Utopias Bach’s Safeguarding: Culture, Practice and Process

Utopias Bach’s Safeguarding is a process of continual learning and improvement that is regularly revisited and updated based on collective insight and practice

It builds particularly on the work of the Collaboratory and the Octopus of Omnipotence experiment, and links to Gaia Redgrave’s Rewilding the Artist/Culture of Care.

Overall approach summary

• Culture: Prevention through a culture of care

• Practice: Day to day practice

• Process: We recognise that things do go wrong and this is what we do if it does

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Culture of Care Nest Box Agreement - creating a Nest Box Agreement enables us to understand how individuals (freelancers and within organisations) will work together in an equitable and nurturing space (physically and metaphorically), supporting each other’s well-being.

Culture: Prevention through culture of care

We consider ourselves to be developing a miniature culture as one of our attempts towards a Utopia Bach.  Utopias Bach starts with a culture of care, as one way of mitigating and preventing harm in the first place. 

We will work with awareness, care and respect to the environment, each other and all humans and more-than-humans, paying attention to our process, methods and our own becoming in all that we do. We do this by keeping a learning mind and through our principles, particularly:

• Diversity:  Seeking and celebrating diversity and difference, and appreciating what we each bring to the collective experience. We aspire to give a platform to people and issues which may often be ignored or insufficiently recognised. 

• Change: Challenging prevailing orthodoxies and ways of working, generating a space where radical change can happen. We encourage discussion and debate on difficult issues. And recognise sometimes a tiny change is as important as a big one.

• Spread: Like a strawberry plant, spreading and nurturing little seeds and offshoots so that all can find their niche. We support capacity building through sharing skills, ideas, events and resources, and through appointing mentors for each of our ‘experiments’ so that those leading on activities do not feel isolated.

• Open and reflective:  Generous with space and time for on-going reflection and dialogue and open to challenge. Flexible on time, outcomes, methods. We will experiment with different ways to document our individual and collective processes and our production, including feeding these into our Safeguarding.

• Co-creation: All those involved play a significant role in determining what happens. Self-facilitation, accountability and conscious participation help us explore new ways of working together. 

• Responsive to needs: aware of, and respond to the needs of those taking part, encouraging honesty, kindness, empathy and understanding.  

  
  
  
  

Practice: Day to day practice

We are committed to sorting things on a daily basis - tension/conflict/mis-understanding is usual, perhaps because of mis-understandings due to neuro or other divergence.

We begin with an assumption of ‘good faith’ - that there is always an opportunity to learn and better understand ourselves and others. If someone says something that is clumsy, ill-informed or may be read as offensive, we will work under the assumption that they are not trying to cause harm or be critical or put someone down. We will assume it is an unintentional slight or difference or misunderstanding, and that they are engaging in good faith. We will be open to discussion and further understanding.

Conflict resolution challenges power dynamics - personal trauma, power inequalities have many layers, and all can be opened and expanded, the earlier the better. So we encourage people to notice and start these processes earlier and earlier, to avoid the rumbling/reactionary. Through practice we come to understand that by working through it comes repair/reparation and a stronger bond. 

• Communication Practice -  start with raising the ‘top card’ of what you are experiencing/feeling/noticing - just say it or ask it. No-one is ‘wrong’ and others might be feeling the same. Ask ‘what’s happening here’ - be curious and interested to find out what’s going on. Try to hear and understanding each others’ story and how they are experiencing things. Think about how a communication might be received before we circulate a communication (such as a text, email or voice message). If possibly contentious or difficult, we will use communication which allows a conversation and open dialogue, and will avoid email or voice messages.

• Curiosity Practice - We will be curious to learn about where we and others are coming from, how we experience different situations and moments and what we feel. This will help us feel confident, safe and respected.

• Kindness Practice - We share a kind patience towards us. This includes attentiveness to our emotions, anticipating emotional reactions. Sleep on our reactions, enabling us to explore our reactions before acting on them. This culture might require slow-pace processes.

• Multilingual Practice - each person uses a different language to express how they feel about and think or what they need. We respect that we might not understand each other’s words, metaphors or tone. We want to learn what the words we use mean. This requires durational and committed co-learning and a kind humour for, in, with misunderstandings.

  
  

A worked example for meetings

• Utopias Bach will begin all meetings by checking the purpose of our meeting, amending it to meet the needs of all present

• We will explore how we need to run the meeting to work with people’s different needs, acknowledging that some needs might be different to - or even the opposite - of someone elses. You are invited to raise any needs you have to enable you to take part and feel safe in the meeting. With Rewilding the Artist, we have developed the use of the ‘Park Bench’ and ‘Quiet Garden’ in both physical and online meetings as alternative spaces participants can use.

• Utopias Bach will encourage a space for acknowledgement of how people are feeling at start of each meeting:  We each acknowledge the effect of ‘other things going on in our lives’ and we set aside some time for us all to come and be in this space.

• Utopias Bach will leave plenty of space in meetings, including a ‘grounding’ at the start of the meeting, being comfortable with silence, trying not to talk over one another, listening well and having regular breaks of 15 minutes or more

•  We will engage with curiosity and assumptions of good faith, and work through any difficulties in line with the Utopias Bach principles.

  
  
  
  
  

Process: We recognise that things do go wrong and this is what we do if it does

• Try to prioritise the integrity of the core values and aims of Utopias Bach/the work you are involved with, rather than individuals and personalities.

• Take time out to express/transmute your feelings/energy through creativity 

• Try to recognise what is within the scope of the project & what is not. Issues outside of the project will be taken elsewhere to be resolved.

• Raise your feelings/concerns/experience with person directly if you feel able to, or failing that, in the wider group or as in Day to Day practice above.

• Try to discuss what would enable you to continue to work together/within Utopias Bach, while recognising differences

• If this is not possible, or not working, ask the Experiment’s mentor, or another nominated person the initial contact for safeguarding, to support a conversation, to be heard, and to start a process to address the issue. Having processes like this in Utopias Bach, means even in the heat of the moment you can acknowledge what is going on and trigger the process which will create the time that’s needed to work it through (at a future date if necessary)

• If that doesn’t work or the mentor is involved in the issue, contact the Safeguarding Person outside the experiment. Their contact details and process for this will be publicised on the Utopias Bach website.