Dear Subscriber First Name,

Today/tomorrow marks the Winter Solstice, or the shortest day of the year. As we look forward to the longer days returning, we’re sharing some updates and gratitude for the first year of our collective!

In this December newsletter we’re sharing:

🍊 Fruit trees: Sharing the story of Falay on the Common Practice podcast

🌱 New shoots: Bringing inner development to COP28

🌰 Sowing seeds: Wintering and hospicing

🌞 Sunshine: Sharing grounding and gratitude for the past year and the new year ahead

No matter what you’re celebrating at this time of year, we send our festive wishes and look forward to seeing you again in 2024 ✨

We see this newsletter as a catalyst for conversations, relationships and collaborations - so we’d love to hear from you! If anything resonates with you, don’t hesitate to drop us an email at collective@falayconsulting.com

Fruit trees: Sharing the story of Falay on the Common Practice podcast

Our founder Zeynep recently joined Owen Kelly on the Common Practice podcast to talk about transitions design and paradigm change.

In the podcast Zeynep tells her personal journey through the design industry, and how the Falay Transition Design Collective came to be, alongside her roles as founder of Design Activists for Regenerative Futures, and as a member of the board of Systems Change Finland.

It’s the perfect way to round off the first year of our collective by sharing our story and intention, and looking forward to more paradigm shifting work to come. Listen to the episode here:

New shoots: Bringing inner development to COP28

Zeynep has also been busy this month attending COP28 in Dubai, as a representative of Neol creative leaders.

This year, as with many of its previous iterations, an air of controversy and imbalance surrounded the event. Presenting an alternative mode of thinking, Zeynep and Neol colleagues Chris Grantham FRSA, Lisa Baird and Fanny Eliaers shared the importance of inner development as a critical element of regenerative transformations in the face of the climate and intersecting crises.

Their "Inner Development Pause" workshop at the summit centred on this, providing a space for building awareness and authenticity, and to understand why we must first and foremost realign our values with transformation. You can read Zeynep's reflections here:

Sowing seeds: Wintering and hospicing

In collaboration with Rosa Rantanen at the University of Helsinki, we have been exploring grief and the hospicing of obsolete systems as a crucial part of sustainability transformation.

Together we have started to develop a participatory workshop format that encourages participants to ask…

“In saying goodbye to old systems and practices that once served us, how can we create new rituals that honor and critique them simultaneously?”

In this workshop, we will facilitate collective imagination to create rituals for hospicing our dying way of life; we look for ways to provide palliative care (palliate=alleviate, reduce suffering) for letting go.

We’re actively looking for places to facilitate this workshop, with those interested in sustainability transitions and those working in drastically changing industries. Get in touch to chat to us about these ideas

Sunshine: A dose of energy, uplift and hope

Each newsletter we want to share something that has given our community some sunshine in the past month - nurturing our hopefulness and balancing the doom and gloom of the world.

With the nights as dark as they get, and the start of winter officially on our doorstep, we’re taking time to look back at the year and find gratitude and grounding. Our wonderful members Erika and Saara-Maria took us through a contemplative practice to connect and recharge through creative practices, and remind that all life has purpose - and that all life urged to live.

You can follow the practice at home, with the recording below:

Let’s build a better future together.