groups is they're often in precarious situations. They have lovely talents and ideas, but they're not earning a lot of money. So I thought, how can we bring these people together to get paid for the beautiful project that they're doing anyway?

It was by invitation only, and we wanted people that we already trusted. So we all invited a couple of people. Growing at the Speed of Trust. If you already have a lot of trust with these people, that growth might be also a bit easier.

Jocelyn - It felt like a beta test version: just invite our friends who would give us good feedback. I think one of the most difficult things has been articulating what this is and getting people to understand it. New people arrive being like, I didn't know exactly what this would be, but by the end of the first in-person session it feels really good. Yeah, and I just trusted you and Nikki that it would be something interesting. We got around 25-28 people.

The format

Nicki - The format was quite straightforward. We had one meeting at the beginning of Saturday where we had six hours, I think, all together in the Imago Space, where we did lots of introductions and dyads. 

Jocelyn - The first session was really like an introduction to the scales of microsolidarity and giving people an embodied experience of what it feels like in different group sizes. 

Nicki - Then we had four calls, and each one went into a different area. We had a case clinic, then a session on NVC focused on surfacing needs and speaking about needs. There was another one on decision-making. The last one was on feedback, with each person getting into the hot seat and receiving appreciative and supportive generative feedback. 

We were basically trying to think of what are the minimum useful skills for people to be able to collaborate well together, so being able to communicate from a place of needs, and separating the needs and strategy. How do you make decisions together? How do you give each other good feedback? And giving people a template, one template, the case clinic, to really have a sense of what it means to give mutual aid and deep peer support and see how can we mean more to each other.

There's so much untapped potential of what people could do to support one another. And everyone's trying to figure it out by themselves. And we were trying to give the sense of like, ah, we can actually have a lot of collective wisdom.

Nicki - There was the process of crewing, like finding your crew. For example, Löwenherz, the living house crew from this community outside of Berlin, they wanted to be together to work on their own kind of stuff. But others were just like, mixing and matching. And so it was not necessary that you come with a crew you already knew.

Jocelyn - There was some intentionality too, in that the crews could form around certain clusters of interests.

Nicki - There was one more ingredient we wanted to have - optional live meetings. So every Monday we had a hangout where we just had the space, made it comfortable and then people came. It was kind of an unfacilitated space and we wanted to see what emerges without a lot of input. 

So we just got people together, hey, we do a circle. How are you feeling? And what would you like to happen today? And, of course, then you have to figure out - wow, there are many ideas in the room and every session something different emerged, which was quite nice. 

And there was one also where there was a bit of tension and that was to me the best session and it was also a bit risky, you know, having this kind of semi-facilitated and facilitated uncertainty. But it was amazing that many people showed up. We didn't even know how many people would be there. But it seemed to have been a really important component for people, to be live together and cuddle-puddle and you know, like, help each other on their problems.

Jocelyn - Because they were otherwise just in their pod groups during those online sessions. They were meeting in person or hybrid. But then there were people who were like, I wanted to join because I want to meet other people in the city. That's why they wanted to come to the hangouts where everyone was there. 

I think one of my favourites was actually when Sarah said, I'm curious how everyone's been experiencing the sessions so far, and there'd been some like dissatisfactions or confusions. It was just great because everybody got to surface. We got loads of good feedback in that session of just like how's everyone experiencing it.

Nicki - And that surfaced out of the need of the group, so it was not planned.  The Löwenherz community had a lot of issues in their community, and they just brought it up and then everybody kind of chimed in and asked generative questions, and it was really an amazing session as well.

Jocelyn - And that created quite a pivotal shift in their whole community field, that they realised that they hadn't given space to grief. 

And then they went back and had a grief circle, and apparently loads of stuff came out, and also a lot of healings. It's just really amazing to see how they're just, oh, we need people from outside of our community to just reflect back what they're sensing happening.

Rich - Can I just double click on that?  That's kind of the reason for the macrosolidarity network. There are some kinds of challenges that a community will encounter, where the resources to solve the problem are not available inside the group, and they need to go outside.

Having the shared language and a sense of companionship and like extended family, with another community that's not directly involved in your stuff, but understands what you're trying to do is like a life-saving measure. 

And so it's kind of like when you hit that moment, that could be like a terminal risk, knowing that there's another sibling community to turn to like that. To me, that's what stops these communities from just fizzling out but actually helps them go in on the anti-fragile intentionality.

Nicki - After these four weeks of calls and hangouts, we had a final Saturday session. It was also six hours. That was like closing. We did a big retrospective, which we still haven't properly digested.

And there was also a time for surfacing projects. What, what could grow out of this? What are you interested in? What what are you longing for? 

Jocelyn -  One piece about the session format that we didn't start off with but got better at and it worked really well: we opened the session, we gave some theory input for about 15 to 20 minutes. And then we gave each crew a run sheet and there was a facilitator for each group, who would be the timekeeper and make sure that everyone understood the instructions and would read out the instructions. So the crews just would go off on their own and go through the run sheet and practice this hosting thing of doing it by themselves. And then we come back and harvest a little bit together as a whole group.

Nicki - Part of the reasoning was to get them into facilitation mode and having a closed container in their crew. And the other part was that it turned out pretty annoying in the first session, the going back and forth and back and forth. And some people are not back so you lose coherence and time, so we were just like - we just give it over to them. They go on and then for the last 20 minutes, they come back - and it worked really well.

The learnings

Nicki - So the the creation process, I would say, was quite labour intensive, because we had to get on the same page and had different kinds of ideas and practices that we really like. But the microsolidarity formed the basis.

Rich -  To me, an important part of the micro solidarity approach is the sampling from many different toolkits. If you don't like NVC, fine, you can still have a good time. You know, if you don't like IFS, you don't like Theory U or Liberating Structures. We're just sampling from lots of places, and it's like a front door.

And the second thing was the permission to use the name. And I think it was just that Karl and Jocelyn had co-hosted the first big retreat in Europe. And so we have close collaboration there and really had a sense of like, common understanding. And I was notified that you were doing - and it wasn't like you asked for permission. But given enough reciprocal communication, it's okay. I feel like we had enough shared context that there was no need for permission. 

Whereas if it was someone that was less well known to me or us, or the so-called student group hasn't quite been defined yet. There, probably, a little bit more explicit permission would be good or maybe there's a bit more hand-holding or oversight or something.

Jocelyn - I think there's something like being really clear what the intention was. For me, it was like cross-pollinating groups. In Berlin there is a lot of struggle with people doing too many things all the time.

I was wary of not creating pressure so that people have to come up with yet another project or something more they have to do. But the project could be like, I need to create a stronger emotional support network for myself.

I didn't want to create expectations over what was possible in that time because it's half a half training and it's half space. 

It's a training that we were teaching skills for collaboration. This is also a space for people to just get in touch with the questions, what are my needs? And having time to reflect on questions like, what is the support that would help me in my life right now? What are the crunchy points? What is the space to just let the connections happen as they wanted to - which is where the Monday Hangouts are really important for me, like having space that's not like a funnel, where you start here and you end up there.

It's more like this is a space for you to explore something and make sense. I want to call it experiential space. Experiential space for discovering your deeper needs and longings and desires, and how to have a sense of others can support me with taking the next step. 

Nicki - So for me, the main intention was for people to come in, to be able to collaborate on beautiful things that they have in their hearts. 

And that was also part of why we did exactly the practices that we did. What's the minimum viable tool kit for collaboration? But it was also, of course, the ground of belonging. So it was kind of two goals. And I agree that in the end, I think it was not clear you know, what it was for…

Jocelyn - It wasn't unified. Some people found a best friend, and some people solved their community problem, and some people just had a new idea.

Nicki  - You said before about beta testing, it's exactly that. You know, like we just threw in a bunch of stuff and then see what happened, and a lot of stuff happened, and a lot of learnings happened.