Collaboration and the Learning Lab
Collaboration
No company can solve the challenges the botanical industry is facing: poverty, biodiversity loss, the climate crisis, urban migration alone. The goal of the Learning Labs is to create a place for stakeholders in the herbal products industry to understanding the deeper, systemic issues beneath these challenges and to build a network of ongoing support and collaboration to tackle them together.
Ann Armbrecht first launched the Learning Lab in the fall of 2022. Julie Arts, a senior Faculty member and consultant with the Presencing Institute, and Ann hosted a second cohort in 2023, and a third in the winter of 2024.
Read more about the vision behind the Learning Lab here.
The series is organized around these key questions:
- How can sourcing medicinal plants enhance the wellbeing and prosperity of people and plants around the world
- How can we encourage the herbal products industry to remain rooted in respect for the plants, people, and the planet?
- What changes are needed?
- How can we, as a group of committed stakeholders from around the world, collaborate to make those changes?
Awareness-based Systems Change
The tools of Theory U and the Presencing Institute, a model of awareness-based systems change that works at getting to the root causes of systemic change and identifying key steps to address those issues, guided this initial work, asking:
- What needs to be seen?
- Whose voices do we need to hear?
- How can we access and act from deeper sources of curiosity, compassion and courage?
- What kind of leadership and collaboration is needed to create innovation at the scale that is needed?
You can find out more about this work here. Contact Ann to become involved.
