Invitation to Invocation

The Wellbeing Economy Alliance hub for the island of Ireland (WEAll Ireland) invites you – as an individual or representative of your organization/network – to join with us to build a Community of Practice in the art of the wellbeing economy. It is an invitation to join with other members of the Community of Practice in invoking a new set of economic and societal stories, grounded in fairness, dignity, connection, participation and deep regard for Nature. 

This is a cosmo-local invitation: it is both local to the island of Ireland and it is a global peer-to-peer initiative in close collaboration with our friends in the worldwide Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll). Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Towns movement, put it well when he wrote of the fierce importance of creating compelling conditions to enable ourselves to think and act otherwise: 

"‘Longing’ is a vast, aching, yearning word. I’ve always felt that unless we are able to cultivate a deep and visceral longing for a low carbon future, we have no chance of ever creating it. It’s the question that obsesses me, how to cultivate a deep cultural longing for a post-carbon, more just, more equal world? I don’t have all the answers, but I know that it’s the 100-million- dollar question. I also know that, for starters, we can only do it by harnessing art, poetry, music, design, dance, story-telling and creativity."

WEAll Ireland is the local hub of a global network of individuals, organisations and governments (WEGo) dedicated to the transformation of our economic system in line with the imperatives of our socio-ecological crises. Our steering group is made up representatives from: Queens University Belfast, FEASTA, The Playhouse in Derry/ Londonderry, The Irish Doughnut Economics Network, Cultivate and the European Health Futures Forum. 

Our focus is on shifting the deep and embedded stories that currently obstruct and obscure the system change required to address climate justice and wider socio-ecological devastation. These stories form part of the DNA of day-to-day decision-making and non-decision-making in governments and corporate boardrooms. They frame and delimit popular understanding and critiques of the huge inequalities and ecological destruction that – we are told – are part of the price we must pay for aligning our shared fate with the vagaries and interests of impersonal financial and market forces that have taken the place of the indifferent gods that demand our sacrifice. 

In line with analyses set out by one of WEAll’s co-founders and friend, Katherine Trebeck, WEAll Ireland, supported by Carnegie UK, has focused on the work of exposing the dominant narratives that hold the current local-global economic system in place. Equally important is the role of the cultural creative and activist in amplifying new liberating stories of transition and accompanying practices, especially here on the island of Ireland, North and South. 

As an important contribution to this work we are building a Community of Practice for those who are dedicated to shaping new stories and practices, notably artists and a wider community of cultural creatives. The Community of Practice will offer a platform for engagement with the latest thinking and research on the wellbeing economy, collaborations, partnerships with funders, and arrangements to curate creative outputs – all in the service of growing a movement across the island. We commit to act in deep solidarity with our global partners, including those who embrace ancient/new ways of knowing and being in the world. 

Every great sea change….every great movement for social change and cultural transformations has been accompanied by and generated by compelling new imagery, literature, film, performances, song and poetry….not least here on our island of stories and story tellers. 

The art of social change migrates freely from region to region, heart-to-heart, on the streets and in theatres, in boardrooms and lecture halls. Today we are in the midst of an unprecedented culture shift, a transition driven by the demands of climate and ecological justice and the imperatives of designing new economies that place planet, people and wellbeing first. A call to design new economies no longer trapped in myths or ‘fairy tales’ of growth without ends. 

We believe there is no greater challenge and that our mission to build a Community of Practice for creatives can significantly contribute to an emergent popular movement across our island and across the wider WEAll network. It will be dedicated to the just transition and the design of economic futures founded on the protection and prioritization of public goods, delivered within the parameters of Planetary Boundaries.

Artists from all disciplines - working alongside and as activists themselves - have a pivotal role in leading our collective inquiry into new ‘social imaginaries’ informed in dialogue with the pluriverse of emergent new regenerative narratives. This work has a technical and policy component but must also dive deep into the philosophical, ethical and sensorial dimensions of our participation in phenomena such as consumerism, inspired by degrowth research, new visions of prosperity and work, and building on Planetary Boundaries research, such as that of our friend Kate Raworth on Doughnut Economics.