Understory Collective

Growing a community of empathic facilitators to meet the needs of our time

A key way we intend to grow toward our mission is by supporting the development of new facilitators and working with a range of professional facilitators to deliver this work at scale. We call ourselves The Understory Collective.

Grounding Principles

We are a group of empathic facilitators using our unique knowledge and experiences to lead a fair transition. We come together in a community of care to connect, develop, and support one another. Central to our ethos is not just what we’re doing but how we’re doing it.

What

The Understory Collective is a place for access and connection.
Access to facilitation development and fairly paid opportunities. Access to infrastructure, from tech and tools to testing new workshops and governance. Access to mentoring, accountability and best practice.
Connection with aligned changemakers from across the globe. A network to maintain resilience and tackle isolation.

Why

We are co-creating the new system in the old, this is hard work and the current structures are unfair.
We challenge ‘business as usual’ in our workshops, projects and governance. We treat each other, our clients and collaborators with dignity and respect.
Well paid opportunities and support are economic levers that can bring diversity and fairness to this work. We aim to practice transparency with how facilitators are paid and offered opportunities. We lift each other up and practice generosity and abundance.
We will not get it right every time and that’s okay.

Our clients and stakeholders benefit from working with an empathic, professional, experienced, collective ready to deploy projects at scale.
We benefit because in the fair future we are all actively bringing about, we know community is central.

How

We practice collaboration to diminish scarcity, stepping forward with a sense of belonging, shared purpose and mutual benefit.
We take inspiration from nature; our connections make us greater than the sum of our parts.
We practice our work in a way that is fit for these times.

Meet the Understory Collective

These are some of the facilitators we’re working with in different capacities. They come with a variety of experience and perspectives and they all feed in to our supportive network.

This group of excellent humans is by no means exhaustive. We are busy supporting up and coming facilitators and often work with other professional facilitators with different and complementary specialities.

We also work with like-minded organisations doing similar work, including YNotNow, Caristeo, Climate Clarity, SpeakCarbon and Superegg; sometimes we bring them into projects, sometimes it’s the other way round. We champion collaboration over competition, long-term relationships over transactional ones.

Inspiration for the name

We turned to nature for inspiration for the structure of this group, specifically, the mycorrhizal network. This is a network of fungal threads that connect tree roots through the soil. It’s also known as the “Wood Wide Web”. The discovery of this network was made by Suzanne Simard and documented in her book Finding The Mother Tree. The name came from inspiration found in another pivitoal book, The Overstory by Richard Powers.

We took this model and applied it to new members of our community, our saplings. We thought about what they might need, what they might gain through connection with more experienced “Mother Trees” and what the community might gain from this collective connection. Soon a structure materialised that has allowed us to scale in line with our values and expand our portfolio through partnerships and referrals. We’ve vetted facilitators expertise by guiding them through a course on difficult conversations, observed their workshops and provided constructive feedback, and paired them with a Mother Tree to provide ongoing development and support.

Thank you to Allison for all the thought and foundation building she put into the Understory.

Collaborating With Us

We have been slow and deliberate in the way we have built up this community. Care is threaded through our approach. Here’s what a few of them had to say about working with us:

I have been so impressed with the smooth and thorough professionalism of WMR. I feel cared for, seen and part of a passionate team of talented communicators bringing much needed education to businesses.

The term ‘work’ doesn’t touch what it is to collaborate with With Many Roots. It’s a friendship, an enlivening practice, a purposeful journey, an exploration of what it is to be alive in critical times of change. WMR live the changes they seek to bring about, so to ‘work’ with them is to experience a glimpse of a brighter future embedded in the present.

WMR is the embodiment of collective care, community and actions for a regenerative future. I love working with WMR, their thoughtfulness and kindness is rare to find in other places.

“Whenever I’m asked where and when I started my career as a climate change educator, I always refer back to this collective. Without the support and care of this community, I wouldn’t have reached the impact I have accomplished until today. Trying to do business differently when our target audiences are precisely those who contributed to the old, outdated system is not an easy job. Climate action also translates into how we work, show up for our clients and colleagues, or run our businesses. It can be a lonely journey, so having this community by my side has been essential to my work and well-being.”