edgeWork: Roles for reWorlding with Lauren Zitney

As we navigate a world in transition, we need ways to understand how each of us contributes to the collective work of change. Not everyone is a frontline organizer or a public storyteller. Nor does everyone need to be. reWorlding is a communal effort that is made possible through many kinds of labor, seen and unseen, material and relational.

In this session, we will explore Roles for reWorlding, a framework developed within otherWise to help communities name, value, and practice the diverse orientations that make collective change and transformation possible. Instead of centering productivity or conventional leadership, this framework honors the often overlooked capacities that sustain collective life: from knowledge carriers, healers, and pattern-workers, to menders, protectors, builders, and subverters.

Participants will be invited to explore six broad categories – Knowledge & Meaning Stewards, Feelers & Healers, Makers & Tinkerers, Navigators & Pattern Workers, Carers & Coherers, and Disruptors – and more specific roles within them to consider which roles feel resonant in this moment of their lives. This is a way of asking and noticing: Where do my gifts meet the needs of my community? Where am I most alive in the work of reworlding? And where might I be called next?

Guiding questions include:

1. Which reWorlding role(s) feels most aligned with how you currently move through the world and why?
2. Where do you notice yourself being pulled, even if you've never named that capacity as a "role" before?
3. How do our roles shift in relationship with place, community, life stage, or circumstance?
4. What becomes possible when we understand reWorlding as a collaboration among many kinds of work, not a single kind of leadership?