About Symbiotic Culture Lab

Symbiotic Culture Lab is an outgrowth of 40+ years of experience in developing practical community tools to transform bioregional community into ecosystems of collaboration.   We learned some very deep, but at the same time very practical methods of building community.  One of our inspirations is the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka, a 60-year-old effort involving 15,000 villages and now active in 5,000+ bioregions. The second is the work we’ve done translating those principles in different urban areas of the West. Two unique features of Symbiotic Culture: first, the foundational importance of universal values and principles in community-based social and economic development. Second, the importance of transforming what we call “tribalized silos” --- the fragmentation of society into competing organizations --- by using a method we call Symbiotic Networks. Over the years, we have received many inquiries about sharing what we have learned with other communities.   In 2022, we have launched trainings to communities around the world, including in the United States, Europe, and Africa to start their own Symbiotic Networks.

Symbiotic Culture Lab connects innovators and experimenters --- pioneers of a new culture. Our audacious vision is a global Commonwealth of Empowered Regional Economies. We work to help build up "micro" bioregional ecosystems, aggregating all of the spiritual, cultural, social, and economic capital within and between existing nonprofits, for profits, government, and social enterprises. We share tools that work on building symbiotic culture at the level of an individual, a neighborhood, and bioregion --- through scalable teams --- pods. And we create alliances with other networks from local to global who are in alignment with Intentional Mutual Benefit in all relationships.

Imagine if there was a simple way to Connect and Amplify the Goodness already happening locally into highly connected networks of community empowerment? We did it, and it works!  We provide training in our unique “social technology” called Symbiotic Networks that can transform “tribalized silos” and fragmentation of sub communities into aligned community ecosystems of organizations.  Symbiotic networks are “scaffolding”, not the building itself. It’s a gentle structure allowing the building to be built. It helps brings the separate tribes together, releasing creative energies and a collaborative culture can emerge.

Let’s pave the road for scalable, emergent solutions. What works in one region works elsewhere as bottom-up grassroots movements being to erupt everywhere at the same time. Thousands of local communities, simultaneously, participate in an unnamed eruption of Spirit and hope — as regional and global networks emerge organically, tied together through a new bottom up, but global trading system, a countervailing power to the centralized global system.