The Elements of Liberating Transformation
Change Elemental galvanizes movements by freeing, combining, and inspiring the necessary elements of transformation to prefigure the future we want now.
“Liberation is constant dreaming. When we center it as a thing—as a table, a place, as a solo getting to liberation—that is where that tension shows up…. We will constantly be in an iteration of liberation, not a rotation, but a continued process. It makes me think: how do we get there together, the ability to be together in a process of constant dreaming.” – Sage Crump, Prefiguring Futures Lab Alum and Change Elemental Governance Team member
At Change Elemental, we strengthen our movements with creative, rigorous, and values-aligned capacity-building that ensures short and long-term change towards our visions. We achieve this by deepening practice with the five elements of liberating transformation.
The Five Elements of Liberating Transformation
Our movements, whether focused on democracy and voting rights, bodily autonomy, climate justice, or something else, are meant to advance liberation and sovereignty. This requires understanding, embodying, strategizing, and acting both interdependently and independently. This is systems change (transformative and metamorphic), where the way forward is both planful and emergent, requiring us to weave wisdom from many sources in complexity, respond from vision in chaos, and define, cultivate, exercise, and share leadership and power differently. This takes practicing our individual and collective inner work and valuing multiple ways of knowing. These five elements are interconnected, interdependent, and always evolving.
Advancing Liberation & Sovereignty
Liberation is a noun only in that it is a collection of verbs. Sovereignty reclaims our inherent right of self-determination.
Sharing Leadership & Power
Nourishing the ability to flex across a spectrum of leadership approaches while growing collective power and power within.
Valuing Multiple Ways of Knowing
Embracing the many knowledge systems, wisdom traditions, and expanded forms of expertise that transformative change requires.
Creating & Transforming in Chaos and Complexity
Adapting strategies for unpredictable environments while leading from vision with clarity.
Practicing Inner Work
Centering our individual and collective health, healing, clarity, and wholeness so we can be and do, from and toward vision.
These elements of liberating transformation provide an essential living framework—infrastructure not just for our movements but for building the world we want to experience today.
To learn more about how these elements come together in a theory of transformation, see here.