Core Team Coordinator

Kat was educated in Environmental Science and dedicated the first part of her career to environmental restoration and sustainability initiatives. Recognising the limitations of science in the current system, she transitioned to facilitation of shared decision-making around the natural environment, motivated by the building of social capital realised through these processes. Away from DAF, Kat runs a small community interest company that delivers projects in ecological restoration and the reconnection of communities with their natural environment. After joining DAF early in 2019, she quickly became an active volunteer and is involved in many DAF circles and groups. In Kat’s own words, she ‘came home’ when she found the Deep Adaption Forum. Having experienced the gift of this international community, Kat is deeply committed to supporting its development and evolution to ensure it remains available and relevant for others seeking a soft place to land as they wake up to our predicament. 

Principal responsibilities:

The principal aims of these activities are to ensure the smooth operation of the Deep Adaptation Forum through effective coordination and support for all Core Team, and volunteer activities.  The Coordinator is also responsible for budget forecasting and cash flow management with support from other Core Team Members and the Holding Group.

• Providing oversight and support for the work of each Core Team member, including enabling helpful team communication and collaboration where necessary and convening monthly Core Team meetings
• Understanding each of the activity areas of DAF to ensure effective, integrated working amongst Core Team members
• ‘Horizon scanning’ to identify opportunities and challenges for DAF, prioritising important issues and enabling Core Team strategic and operational decision making, including coordination of the Strategy Options process and the Core Team response to it
• Evolving DAF governance in collaboration with the Core Team and Holding Group as DAF grows
• Developing new initiatives, including deciding and allocating Core Team responsibilities and resources to ensure such initiatives have Core Team guidance and/or support.
• Hiring any new freelancers or service providers, or changing existing team hours or responsibilities, in consultation with the Core Team and Holding Group
• Ensuring volunteer onboarding, support, and recognition is happening
• Liaison with DAF fiscal sponsor (currently the Schumacher Institute) and any individual donors about activities and invoices
• Financial planning and management, ensuring the DAF is financially sustainable in collaboration with the DAF fundraising coordinator and liaising with key donors where necessary
• Liaison with the Holding Group and ensuring decision making authorities are respected and processes connecting HG and core team work smoothly, incl. regular bimonthly communication with 2 Holding Group representatives
• Keeping the core focus of DA and DAF in mind in all communications and decisions.
• Liaising with external organisations and individuals on behalf of DAF

Community Weaver

Dorian curates the DAF Professions’ Network on a day-to-day basis; liaises with Interest Group and Task Group leaders, including managing the process of launching either; carries out quickly-applicable research on how to design better collaborative work processes; and oversees capacity-building activities for Task Groups. Through his work and PhD research, Dorian intends to help develop the Deep Adaptation Forum into the foundation of an international mass movement, focusing on peaceful responses to the climate and ecological crises we face – and the collapses that are likely to unfold. Simultaneously, he wants to develop his skills in the field of self-organised group facilitation and contribute to scholarship on the role of mutual and social learning within such processes.

Principal Responsibilities:

The overall aim of these tasks is to help bring together the volunteer-led efforts and initiatives that are emerging throughout Deep Adaptation Forum groups and spaces, explore synergies and initiate new collaborations, with a special focus on enabling and nurturing a self-organising collaborative ecosystem. This includes paying attention to the technical infrastructure underlying this social network, and how it may evolve to better fulfil its functions.

Areas of Responsibility

• Professions’ Network Curation & Coordination
• Volunteer & Project Coordination
• DAF Internal Communications and Information Dissemination
• Technical stewarding, and
• Research

Professions’ Network Curation & Coordination

• Check membership applications, accept/decline, send rejection message if declined
• Check Welcome thread, welcome new members
• Assist confirmed volunteers in their everyday tasks, including online gatherings organising (sending invitations) and other technical difficulties, supporting their activities.
• Support volunteers in providing guidance to new or aspiring volunteers
• Helping people launch new Task Groups, sign MoUs, and coordinate their activities
• Create new Discussion Groups as required
• Coordinate and help organise monthly PN volunteer meetings
• Coordinate and support production of How-To guides or explanatory pages for the volunteers as needed
• Coordinate the testing of proposed technical solutions formulated within the ‘Evolving the PN’ (or ‘New DAF Space’) discussion group

DAF Project Coordination

• Research on DAF: As part of a PhD research project on online communities, conduct interviews with various participants in DAF (volunteers, non-volunteers, CT members, etc.) and occasionally share results when relevant – as ​ outlined​ in the CT response to the Strategy Options Dialogue.
• Communications: Manage the DAF email settings on the current web host server; manage new DAF emails database on the DAF web host server, while paying extra attention to issues of security and data privacy, in accordance with the DAF Privacy & GDPR statement; and supervise DAF newsletters, including writing and publishing (in collaboration with experienced and trusted volunteers when needed).
• Others: in case need arises in DAF, coordinate other projects with AC/CTC and CT, eg. Strategy Options Dialogue.

Fundraising Coordinator

Tom is a husband and father; a resident of Brooklyn, NYC; equally as happy on his bicycle, especially on temperate days, as at home in bed with a book. He has lived in a few different U.S. states and has had two stints abroad. He once turned down a position in Mali and ended up in Oklahoma instead, but the relationship that caused this rerouting was worth it and continues to this day. He has helped raise funding for half a dozen non-profit organisations, the longest of which was the International Rescue Committee, and issues of migration and borders, politics and human decency, interest and worry him. The start of the school climate strike movement inspired a sense that a far larger contingent of people of all ages cared about how the planet was being treated. Interacting with communities of like-minded activists, especially those pondering internal, interpersonal, and practical adaptations to our predicament, has been a deeply gratifying outcome.

Principal Responsibilities:

Tom’s overarching aim is to seek diverse and ongoing funding streams to support DAF administration and activities through working with a team of volunteers with skills and expertise in the area of fundraising. Mechanisms for securing income may include (but not be limited to): 

• Unsolicited funds from individual participants in the Forum
• Requests to professional philanthropy advisors to connect us with High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) who give grants and might resonate with DAF or who have already mentioned DA
• Use of suitable platforms to leverage our networks to reach people who already know and support DA
• A Financial Gift Hub (in the spirit of a “gift economy”)

The following areas of responsibility can and will change during the course of the work, with major changes needing to be agreed with the CTC first:

• In collaboration with other members of the Core Team, to develop a strategy for maintaining a stable and diverse income stream for the ongoing sustainability of the DAF.  (The strategy should incorporate and build upon the successes of DAF fundraising so far, as well as bringing additional expertise and creativity).
• To convene and coordinate a small team of volunteers from the DAF community, who have experience in a range of different aspects of fundraising, in order to mobilise sufficient diverse income streams to support ongoing DAF activities, and allow for growth of the network.
• To cultivate and maintain positive and transparent relationships with people who have funded or are currently funding DAF by representing CT or ensuring CT is represented in those relationships in a meaningful way
• To support DAF, in collaboration with volunteers, with creating written content that is relevant to DAF fundraising needs (to be shared in the DAF blog)
• To ensure alignment with, and support the evolution of the DAF provisional fundraising and resource mobilisation policy
• To help arrange administrative aspects of the receipt of the funds, in collaboration with the DAF Core Team Coordinator

Facilitation Coordinator

Igor is a Master of cultural studies, has a PhD in social philosophy, is a community trainer, writer and a board member of Russian Ecovillage and Eco-initiative Union (GEN-Russia). During the last years Igor was immersed deeply into ecophilosophy and anticipation of civilizational collapse, as well as the world beyond it. In his first essay around this topic Igor wrote: “People tend to stick to the existing picture of the world and follow social norms to the last, people hope and cling to the habitual. Paradoxically, even in a situation of crisis it turns out that it is easier to be optimistic than to recognize the catastrophe”

For a few years Igor has facilitated events such as “Seeds of action. Post-apocalyptic hopelessness and hope”, “Post-crisis immersion” and the “New story of the Earth” transformative course, which included the Deep Adaptation four questions. Now Igor is joining the DAF team in order to strengthen an international web of people, who are ready to face the reality, to process what comes and to act with courage and compassion.

Principal responsibilities:

The overarching aim of these tasks is to promote and develop the practice of facilitation as it relates to Deep Adaptation; supporting people in enabling and embodying loving responses to our predicament.

DA Facilitators

• With volunteers, enable and maintain a lively and growing community of practice of Deep Adaptation facilitators, centred around the DA Facilitators’ Facebook group
• Coordinate hosting of regular facilitated online spaces for members of the wider DAF ecosystem, that are free to participants, including, but not limited to Deep Listening & Deep Relating
• Support volunteers to develop their own practice, in line with the aims of DAF and the DA Facilitation Principles.
• Ensure gatherings are held in accordance with ‘DA Facilitation Guidelines’
• Collaborate with other relevant practitioners (within and outside DAF) to contribute to the development of communities of practice in line with DA principles and values
• Other activities aiming towards propagation of principles and communities of practices for the facilitation of spaces, online and offline, which support people to engage in more loving conversations about collapse, and create change (inner and outer) for reducing harm in the face of unfolding societal collapse

Communications coordinator

Cat is a Christian, a student of digital theology, and mother of twin 14yearolds. She’s struck by the parallels between Christlike behaviour, and the loving responses to crisis called for by DAF. Based in the Isle of Man, she’s also a writer, campaigner and works/volunteers for NGOs including www.Positive.News and www.catj.org.uk.

Much of her career was in offshore finance; it took longer than it ought for her to wake up to the damage done by unjust tax practices. She’s been an investment manager, regulator, lecturer, and author – and in recent decades, increasingly involved in social and environmental justice.

Cat’s the stereotypical cat-lady, sharing her home with a rising tide of assorted felines and seemingly rarely comes home without an addition to the ‘family’. Often apparently busy but secretly very lazy, her favourite pursuits are pottering in her ‘sharing garden’, where passers-by are invited to help themselves to any produce they need, reading (anything from bus tickets to academic papers, it’s the eye movement that soothes her) and pretending she can’t move to do the housework because to do so would wake a sleeping cat.

Cat is a recovered alcoholic, recovered offshore finance specialist and recovered one-woman consumer boom: these three things are not unrelated, but that’s a longer story….

Cat is responsible for the website, blog, internal bulletins, and a communications strategy for DAF. She’s very approachable.