How We Work

“Your life's work is an intergenerational project, an ancestral conspiracy, a continuous meeting of bodies, a queering of temporality. Your life is not yours to resolve, yours to complete, or yours to contain. It is necessarily the life of the many…”

Bayo Akomolafe

The initial phase of Arising Quo has been rooted in a spirit of enquiry. We’ve been exploring questions of why to move wealth at this time, how to move it and where to move it to - wanting to place equal emphasis on each of these.

The funded “explorations” are a reflection of this - each one is a way for us to learn and gather insights to share with our partners, with a wider field of interest, and to inform what we do next, and how we do it.

They represent areas where we saw gaps and opportunities that we could orient people towards or the potential for new practice to be tested.

For funding the explorations, we created our own principles for decision-making within the team, shared below. These served us for the first phase of Arising Quo decision-making in 2023.

As a team, we work non-hierarchically and horizontally, dividing the work so that each member of the team is leading on something depending on their experience, interest and capacity.

We tried to create a polyculture of perspectives through inviting an Accountability Circle to join us for the first year of the work (2023). We are currently considering what kind of accountability and from whom will be needed in the next phase of the work, starting in 2025.

As a small team we’ve needed to evolve and adapt in response to what the work needs, as well as experiment with our own process and practices. It matters to us that we are:

  • Exploring different practices as a team

  • Learning through practice

  • Practicing sense-making - which we do monthly as a team - to become more contextually sensitive in order to become more contextually relevant to present and future states

  • Being mindful of our capacity to experiment alongside moving work forwards

  • Having integrity to the times we are in

  • Enacting power awareness throughout our practice and in our different contexts

  • Acting through a lens of plurality -  holding multiple, simultaneous realities and seemingly conflicting ideas and with great care.

Through these explorations we are doing unlearning, experimentation, re-learning, integration, and unlearning all over again. We are paying attention to what is emerging - the patterns, the insights, the intuitions, and we are trying to make sense of them to inform what we do next. In January 2025 Arising Quo will have come to the end of this learning cycle, and the initial grants we made will be ‘done.’ The work to do then will be to ask the question of what we should do next.

We’ve been working quietly and with focus throughout this initial phase of Arising Quo - trying to live our enquiry questions and stay close to them. For this reason we haven’t been open to funding requests and won’t be throughout 2024.