Estaleiro Liberdade, Porto Alegre 2012
A school of entrepreneurship through self-knowledge. But pirate.
That was the tagline, and it was accurate. Estaleiro Liberdade ran in Porto Alegre from 2012, in a shared house on Rua Liberdade that several social-impact organisations were using at the same time. We started by opening the doors every Friday for free teaching and learning sessions. The first cohort of five began in August 2012. By 2014 it had reached São Paulo with groups of up to 24.
I co-founded it and served as president of the formal organisation. My part ran through 2015.
How it worked
Journeys ran three to four months. Participants were called sailors, facilitators were pirates, and nobody had a curriculum. No grades, no reading lists, no attendance requirement. Everything was proposed and nothing was mandatory.
Four kinds of gathering: conversation circles, workshops on methods, hands-on sessions on your own project, and individual mentoring. The toolkit came from wherever it worked, including Nonviolent Communication, design thinking, Dragon Dreaming and agile.
Three principles held it together.
Three principles
- Whoever raises a question leads the discussion.
- What belongs to one belongs to all.
- Everyone follows their own path while growing as a network.
Before we started, I travelled through Europe visiting multiple schools in Europe and being inspired by Kaos Pilot and Knowmads. In 2013 a second expedition visited nine more schools, crowdfunded on Catarse. What we found there shaped the model.
What came out of it
Small things, mostly, which is what happens when cohorts are a dozen people. Herói Postal turned emails into handwritten physical letters, with the income shared with hospitalised people who wrote them. One participant left with a writing project he'd been avoiding for years and started it. A facilitator built a career transition programme of her own out of the experience.
The programme carried on without me for a while and wound down around 2015.
Stockholm
Klustret Ekskäret is a community and coworking space on Odengatan, started in 2016 by Stiftelsen Ekskäret, a foundation Tomas Björkman set up in 2008. The foundation runs two places: Klustret in the city, and an island in a nature reserve out in the Stockholm archipelago. Weekdays Klustret is somewhere to work. Evenings and weekends it turns into whatever the members decide to run there.
Klustret calls itself a lab and an experiment in self-organisation. Members sit in circles, each one responsible for an area, and the whole thing runs on six principles about taking responsibility for your own contribution, showing up as you are, sharing what you have, acting before you're certain, and everyone being a host rather than a guest.
I recognised all of that. Estaleiro ran on rotating leadership, shared responsibility, and circle agreements about listening without judgement and treating silence as part of the conversation. Different country, different decade, the same bet: people work out what to build by working on themselves, in a group that holds them to it.
Klustret is also an Inner Development Goals hub. IDG is the vocabulary that didn't exist in 2012, when we called it autoconhecimento and had to explain it every single time.
We're building a version of Estaleiro there. Details when there are details.
More soon. Leave your email if you want to know when.
Notify meOpens an email to captain@wonderingsolutions.com.