Dung Beetles Project Description

The Underground revealed a need for a shift in the shape and configuration in ten’s organizational ecosystem and gestured towards a period of transition. The custodians acknowledged that the work needed to move forward was: practical (finances, structure, website, organizational culture); creative (how to unravel, weave, pass around the threads); philosophical (how to deepen, communicate, integrate, embody concepts and conversations ten was interested in); and relational (how to support community building and team work in real ways across a beautifully awkward gaggle of humans).

There was a clear need to invite in new people, energy and ideas to steward the transition to whatever comes next for the network; to design & co-create experiments; and to sense into learnings. ten is fortunate to have a brilliant and diverse global community of support and care (many of these folks had been gathering online and weaving deep relationships since the online gathering, The Wilds Beyond Climate Justice in 2020, and the festival-courses, We Will Dance with Mountains, organized by ten’s founder, Báyò Akómoláfé and members of the ten family in 2020 and 2021). 

In early April 2022 ten invited seven incredible people from around the world to come together and lead the work for 9 months: Robert Wanalo (Kenya), Penélope Baquero (Colombia/U.S.A.), Sofia Batalha (Portugal), Marianthe Loucataris (Australia), Gayathri Ramachandran (India), Alex Rodríguez (U.S.A) and Aerin Dunford (U.S.A./Mexico).

They served in a role we affectionately dubbed the “Dung Beetles” since the idea was that they would be rolling around dung ball questions like: “What is ten’s work to do?” and “How shall we do it?” Each Dung Beetle committed to taking initiative and holding shared leadership from June 2022 through February 2023 to create the conditions for the next iteration of The Emergence Network to be more locally-rooted, practically and audaciously experimental, and rehabilitate exiled capacities in our rapidly collapsing systems. The Dung Beetles were also tasked with grappling with critical organizational questions around structure, decision-making, and money. 

This ten Dung Beetle phase was a rich and fecund time for those involved, and not without some serious challenges, tensions and troubling questions. Without doubt, it was a time full of learning and unlearning. Much was accomplished and much was left unfinished and, perhaps, unsaid. The Dung Beetle crew traversed different landscapes and territories over those nine months: working to deepen relationships & know one another better; creating processes & structures for decision-making, conflict-resolution & care; engaging in artistic projects together & supporting one anothers’ “individual” artistic endeavors as well; co-creating a blog space as a receptacle for creations, reflections & processes; exploring the terrain of the ten website, brand & communications; looking into issues related to money, finances, legal structures, accounting & fundraising; and defining organizational metaphors for the network.

At the end of the Dung Beetle phase, The Emergence Network was able to more clearly define the priorities and areas for attention and growth for the following year. After this period of dreaming, creative exploration, planning, and challenges, ten was ready to move into execution and manifestation. Our priorities included: cultivating a thriving underground network of postactivist practitioners interested in exploring other ways of knowing, being, sensing, relating & responding to the crises of our time; animating local & trans-local experiments to deepen our understanding of postactivism by grounding it in ongoing praxis & (un)learning; building & nourishing a core operations team, serving as microbes to coordinate different parts of the system & manage day-to-day administration & decision-making; developing a clearer means of engagement via a new “brand,” website, visual language & descriptions of our work in order to welcome people into the underground, kindle participation & co-creation in ways that feel clearer, more inviting and energizing.

The ten Dung Beetles were Robert Wanalo, Penélope Baquero, Sofia Batalha, Marianthe Loucataris, Gayathri Ramachandran, Alex Rodríguez and Aerin Dunford.