Returning to the Hive: Thoughts from our team retreat
There is something about returning to the hive. In our day-to-day lives, we are busy bees in our different locations, moving around, collecting food for thought to nourish our work at Conducive Space for Peace (CSP). But coming together and sharing our ideas is what moves us forward and allows us to reimagine our work, restrategise our approaches, and recommit to our values. You may have stumbled upon our conceptual thinking around the beehive (if not, check it out here) – just like we apply it to think about systems change, we use it as a practice within our organisation. For five days, Emmaus Conference Centre in Haslev, Denmark, was our little beehive.
Emmaus is, among other things, an art-gallery, and we were lucky enough to convene in one of its exhibition-rooms. Talk about a conducive space for inspiration and learning! We replaced the walls of the art gallery with our own kind of “art”: post-its and posters for our radical change aspirations peppered with thoughts, ideas and visions produced when seven minds come together to reimagine what sustainable peace could look like – and how we get there. The discussions left us with many new ideas and open-ended questions:
How can we contribute to new forms of global collaboration that is built upon new spaces and infrastructures? What does it mean to stand in solidarity with social movements and translocal networks? What does centering equity look like? How do we mindfully expand the space for - and contribute to - the transformation championed by others?
We have spent hours in the hive addressing these questions – and we have let some of them keep their question mark. But one thing is clear: paying lip-service undermines the broader agenda of transforming the system. We need to walk the talk.
One of the retreat-activities involved taking a walk in the Forest Tower nearby. The Forest Tower is a 45-meter-high observation tower with a spiral-shaped board walk leading up to the viewpoint. When we walked up the Forest Tower, it was almost symbolic of the direction CSP is heading: reversing the “downward spiral” in global peacebuilding, instead going upwards, finding new pathways to grasp the bigger, bolder picture from the top.
Returning to the hive. How do we turn our vision into a reality? Through reorienting our focus from local leadership to fundamentally rethinking global collaboration for peace. Identifying alternative ways and spaces for this global collaboration. Working alongside change agents, identifying ways in which the current system can be a steppingstone for a new system. We have received valuable inputs to our journey from our board members when they joined our hive the board seminar. We have recently expanded our team with a student assistant and an intern to help us in our journey. We cannot wait to share more of our work and ideas with you! The hive is thriving, and as CSP leaves Emmaus to seek new pastures of inspiration, it is with a renewed sense of purpose.