A Season of Re-membering

“Walk backwards to remember, before you go forward.”

Timmy Smith, founder of PAUSE for Tea in Aotearoa, one of the 263 ventures this community has funded across a decade, gave us those words this summer, and they became our compass through a season of re-membering.

A little over ten years ago, I was in the mountains of southern Colorado, on a wilderness solo, when the instruction to “go find your people” led me to the earliest versions of this community and what it was trying to become. Then, we believed that women supporting women would change the world.

We told people that we were “building a movement to radically transform how woman-led businesses are funded and supported.”  

I signed up as an Activator in year one, despite being based in the US and the inaugural year being Canada-focused. I decided that being born in Newfoundland made me Canadian enough to want to both support those ventures and to be a part of discovering how this bold experiment in building new models would work.

When we expanded to the US the following year, I was excited to help steward that movement and there were a few years where it felt like we were making meaningful change and serving as an important counter-point to the old models we wanted to see replaced.

The pivotal years around the pandemic sent us inward in many ways and also helped us see more clearly which habits of practice and energy we simply did not want to carry forward into a new world. 

I have walked in and alongside SheEO, and through its evolution into Coralus for more than a decade now: from the earliest venture selections and galas, through years of discovery and deepening discernment, the meaningfulness of our re-naming, forming and re-forming pods, evolving the nature and quality of our gatherings…

I’ve gotten to witness a decade of radical generosity operate as a way of being both up close and at a distance. And I’ve watched us learn our way back to much more fundamental knowings along the way.  

As we got to know each other, and got into relationship with one another, across the world, around shared commitments, we have helped each other to return to a deeper understanding of the fractures at the heart of “lack of funding to women owned businesses,” and have evolved into a new relationship with what any model of flourishing must include.

Building new models requires letting go of the ones that are not serving us at a level that systems and structures often frustrate but that relationship and community enables, supports, and enhances.

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This past year was one of transition and transformation in my own life as many of the foundations of my past life came apart and had to be composted, the company I led among the losses, and I stepped into a sabbatical with no deadlines and no deliverables, writing and feeling my way through it.

It gave me a chance to reconnect deeply with the many threads that make up the weave of my life, and when this community convened a Season of Re-membering, it named something I was already living up close.

Re-membering ourselves into belonging happens when the parts of ourselves that have forgotten how to trust our knowing at their deepest level come back online, and we discover that we are not only whole, but together. 

Doing this practice in community has been electric.

How had we affected the public conversation a decade on, I wondered? 

I scanned the websites for everyone we have invested in and brought their voices into every room, and every room back into my own reading and sensemaking.

The ventures run the gamut of industries: they make paint and chocolate, run an airline, litigate, farm, process ocean plastic, teach kids to build robots. And yet, their language rhymes. 

“You’re not the problem. The system wasn’t built for people without lawyers.” 

“We are not a ‘body with a problem’, we are whole humans.” 

“Our actions show love and care for seven generations forward.” 

Whether I was reading the ventures’ own words, or talking with current activators, the voices kept speaking the same language: on murals and stickies, in transcripts and conversations. 

Relationship as infrastructure, radical generosity at the center, whole selves, belonging, joy. A decade of ventures and a season of gatherings, remembering the same convictions.

It did not feel like coincidence. It felt like a field in formation. Like we are ready.

The rooms also said what they hope comes next:  A structure you can see.

Capital at a scale that changes a business. Constellations funded around persistent problems, rather than individuals succeeding one at a time in isolation or competition. The pods, again and again. More connection, please.

And for the truth-telling to continue: name the experiments, run them in the open, say what actually happened. Make the learning public. Circulate wisdom and flow resources to the connective tissue that makes magic happen. Readiness is a decision.

These voices are all around us in this space. Brenda, who calls herself Aurora Heat’s caretaker rather than its owner. Sonia, whose Skipper Otto has “stayed weird” for eighteen years and built a business on relationship and trust. Sarah of GOGO, who built a village where the unseen are seen. 

They do not look like exceptions to a rule. They look like a field of impact becoming visible.

Ten years ago I got to be a part of opening a door and stepping into a bold experiment in discovery. What this season showed me is that a field flourishes when it holds its members through cycles and seasons.

Deep roots are needed to rise and the decade’s losses and stumbles have been just as important to our learning, growing, and strengthening relationships.  

The season closed under a harvest moon in the North, as the first whispers of spring are arriving in the South. It feels fitting.

The moment when what has ripened becomes nourishment for what’s next, and some of it becomes next year’s planting.

Everything gathered this season — the ventures’ own words, what the rooms remembered, what we will not carry forward, and what the collective has asked for next — now lives in A Decade of Impact. A Season of Re-membering.

You can scroll the season at a glance, or luxuriate through the full report.

Walk backwards to remember. Then turn around. Illuminate is where we walk forward, together.