Putting Together the Pieces of Systemic Change

She describes a pandemic Zoom call with a publishing friend. She told him her three book ideas were connected by human flourishing. She had never spoken those words before. He told her that was the book. She asked how to write it. He said to ask human flourishing what it wanted to say. She typed that question into a document every day for five months until she had 35,000 words. On day three, she knew if she was to have anything to say about flourishing, then she had to practice her own flourishing. Six months in she found the academic field, rich and alive, and used every measure it had. None told her what to do next or how to grow her flourishing.

So she and her partner David Fulton built The Practical Flourishing Assessment (TPFA) for themselves. It looks at eighteen areas of life and helps the respondent determine what actions to make next. They used it for a year. Friends wanted to try it, then they led public workshops, then a workshop for NYPD, then a presentation to the US Army and Navy. The Army said the tool looked like it would add resilience, but wanted to see data. They ran a research study and NYU Stern's Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing wrote a third-party, independent evaluation white paper. Her slide quotes the evaluation: TPFA produces measurable shifts in how participants understand and engage with their own lives. The most significant changes are in internal locus of control, resilience after failure, and confidence in achieving goals. Her practical definition has three parts: most of the areas of your life are working sufficiently for you; you have developed healthy skills for resilience to navigate adversity; and you practice growing and being your best each day.

Under the care of the Lenape, she says, abundance came from deep reciprocity with nature. She asks two questions: how do we invite living systems back, and how do we heal from generational trauma disguised as progress. Her example of regeneration already underway is Harlem Grown. It runs fourteen urban farms across fifteen city blocks. By her count it supported 30,000 families in 2025 and distributed more than 213,000 pounds of fresh food. She asks the room to imagine scaling food sovereignty across the five boroughs.

Care Wildly NYC looks past parks to 5,000 acres of vacant lots. It also looks to the streets, sidewalks and bus stops that run 14.5 degrees hotter without shade. Native plants turn streets into edible sanctuaries for wildlife and neighbors. She says it is already happening: bench gardens in the Meatpacking District, kale, three sisters and pumpkins growing at Astor Place. Transportable self-watering planters test for street safety, heat and flooding. One four-by-eight planter holds more than 400 gallons of water. The project prioritizes neighborhoods that lack parks and welcomes social services, to reverse the historical burden of environmental injustice. One in four of the city's children faces food insecurity. She closes with a question: what if you are where everything begins?

The planter on her slides is a four-by-eight wicking bed with a backed bench. The talk does not get to it. It is built locally from recycled and regenerative materials. The soil is supplemented with compost from the Department of Sanitation. It holds about 410 gallons of harvested rainwater, which reaches the roots through capillary action. The planting list is native and edible: serviceberry, elderberry, pawpaw, American persimmon, blueberry, beach plum, mint, sage, echinacea, wild bergamot, strawberries. The strategy map overlays park access, social services and shelter beds to pick the first neighborhoods. A food insecurity map shows one in six New Yorkers affected. The funding stack runs from two to five million dollars for five neighborhoods. A borough takes ten to twenty-five million. A city-wide network takes fifty to a hundred million. The split is forty percent parks and public space, thirty climate mitigation, fifteen health and wellbeing, fifteen community stewards.

She asks the room: have you felt righteous about your issue, wanted to blame someone and spiraled? If you have not melted down about the state of the planet, she says, she is more concerned. The meltdown is welcome. It means a heartbeat. How that energy gets channeled is the biggest predictor of what gets created. It predicts whether people unite, and how you feel on the pillow at night. No matter how pure the intention, presence is what changes a room. She leads six collective breaths, the last exhale with sound. The most brilliant idea on the planet, delivered without presence, produces more drama, she says.

She reads a line from her friend Jordan Dann, a psychoanalyst. To turn toward, to move inward rather than past or attack what is outside, to let outrage become consciousness, consciousness become relationship, and relationship become conscious action. The middle clause is the one she wants held. Rage is the mother bear's primal no, a signal that something is not of service. She asks who in the room holds anger, then who holds fear for the planet or the city. She asks them to stay with the sensation for a few out-breaths without letting it take over. Fear only tells us what matters. A plan made in partnership with it is a different plan.

Three years ago, she says, she was leading sustainability and innovation at a Fortune 500 company. She was trying to change the system from within. She was burnt out and frustrated by incremental change that never became systemic. A mentor sent her on a Buddhist retreat. The monastics of Plum Village teach that the way out is in. She goes further: the only way out is in, because you cannot change the world without changing yourself first. She also learned she needed a tribe, meaning the people who share your grief. Grief is the other side of love. Six months later, green card in hand, she left the corporate job.

Myzelio works on both sides: helping organizations inside the system move toward regeneration, and helping others birth new systems. You cannot do either, she says, without creating a new system yourselves. So the company finds its own rules and values as it goes. The principle is that clarity comes from action, not before it. The aim is to be a fractal of the future in the present. Nothing happens in the future that is not already happening now. Inside, it is a space for talented people to dream, unlearn a colonized mind, heal and grow. Then they can receive their gifts and put them in service of life. They do it in an embodied way, as brotherhood and sisterhood.

Emergency preparedness talks about federal agencies and individual preppers. It skips the middle layer, the neighbors who are in fact first responders. Connected communities fare better in a catastrophe because they know how to look after each other. People with strong social relationships live happier, healthier and longer. She builds resilience in three nested layers. Institutional systems set the frameworks. Interdependence connects people with one another and the more-than-human world. Embodied capacity keeps people grounded under stress. The institutional layer is her day job: policy, climate action plans, clean energy, participatory budgeting, flood resilience. Tonight she talks about the other two.

Interdependence is built through exchange. Mutual aid is one form. Another is a little free pantry she just had built for a friend, so people can give and receive anonymously. Another is Buy Nothing groups, which she calls the only reason to be on Facebook. The exchanges circulate goods and build trust and familiarity. That is how she met the beekeepers who mind her hives when she travels. It is how she met the neighbor with a spare snowboard who now takes her kids. Neighborhoods meet to map strengths and vulnerabilities and set up communication channels. Stewardship days put people shoulder to shoulder in the forests, wetlands and watersheds that sustain them.

Her gamification started with a zombie game: people practice survival skills and pack go-bags to the sound of screaming laughter. It worked so well that it became a month-long Earth Month scavenger hunt across six municipalities. Hundreds of teams completed thousands of missions. She says it created a subculture of stewardship across the rivertowns. Points and prizes got people doing everything environmental groups have ever asked. They composted, showed up to local governance and donated instead of dumping. They learned local ecology, visited refill stores, took transit and planted trees. Players still gush about how much they learned to love the region.

Inspirational talks give shared language and can leave people more overwhelmed than empowered. So her gatherings are built around participation and embodied experience: people say what weighs on them, then sing and move together. The most popular offering is an ecstatic dance class. Participants say they feel at home in their bodies and have found a community where they belong. Flow states give reprieve from anxious thought and, with practice, restore agency. Deep listening does the most. People speak without interruption until a collective understanding emerges. It eases isolation, restores dignity and calms the nervous system. It deepens the capacity to co-regulate and act for one another. She wants communities that are capable, connected, embodied, accountable and alive, stitched together into a movement that could bring about the great turning.

LIFT uses ten principles for moving from the extractive economy to the next one. She says two are the most urgent as AI arrives: sharing ownership and democratizing governance. Whatever AI promises, if it enters existing ownership and governance structures it will worsen the inequality and power those structures already hold. LIFT's work is equipping institutions with the mechanisms to embody shared ownership and shared governance instead.

Individual ownership has become the main way people in the United States meet the need for housing. Her clean-slate alternative is a client, the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative. It is owned by its residents, its workers, its investors and community members. The investors get no outsized share or say. The goal is to decentralize power and resources. Cost of living goes down month after month from the structure alone. Replicate it across cities, landscape firms, corporations and construction companies, she says. Then imagine practicing personal growth inside those institutions. Conflict with coworkers teaches people how to go home and do it again in co-housing. That undoes the polarization that isolates us.

His first slide sets the gap. Two trillion dollars went into climate solutions worldwide in 2024, a record. The need is 7.8 trillion every year from now through 2030. Philanthropy gave twelve to eighteen billion. Six oil majors will clear about 147 billion in profit this year. Capital follows returns, and the returns still favor extraction. He does not feel we are moving fast enough to avoid the worst of it. He thinks many people feel the same.

What gives him hope is a pattern from the last five years. Hedge funds shorting GameStop lost twenty billion dollars in January 2021. He doubts retail investors would have piled in without the wish to say something to Wall Street. ConstitutionDAO raised 47 million in a week from about 17,000 people. Spirit Airlines went bankrupt this May. A TikToker's Spirit 2.0 proposal drew 337 million dollars in pledges in one week from 370,000 people. He borrows a term for the moment, hyper-politicization: over-polarized and under-institutionalized, people furious with few levers to pull. All three scattered because no standing vehicle existed to hold them. And the capital is already ours, he says. There are 51 trillion dollars in US retirement accounts and pension funds. That is about a third of all publicly traded American stock.

The model on his slide has four steps. Funds take positions against extractive industries, one sector or one fight at a time. Each fund is controlled by a trust or another mission-locked owner, not a firm maximizing its partners' profit. The manager's cut and the profits that would normally go to a firm pay for the campaigns that beat the extractive players. Wins grow the funds, pay for bigger levers, and seed the next fund and the next fight. The aim is a model many funds can run, rather than one fund. Collective Capital Lab is the incubator that spins out the campaigns and the structures to hold them. It works three problems. The first is mobilization: a research sprint on whether communities could bid for a WNBA team when the league expands in 2030. The lab also works on moving a well-loved publication from private ownership to community stewardship, and on capitalizing a monumental public artwork. The second is the rules. That means securities, governance and ownership research. It means corporate campaign research that identifies targets and catalysts. It means templates cleared in advance so the next group does not start from zero. The third is proof of concept. One piece is a krill fund built alongside an active campaign. Another is a pilot on the regulation around a prominent tech company. The last is the public activist investment trust itself: short the worst actors, long the alternatives, the manager's cut funding campaigns. Every lawyer says it will be sued immediately, and he says it probably will. The first pilot worked and was legal.

Leave a patch of bare soil, he says, and rain will make pockets of moisture. The moisture draws microorganisms and mycelium. They germinate seeds. The seeds become plants, then insects, herbivores, carnivores. Nobody designs it. When the Klamath dams came out, salmon that had never swum that river found their way upstream within days. Left alone, nature reaches high complexity and produces abundance the other beings in the ecosystem can use, including us. He asks why an economy cannot do the same. His one view: if the water has nowhere to land it erodes and slides off. Money is the rain. The extractive economy is money in and straight out. Regenerative finance is the divot in the soil that holds capital long enough for a seed to grow into something that benefits other beings.

It is still easier to extract, he says, because the soil is not yet fully denuded. It takes enormous social, intellectual and emotional capital to coordinate human beings and get over egos. And people doing the work have to be paid before it earns anything. His ask of project leaders: a good idea is not enough, money is a tool, and the vilification of it has to go. His ask of funders: think past the quarterly cycle, count multiple forms of return, take risks. His ask of everyone: accept that nobody has this figured out and it is a series of experiments. His doubts, which he prefers to polish, are not about whether regeneration is possible. It happens in the sidewalk cracks of New York. They are about our capacity to coordinate consistently and with compassion, and our capacity to make this fun rather than a niche subject.

Art has changed the course of history by changing what people feel, see, question and imagine, she says, not only through iconic works. The systems producing these crises are made and maintained through institutions, relationships, behaviors, stories, technology and ideas about what matters. They are not abstract machines outside us. What colonization conditioned us to desire, extract and ignore is shaping the living world. She quotes Audre Lorde, poetry is the way we give name to the nameless so that it can be thought. Art makes invisible systems visible. Design science lets us intervene in the patterns that shape us. Ontological design reminds us that what we shape shapes us back. Culture is where people begin practicing another world before it exists.

It is not a destination or a perfect state, she says, from her own loving exhaustion. It asks what is emerging, what must be protected, what needs rest, what is ready for compost and what wants to be born. It requires interrupting familiar, profitable, comfortable patterns that are not life-giving. She co-founded Design Science Studio with Faith Flanagan. It is a community of practice and incubator for the creative community. By her count it has 460 creatives across fifty countries since 2020, and more than 350 projects born. Its fourth annual Interdependence Summit ran this July at the former Solar Living Center in Hopland. That was the first place solar was ever sold. The summit built an earth altar, shared organic food and music, prototyped projects and wrote a collective declaration of interdependence. She calls it a protopian practice ground, not a performance of perfection.

The first time he was invited to a polycrisis event, four or five years ago, he never made it. His mother-in-law got pneumonia and he was the one able to sit round-the-clock watch. At two in the morning he was cursing his fate. He was stuck with a body in a coma instead of intervening with the activists in San Francisco. Then he noticed the gap between her exhale and the next inhale growing, her body trying to stop and coming back. Something made him put his hand on her wrist. He felt her consciousness use his nervous system to make the passage and let go. That, he says, is what death doulas do: they lend a nervous system to metabolize a passage. The night he had cursed was the most difference he had ever made. It turned his work from agent of change to agent of care. He is a death doula for this thing and, he hopes, a birth doula for the next.

What is dying, he says, is not the Earth, and not even our civilization. It is an anti-civilization built on conquest, domination and the ends justifying the means. We have to let it die. The trick is letting it die as painlessly and with as little damage as possible. Local resilience is one way to do that. Knowing your neighbors is another. Learning the names of the ten bodies closest to yours when you sleep is another. Those are the same things everyone on the stage has described as the way to grow the regenerative thing. So whether you have given up on this or are fighting for it, he says, what you do is the same.

The Unetaneh Tokef is the great prayer of the High Holidays. It says that on Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who will live and who will die. You worry over it, and the prayer says the fate is sealed. Then it says: but. Through repentance, prayer and charity, the severity of the decree is lessened. Whatever is baked into collapse right now, he offers the same clause. Through compassion, charity and good works we can lessen the severity of the decree, and metabolize whatever this is together.