This Was Always the Work

What is your Coralus story?

I’ve been thinking a lot about story lately; I’m constantly inquiring as to what story I’m telling myself and how it might be limiting me.

Stories are how we make sense of the world.

They simplify complexity. They help us decide what matters. They tell us who we are, what we do, and how things are supposed to work. Without them, everything would feel chaotic.

But stories don’t just help us see, they also filter what we can see.

The Original Story

When we began as SheEO, we focused on creating a different future, designed by those less likely to have their dreams resourced. 

We asked, What future do we want to live in?
And what happens if we resource that future—together?

We trusted ourselves, pooled our capital, distributed decision making, and tuned in. 

Do I want this future to exist?

And from that question, decisions were made.

It looked like a funding model.
But underneath, something else was happening.

We were sensing the future and practicing the world we want to live in, being radically generous with ourselves and others, focusing on what we want and have and need; we were asking for help and supporting others along the way.

Over time, it became clear that the money mattered AND it wasn’t the most important thing.

Beyond Capital

Ventures shared over and over: The community matters more than the money. 

What was actually moving things forward wasn’t just capital. It was:

• Relationships > people connecting with one another who never would have met outside this ecosystem approach
• Care > getting to know one another in ways that had us understand each other better 
• Insight > into how the systems and structures were creating the outcomes we don’t want
• Belief > knowing we matter and that others are excited by our dreams. 

There’s nothing like finding the others. It’s like coming home.

A different kind of economy was already forming by organizing differently.

Without naming it, we were practicing:

• Distributed decision making
• Trusting our intuition
• Contributing what we could to others’ dreams and receiving help with our own

We weren’t just funding ventures; we were learning how to build a different world.

And then the world began to shift

COVID disrupted everything.

Isolation, instability, uncertainty had us reorganize and triage resources. We got online quickly and found who needed help most and got on it. It was electric. 7 gatherings a week, all around the world, sharing, unlearning and flowing support to one another.

Then the murder of George Floyd surfaced truths that could no longer be ignored.

We were called into deeper work around race, justice, and unlearning with the Racial Justice Working Group followed by Rooted in Your Story to deepen our understanding of our ancestral lineage and our role in colonization.

We knew we couldn’t bring forth a new world without doing the deeper work. 

And the conditions kept changing.

So we went deeper, always sensing, listening, adapting and staying in relationship with what was emerging. 

When Australia voted NO to recognize Indigenous peoples and create an advisory body to give them input on laws affecting them, we moved all of our resources to Aboriginal and Torres Strait communities. 

We have been continuously centering on our purpose while navigating and responding to changing world conditions. 

It goes beyond who gets funded to include how we relate, how we unlearn, and how we see.

As we deepened, another realization came into focus:

The system we are operating within produces the same outcomes—no matter how good the intentions.

We can try to fix it. We can try to reform it. We can even try to radically change parts of it. We’ve done all of that; together, almost 10,000 of us have been chipping away at the edges alongside millions of others, putting all of our energy into ‘the system’ we have.

But the underlying structure remains.

And it has become increasingly clear that this structure is under strain. It’s destabilizing and unraveling as we speak. We are in late-stage capitalism and ecological breakdown while tech acceleration through AI is upon us and polarization is presented as insurmountable.

We are facing system collapse. When and how it will arrive is uncertain—de-stabilization usually arrives to those who are most vulnerable first—but it is happening. 

This conversation is at the core of our retreats, which you learn about more deeply if you join them. 

What Looks Like “Nothing”

We have heard from some of you that Coralus’s response to this moment is confusing. If you are holding the story of flowing money to ventures = success, then it looks like we aren’t doing anything.

But something else is happening.

We are recognizing that in conditions of collapse, the old ways of doing—more, faster, louder—no longer serve.

When systems destabilize, the most important work is not production.

It is capacity.

• Nervous systems that are not locked in fear
• Being okay not knowing, without trying to fix it right away
• The space to grieve what is ending
• The awareness to notice what is emerging

That means resourcing:

• practices that support our nervous systems and overall capacity
• deeper relationships
• small group connection at retreats
• mapping needs, resources, and opportunities across the community

And alongside this, we continue to actively support the 268 Ventures we have funded—helping them stabilize and navigate what is changing.

As we create our new infrastructure and get our non-financial capital flows moving well, we will continue to sense into when, and how, to flow our financial resources to existing Ventures and new collectives we see emerging. At the moment, we (a small group of Activators) are in a deep dive with a segment of Ventures seeking patterns and tuning in to where we can be most useful to their needs, the moment we are in, and our desired impact. 

Many of us are holding stories of what SheEO and Coralus was while also tuning in to what’s next. How we used money in the past, how we organized and made decisions, this is all evolving into an updated design. Azul reminds us that stories are what allows us to notice what is. Part of the trick as we navigate this evolution is that we won’t be able to sense the future into being unless we change our stories. 

We can spend lots of time sensing and co-sensing, but if we don’t do the work to loosen and/or compost some of our old stories, we won’t see the future even if it’s in front of us.

And by stories we don’t mean just narratives. Stories live in our bodies; they become part of how our nervous system responds. In some sense we have become addicted to certain stories because they feel safe and they make us look and feel good. 

So the work of unlearning the stories goes hand in hand with increasing our capacity to sit in the liminal space of not knowing, of not being the ‘savior’ or the one with the right answer. It’s having the humility and serenity to see how we have been part of the ‘problem’ and benefited from the ‘problem’ and not spiraling out into guilt and shame. Holding the reality we see gently without collapsing, that’s a real practice. And from that, we bring forth a world we know is possible. (We go more deeply into this in the podcast as well). 

The Continuity

Nothing fundamental has changed. We are still here to bring forth a different world. But the conditions have changed. And so the practice must evolve.

Where we once circulated money to activate the future, we are now stabilizing ourselves to perceive it more clearly. Where we once acted quickly (5 countries in 5 years, hundreds of workshops and gatherings and trade missions), we are practicing moving at the speed of trust, capacity, and coherence.

Where we once worked mostly within the system, we are now orienting beyond it. We have a very special opportunity as a community to keep pushing the edges of possibility. 

We have flowed money in ways no other community has. We have gathered thousands to organize differently to see how the future might shift. We have built trust in a world that is destroying it daily, knowing there are other ways to be as a society and we are deep in the experimentation, together doing brave work.

Where We Are Now

When I was in Aotearoa recently I learned more about Maori cosmology.

In Māori cosmology, creation doesn’t begin in clarity.

• It begins in Te Kore, the vast field of potential
• Moves through Te Pō, the darkness where things are forming but not yet visible
• Arriving in Te Ao Mārama, the world of light.

We tend to value only what we can see, measure, and point to. But right now, many of us are being invited into Te Pō—a space of uncertainty, ambiguity, and quiet reorganization.

It can feel like nothing is happening, but beneath the surface, everything is.

This really resonated with me when Awhina Murupaenga shared it with me at lunch in Aoetearoa. I went home and looked up more about these three phases which resonated so strongly. At this time, as predicted, we can look to our Indigenous cousins for sense-making. Then, as if to underline it, Timmy Smith, one of our Maori ventures, created a tea ceremony at Coralus House in Toronto using the three ‘rooms’ of Maori cosmology to take people through the experience—FIVE days after my conversation which I had not shared with anyone. 

There’s another sign. 

This is the moment we find ourselves in, looking for signals to better understand what’s happening and where we are. 

We have another small group who are starting to articulate what is emerging here from a variety of perspectives and modalities. You can explore an earlier piece on signal spotting here, which offers a helpful foundation for the kind of patterns and insights this group is beginning to surface.

We are creating new mapping tools to illuminate connections and to support finding the others which we previewed on our most recent Moon call. 

An Invitation

If some of this still remains foggy to you, a reminder that as with all things Coralus, you have to experience it to get it which is why we are highly encouraging anyone and everyone to please come to a retreat. This is where we seed the practices that might allow us to look at the stories we are holding (or that are holding us) and question whether they are useful at these times.

We are also expanding our capacity to hold uncertainty and difficulty within our bodies and nervous systems so that, from a much more regulated space, we can ask ourselves and each other: What is next? Not to find ourselves grasping for the same old answer, but perhaps to witness something else that is already being birthed. 

You have an open invitation to our monthly gatherings. The Full Moon meetings are spaces to access the latest practices, find the others, share what you are noticing and weave yourself into the future that is emerging. Our most recent calls were a beautiful ceremony to mark 6 months and we created artifacts to share ‘what is transforming in us’. 

If you are reading this and/or listening to the podcast and thinking, “yes, I get this,” please reach out to others in the community you know who may not be as tuned in to what we are up to. This message is quite difficult to explain and we need as many translators as possible. 

We are still here, doing the work that we believe is rooted in our highest and best use for the times. 

We are learning how to do it in a world that is fundamentally changing.

And perhaps, when we step back, we can see:

This has always been what Coralus is.