No matter where I find myself in this beautiful but increasingly fractured, politically divided, and often violent world–whether I am participating in Project Dandelion forums in Nairobi on food sovereignty and gender, health and climate or walking the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival as part of the team of GroundSwell, a film on regenerative agriculture, or sitting in a small circle of women leaders in Ibiza, learning more about self regeneration, or invited to be in community with indigenous women leaders in the Sierra Nevada region of Colombia, or participating in one of the many other opportunities to show up for Mother Earth wearing my yellow Dandelion pin, a question will often arise for me and my Project Dandelion co-founders:
“What exactly is Project Dandelion and what do you do?”
In a sentence: We are a global campaign to make women-led climate solutions more visible, valued, & better financed. Our theory of change is that when women lead, solutions follow. Like the Dandelion that inspired our name, we are spreading seeds of possibility and hope rooted in a simple but very important truth: we have an abundance of solutions and solutionists– a name often used to describe the global community of leaders committed to ensuring our Mother Earth remains a habitable home.
To ensure that future, we do not necessarily need more solutions or new technologies or even more climate focused organizations. We need to better understand and support the work that is going on already.
That work is going on in every community, country, continent and much of it is being led by women. Yet, women-led climate and nature solutions currently receive less than 2% of philanthropic funding and even less investment capital.
Project Dandelion’s work is to change that reality by shaping a new narrative–spreading and amplifying the stories of success; by challenging the fragmentation that keeps too much of the work at small scale, siloed and under-resourced. Our work is to create opportunities to connect frontline leaders to learn from each other, to understand more about what’s working and what’s needed most, and we believe among the many ways to meet the need for better coordination, bigger impact, more resources is to connect women leaders, provide space and place for learning exchanges and potential strategies for the collective action that leads to necessary changes in policies and practices.
Overall, our purpose–what we do–is to elevate women everywhere as the catalytic opportunity for creating a healthier, safer, and more sustainable future. How we do this, in part, is through a practice of process that can be described as “Sistering”.
I first heard this word a few weeks ago in a women’s circle of trust when Jacki Zehner, a close friend and role model for investing in women, described what we were all experiencing in that circle–a powerful sense of connectedness–as “Sistering.”
She shared this definition: ‘Sistering’ is a term builders and architects use to describe the action of joining one supporting beam or pillar to an existing one to add needed strength and stability. The two connected beams may be sufficient, individually, to hold up a structure, but when connected, they are stronger together, not just because there are two rather than one, but because the ‘sistering’ creates a new level of structural capacity, greater stability and sustainability.
That one word gave me a way to describe what happens in these circles and convenings that are an important part of what we do as Project Dandelion: Sistering. It’s not just about connecting women to each other for purposes of strengthening or scaling individual initiatives or organizations, which is one of the desired outcomes, but it is also about redistributing strength, sharing the load and responsibilities, and directing resources where they are most needed for strength and impact.
Think about it this way: when we are placed alongside each other, we are able to understand more deeply the value in each other’s work and appreciate better what’s being held or sustained as well as what is needed to strengthen and support. This new understanding, through proximity and trusted leadership, opens up opportunities for collaboration rather than competition. Such trust allows us to see ourselves and other women as extensions of the same structure, not separate efforts competing for scarce resources, but interconnected parts of something much larger; in this case, solving for the urgent need to better protect our shared planet’s natural resources and to restore the balance needed for a sustainable future.
That’s how I am thinking about what we do at Project Dandelion: cultivating and strengthening a global culture of sistering. That’s not all we do, of course, but hopefully, for those who ask, it’s a helpful perspective, a narrative frame for many of our recent activities and programs.
In the past three months, I can share some specific examples of ‘sistering’ in practice.
Project Dandelion hosted a special delegation of women from the Global South at the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University.
Let me pause here to acknowledge another reframing of language that goes way beyond words–no longer will we refer to the “Global South” but encourage all to consider that the Global South is, in fact, the “Global Majority”! (Acknowledgment and gratitude to Nyaguthii Chege, leader of the Green Belt Movement for this important reframe).
The women entrepreneurs who were in Project Dandelion’s “Global Majority” delegation had opportunities for a lot of ‘sistering.” Along with participating in the sessions curated by the Skoll Foundation for a global community of social entrepreneurs, we curated opportunities to position the role of women as strategic climate multipliers, to focus discussions on food sovereignty, and lead new insights on the impacts of extreme heat and other climate impacts on women’s health. Our delegates connected with others working on similar initiatives, finding new and often uncommon collaborations as well as those serendipitous connections that led to new funding as well as advocates.
From the Skoll World Forum in Oxford to Australia for Women Deliver, an every three year global gathering of women leaders–6,000 delegates from 189 countries–across all the interconnected issues of social justice, equity, health, food, and of course, climate. Here, the call was clearly to position women as system stabilizers across intersecting crises, and the solutions surfaced included the need for more collaborations, more sharing of resources, more collective actions. We are entering a more volatile, post-aid reality. Systems that once stabilized communities are under strain or being rolled back, but the solutions are everywhere. What is missing is alignment, trust, connection, and community and this is where and how ‘sistering’ can and does create collective strength.
These are just two examples of the convenings and opportunities to connect with women leaders, to learn more about women-led solutions, to ignite new collaborations, strategize collectively and strengthen a global community of committed leaders with shared purpose.
Like the Dandelion which uninformed gardeners may try to stop from spreading but cannot because of the deeply interconnected root system, Project Dandelion is also building interconnected roots of trust that will become an unstoppable force for change by the practice of ‘sistering’.
As co founder and Executive Director, Ronda Carnegie describes in more strategic language–
“What’s clear is this: we don’t have a shortage of solutions, we have a fragmentation of systems. Health, climate, gender and finance are still operating in parallel, while governments are not currently structured to respond to the scale and complexity of what’s unfolding. The opportunity and the gap is to better align these systems. Particularly to connect what’s already working on the ground with financing models and private sector engagement that can support delivery, even when it’s complex and costly.”
We are also responding to a growing need in this community to consider the well-being of our sisters and how we can support programs that address the physical and mental stress of frontline work, of bearing the biggest burden of the impacts of weather disturbances and health related outcomes for themselves and their families. They need to strengthen their own physical, emotional and mental preparedness to continue the work to heal the planet. Project Dandelion’s work here has been to seek partnerships with communities of leaders whose strength is sustained by generations of knowledge and practice–our indigenous “elder sisters”. I wrote about our first such convening in Sierra Nevada and share the link again here, with the promise that we will return to the indigenous leaders to observe the quiet sustained power of true connection to Mother Earth, and what is needed to protect, conserve, restore and how to heal and regenerate ourselves and the planet. More gatherings in these sacred places and spaces with indigenous women are planned.
Project Dandelion also partnered with a regeneration team at Now Be You of real life sisters, Lenora, Ieva, & Egle, with their curation and experience, convened a special women's gathering in Ibiza, an island infused with the feminine spirit and with some impressive feminist leaders. I will share more about that transformative experience in the next newsletter, along with an invitation to our second curatorial partnership with Rancho la Puerta, one of the world’s most respected wellness retreats in Northern Mexico. We provide speakers and this woman founded and led beautiful 80 year old retreat provides an inspiring array of programs and practices to heal body, mind and spirit.
All of this–participating in global conferences, convening our own forums as well as shaping new opportunities for self restoration are all part of what we do to support resilience through challenging times while also providing pathways and opportunities for sistering–connecting to optimize each other’s strength for a collective power that can and will create the world we want to live in and the world we are working to shape, together.
That is Project Dandelion’s promise: to help make sense of complexity, remove barriers to support and investment, and protect the spaces where deep listening, authentic connection, and courageous conversation can thrive. We also promise to nurture the leaders who hold up their communities and organizations—the supporting beams who also need care, resilience, and renewal.
Our work is to create the conditions for a stronger, more connected movement: bringing people together to learn, to strategize, and to strengthen one another’s efforts.
And through the practice of sistering, we are building a movement grounded in the simple but powerful truth that we are stronger, connected, working together.
This is what Project Dandelion Does.
Onward!
Pat
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