The Haven in Stonehaven is a health & wellbeing charity in the Northeast of Scotland. We had a paid summer internship last year through Aberdeen University. The intern was amazing and worked with a board member on a report for the board. This is a practice brief of the work. The ideas than feed into the internship happening kind of came about from conversations after I did some social enterprise leadership training that I found very frustrating as it pulled a lot from corporate HR approach of team building/management, goal setting etc. It was geared for the 3rd sector/social enterprise which is primarily made up of women/marginalised/at risk folk, with staff working in small teams and mucking in, with constantly changing priorities, precarious funding etc etc. I did a little deep dive into matriarchal and indigenous governance frameworks & decision making and didn’t come up with much. This from the Pacific Northwest was about as close as it got to what I was searching for. Charlotte Cote’s book ‘A Drum in One Hand, A Sock Eye In The Other’ was also very valuable especially in relation to health, care, landscape and reciprocity. I welcome thoughts and am wondering if anyone here has experience with policy and governance change in this area. I come from an activist background, NVC and consensus decision making approach and am feeling frustrated with the mismatch of the work we do and the language/legalities/documentation we have to work within to deliver it. I like to think there is the ability to dovetail circular ways of working with box/hierarchical frameworks and come up with new ways of working where everyone’s needs and expression can be supported.