After ten years of experimenting with what a radically generous, relational, community-led economy could be, Coralus is standing at a threshold. Something is ending. Something is emerging. And in this in-between, we are learning to be with transformation as a practice; one that is held in community, in curiosity, and in deep listening.

Much like the coral that lives in our name—interconnected, adaptive, moving with the rhythms of life—we are discovering that the future cannot be planned into existence. 

This beautiful art-piece by Kara Seivewright, one of our artists-in-residence, was created through our deep dives into listening to what is emerging from the Coralus Pods. Her visual language mirrors what we, too, have been noticing: transformation is not a singular moment; it’s an unfolding. It is wild and alive, and asks us to participate fully.

A Living Experiment

In 2024, we invited Ventures and Activators to initiate the kinds of conversations and experiences they most longed for, and to see who joined them in their quests. We called this “finding the others.” It became a living field of 90 small circles (pods) across continents and time zones. Four to fifteen people, meeting weekly or monthly—asking, sharing, learning, practicing.

In 2025, a next cohort of 60 Pods emerged. This was not expansion, but a deepening. Instead of directing, we created conditions for that and asked: What wants to emerge now?

A living, breathing ecosystem came alive. People found spaces where they could show up without performance; where the invitation was not to take on another task or role, but to arrive as they were.

A kind of “response-ability” began to take root: a full-bodied capacity to stay with the trouble, as elder storyteller Donna Haraway, the author of Staying wiht the Trouble, reminds us. To remain present with what had not yet taken form. From that place, trust set the rhythm.

Connection carried more weight than information. People didn’t need more meetings; they needed to be met.

We saw that Pods are rehearsals for new ways of thinking, new rhythms of living, new shapes of leadership, new forms of business models, and new mindsets.  A contained space to practice the unfamiliar and try on new postures. A space in which to test the lines of a new script and discover the presence required to speak it out loud.

What We Learned by Listening

As we traced themes across the 150 Pods, patterns emerged we couldn’t have predicted.

The Pods held the full arc of transformation: the breaking down and breaking through; the tender uncertainties in between. Wounds in community became fertile soil for creative expression. We started to see the relational webs that can carry us into and through hard things. 

The second round of Pods became more precise in their invitations. Moving from 90 to 60 was not contraction, but discernment: a recognition that depth—not scale—offers the architecture of meaningful change. Quality of presence replaced quantity of circles and success looked less like expansion and more like coherence. 

It turns out the Pods were developing a whole set of capacities that feel essential for the unknown journey ahead. The capacity to:

• hold uncertainty without rushing toward false certainty; 
• make decisions together with the rhythms of trust; 
• notice power and redistribute resources with intention;
• move without waiting to be told what to do. 

These are skills, but they are also muscles for an emerging world that are strengthened through use and made possible through collective practice. Transitions to more life-giving and coral-like futures require deeply alive relational architectures. 

Kara’s artwork helps us see the living architecture of our ecology more clearly:

The seeds of nourishment (the gifts and resources we redistribute),
The wisdom of night (our dark moments of gestation and renewal),
The spider’s web (the tensile strength between us and the spaces of potential),
The mycelial networks (the invisible relational systems that grow us from the bottom up).

Her visual language reveals that this web is already here and alive and we are simply learning how to move with it.

A Crucible Time

What makes the Pods experiment so alive, so crucial? 

It is happening against the backdrop of an unprecedented planetary reality. We have already crossed 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries, the most recent is ocean acidification. The systems that sustained the status quo have already tipped and there really is no “normal” to return to. The signs and signals are everywhere. And if we listen in … from resilience theory to earth system science to complex adaptive systems to the ancient arts of astrology, the signals show us that the next decades will be defined by enormous change and transformation.

We are creating what we long for, and what the world- and we ourselves–might need to become.

The future is shaped in the company of others, with the human and more-than-human alike. It will be shaped here too, as it always has been: one small circle at a time.