Navigating Collapse. Weaving Resilience. Envisioning Life-Centered Political Economies.
For over a decade, the Synergia Institute has been dedicated to cultivating pathways of systems change, cooperative economic democracy, climate justice, and local resilience. Over the years, our MOOC Towards Cooperative Commonwealth: Transition in a Perilous Century has brought together thousands of change-seekers – weaving together knowledge, practice, and community to respond to the deepening polycrisis with courage, solidarity, and resilience.
After a decade of designing and delivering the MOOC, we at Synergia ask:
Can we cultivate the sensibility and agency to navigate radical uncertainty?
Can we embrace a predicament without solutions—only responses?
Can we shift from problem-solving to repairing relationships with the whole of life?
Amid the Great Unravelling, what priorities might be Life-Affirming?
We believe that this time of Unraveling calls for deep-rootedness – in right relationship to place and community. Rather than turning to technocratic fixes, top-down blueprints, or blind hope in perpetual growth, we believe in forging new pathways of collective sufficiency, solidarity, and bio-cultural regeneration.
Wherever we find ourselves, being in service to life requires a conscious shift:
● From economic growth to resilience
● From competition to cooperation
● From efficiency to sufficiency
● From global markets and capital flows to regional self-reliance
● From centralized power to decentralized, democratic ownership
● From private property rights to an expansion of the commons
● From environmental destruction to ecological restoration
● From self-absorbed individualism to the meaning-embedded web of life
Our Purpose
Synergia exists to educate, animate, and connect people to explore and implement practical pathways toward regenerative, place-based political economies. Through theory, models, and tools, we support communities in building Islands of Coherence—spaces where new forms of culture, economy, and governance emerge, rooted in sufficiency, solidarity, and the commons.
Through co-created learning journeys, we support the creation of Islands of Coherence — grounded spaces where political economies in service to life can take root.
Unfolding: The Islands of Coherence Fellowship
A learning journey for those holding the frontlines of place-based systems change
The Islands of Coherence Fellowship is a co-created offering for those listening deeply to the needs of this time. It is for those already tending to place, community, and possibility with care, discernment, and a steady devotion to what still lives. Set to launch in Fall 2026, the Fellowship is an invitation to pause, to grieve, to make meaning, and to walk with others who carry different the same inquiry: how do we stay in right relationship, amidst the Unraveling?
Across seasons, fellows gather in a rhythm of shared inquiry, co-learning, and grounded experimentation. Together we explore what it means to regenerate our bioregions – ecologically, politically, economically, and relationally. Through each exchange, each prototype, each story offered across distance, we strengthen the mycelial web that might one day hold the weight of a world remade.
