supported by
An Inner Journey to a Future Consciousness
An Inner Journey to a Future Consciousness
Three Horizons and the practice of future consciousness
Connective
Roots
Connective
Roots
Building Capacity for a Regenerative Culture
in partnership with
Building Capacity for a Regenerative Culture
This experiential course is about strengthening the foundational bedding for you and your community, nourishing the soil so the roots can grow strong.
What nutrients create a rich and nurturing shared culture?
How can you encourage your community to flourish?
What promotes a connective culture and allows it to emerge in vibrant, healthy, and abundant ways?
Come explore a nature-based framework that can help any kind of group to thrive: families, workplaces, communities of practice, gatherings, short-term events, or long-term projects.
We’ll introduce key elements, tools, and practices of the Connection 1st (8 Shields) framework that are building blocks for a regenerative community.
Would you like people in your group to express more empathy, helpfulness, creativity, and joy?
To have more awareness, vitality, compassion, and commitment?
Would folks find it easier to accomplish your group’s aims if everyone were feeling more connected and demonstrating qualities like these?
These qualities or Attributes of Connection are what we aim to embody, as well as the metrics for growing a more connective group culture.
During this course we will cultivate practices for embodying these Attributes, with top tips on how your group can benefit.
What can you expect?
Easy ways to attune to yourself, others, and nature.
How to build resilience in yourself and your groups.
Support stepping into transformational and shared leadership.
Deepening your awareness of connection to the living world and natural cycles.
Practices and skills to anchor and embody this knowledge.
Cultural elements and practical tools to incorporate into your daily life.
6 Modules - weekly live sessions.
Each Module provides:
core concepts and key skills.
experiential learning and exercises.
additional materials and opportunities for deepening practice.
interactive online forum.
Key Benefits
Open your awareness to the future potential of the present moment
Get into action in the face of uncertainty
Mobilise your inner capacity to be a source of hope
The Three Horizons Thinking opens a visionary and practical method to articulate sought for future qualities and values, so that measures to bring them about can be deliberately, collaboratively and effectively pursued in the present.
Course details
Starts:
October 20th, 2025
Course format:
Six Live sessions on Mondays from 6 pm to 8 pm UTC.
Price:
200 GBP - Low income
250 GBP - Regular price
300 GBP - Abundant
Duration:
6 weeks
Course Modules
The Social Dimension is one part of Gaia's unique 4D Model, which integrates social, ecological, economic and worldview dimensions to create lasting change.
Module 1
Connecting
We dive right in by looking at how to create a safe and connective container. How can you develop a sense of presence? And a sense of connection? We’ll review the group agreements that support the connective culture of this course. Also: we provide a video/audio of Jon Young describing Connection Modeling and the nervous system.
Invitation to Wales. Brief introduction to the Three Horizons framework. Understanding the voices of the Three Horizons, and what we mean by H2+ and H2-. Bill’s third horizon vision for Three horizons as a shared cultural practice.
Module 2
Mentoring
Next we explore the essential process called Mentoring. How do you cultivate curiosity? Ask good questions? Develop your skill as a good listener? ‘Catch someone’s story?’ And tell the ‘story of the day’?’ Also: we provide a video/audio of Jon Young describing how Mentoring is a key aspect of a connective culture.
How does a tree become a tree? How did the internet become the internet? How does seeing in patterns help us effect change? In this episode we dive into the world of ‘structures and flows’, a core practice of seeing the world through a lens of interconnectedness.
Module 3
Peace Building
We deepen into the lived experience of personal peace. How do you know when you are (and are not) ‘at peace’? How do you return to peace? How do you communicate from a place of peace? Also: we provide a video/audio of Jon Young describing how Peace Building is foundational for any connective culture.
If everything is connected, how do you work with an ecosystem at the scale of change you wish to create? What’s a focal offering and how can we learn about creating one from the humble story of the pocket calculator? Why it’s important to shift from looking at the problems within an ecosystem to what matters within it.
Module 4
Maturing and Life Stages
As we embrace ourselves more fully, we’ll discover how your greatest gifts are often linked to your deepest wounds. How can you transform your wounds into gifts? How might a connective culture support such transformation? How might celebrating or honoring different life stages increase your resilience, build your capacity, and prepare you to face life’s challenges?
What if we had a term for memory but for the future? Perhaps this is future consciousness. The power of imagination in supporting life to unfold in new ways. How to work with the potential of the present moment. How far out should we vision and dream? How do we tune into the timeline for our ambitions? How does looking back help us look forward? And how old will Bill be when his vision for future consciousness being mainstream comes to life.
Module 5
Stepping into Leadership
Next we offer core practices around authentic leadership, shared leadership, and leadership in service to your community. How can you be a good role model, someone who is truly helpful toward others and the world? Also: we provide a video/audio of Jon Young describing how a connective culture can encourage everyone to find their own ways to step into leadership.
The importance of words to Bill and the meaning we make as we live them. The patterns that we stand for and the freedom we have to make small or big acts that stand apart from the current patterns of our lives. Working with challenge, how we show up. Dealing with stage fright with love. The art of facilitation as setting up a field of consciousness in which something emergent can manifest.
Module 6
Cultural Elements
Bringing it all together, we’ll introduce some tools that support reflection and design. How does connection to nature inform a connective culture? How might you begin to introduce cultural elements in your group, even if you are ‘failing forward?’ Also: we provide a link to a free download of Jon Young’s overview of 10 cultural elements that form the core of any connective culture.
What is a dilemma? How to distinguish between a choice and dilemma? How dilemma thinking connects to Three Horizons. Identifying value tensions between the first and third horizons and how to look for the positive value. How Yasu used dilemma navigation to solve her family holiday dispute. What we can learn from ancient Irish myth about dilemmas. Value shifts between horizon 1 and 3.
Meet your facilitators:
Bill Sharpe • Main Facilitator
Bill is a futures practitioner and systems thinker, specialising in the intersection between science, technology, and society. Following a career of innovation in the computer industry he has focussed on helping organisations meet the challenges of a complex and uncertain future. He is known for pioneering the Three Horizons futures practice and is author of Three Horizons: the patterning of hope. Bill is a co-founder of Future Stewards, the home of the Three Horizons Hub, working to build a regenerative future where we meet the needs of all life to flourish within the means of the planet. He is a member of H3Uni and the International Futures Forum with whom he works to build a global commons of futures practice for transformative change.
Yasu Mali • Guest
Yasu has spent the last decade facilitating leadership transformation in service of the earth. She plans to spend the next decade (at least!) supporting the growth of consciousness in humans. Yasu is a strategic director to Naia Trust, an animist steward of capital and a director of Intelligent Life, a platform seeding a new paradigm in human consciousness. She is a co-initiator of the Three Horizons Network, democratizing systems change and futures work. Together with Bill Sharpe, she has trained hundreds of leaders in futures thinking across business, politics, finance, and the third sector. As an Associate at Leaders’ Quest she works with global companies responding to social and ecological pressures. Her great love is Martial Arts which she practices in the North Shaolin Chan Buddhist lineage.
Daniel C. Wahl • Guest
Daniel Christian Wahl is one of the catalysts of the rising reGeneration, one of the original GEESE (founders of Gaia Education), the first author of the GEDS 4 Dimensions and the author of the book Designing Regenerative Cultures and many expressive articles. He works as a consultant, educator and activist with NGOs, businesses, governments and global change agents. With degrees in biology and holistic science, and a PhD in Design for Human and Planetary Health, his work has influenced the emerging fields of regenerative design and salutogenic design. Winner of the 2021 RSA Bicentenary Medal for applying design in service to society. Awarded a two-year Volans-Fellowship in 2022.
Meet your facilitators:
Root Cuthbertson
Root designs experiential opportunities for learning by creating strong containers for the graceful facilitation of group energy. He holds a Master’s Degree in Environmental Education, and certificates in Sustainable Curriculum Design, Participatory Facilitation, and Ecopsychology. He has co-led short courses on regenerative cultures and cultural mentoring for Schumacher College, Findhorn College the ALT program in Thailand, and is a certified trainer in Gaia Education eco-social design. With his wife Deborah Benham, he has delivered trainings on Sociocracy, Positive Leadership, Social Entrepreneurship, and Culture Repair. Former Training Coordinator for Transition Network, he is the co-author and curator of Transition resources on Personal Resilience, Conflict Resilience, Group Culture, and Social Justice. He has been part of teams in the UK offering programs introducing the Connection 1st framework, and has co-led the Connection 1st online courses: “Introduction to Regenerative Community Building,” “Designing for Peace,” and "Pathways to Village Building.” With Jon Young and Deborah, he is co-authoring a series of e-books on regenerative community design. With his ear to the ground, Root’s guiding question is: “What is most needed here now?”
Joyce Peters
Always deeply connected to nature, to Spirit and to sound, Joyce is passionate about how communities can co-create regenerative ways of living together and thriving. She lived in Damanhur community and other co-housing settings, and been part of a team designing an ecovillage in France. Learned Connection 1st content with Deborah Benham and Root Cuthbertson (Regenerative Community Building, Designing for Peace, Pathways to Village Building), as well as Cultural Emergence with Looby Macnamara. Joyce has designed and led a training on regenerative culture (Roots for a Healthy Community) for a group of outdoor leaders. Trained in Transition Training and Gaia Education eco-social design, including Regenerative Cultures with Daniel Wahl, she is working toward my Masters degree in Design for Sustainability and Regeneration. An avid student of Nonviolent Communication, Authentic Relating, Collective Trauma (Thomas Hübl), rites of passage, and sacred ceremony, she is spiritual coach trained by the Mary Magdalene Mystery School, deeply committed to the spiritual ascension process, the awakening and embodiment of Unity Consciousness, and anchoring in eternal peace and presence. A psytrance-lover and divemaster, practices Reiki, breathwork, sound healing, and Trance Dance. Joyce is fully alive, creative, joyful, and curious what comes next!
Jon Young • course contributor
A leader in the field of nature-based education for over 40 years, Jon is a mentor, wildlife tracker, peacemaker, author, public speaker, and storyteller. His seminal works on deep nature connection include What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World (2013), and Coyote's Guide to Connecting to Nature (2007). A presenter at the Sustainable Wisdom Conference in 2016, Jon contributed a chapter on connection modeling to the anthology Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First-Nation Know-How for Global Flourishing (2019). As the creator of the 512 Map, Jon has established a best-practices process for nature connection mentoring and cultural revitalization (formerly called 8 Shields and the Art of Mentoring). A leader within an international network of practitioners cultivating effective connection mentoring programs in communities and organizations, he is dedicated to promoting nature-based cultural regeneration for the benefit of current and future generations. Jon's most recent project is located at the Living Connection 1st Village.
What Our Learners Say.
I realize I am more capable than I had assumed. I am grateful for the learning format to facilitate speedy learning. Our project planning now includes more depth and detailing thanks to this course."
– K. U. S.
The course content was very comprehensive, detailed and practical. I appreciated how the facilitators brought a focus on real-world applications from the very beginning. They both modelled the principles of harmonious and supportive group-working that we were learning."
– N. B.
Freedom and flexibility. Meaningful content. Great facilitation. Inspirational and diverse group of other students.
Loved the mix of self study and live sessions."
– E. C.
Have questions? We’ve got answers.
No previous experience is required. All you need is a passion for community building and collaboration.
The course is designed to fit busy schedules with around 10 hours per week of flexible study. Though highly encouraged, Live Sessions are not mandatory and are recorded to be watched later.
Yes! The course provides hands-on tools you can apply immediately in your community.
A comprehensive programme covering four dimensions of sustainability: social, ecological, economic, and worldview.
No prior experience is required. This course is designed for both beginners and advanced learners. Whether you’re new to sustainability or looking to deepen your expertise, the course provides accessible and actionable content for everyone.
Entirely online with live sessions, group discussions, and self-paced assignments. You’ll have access to experienced facilitators, a supportive learning community, and rich resource materials.
Yes, each dimension can be taken as a standalone course, so if you are interested in specific dimensions, you can take them separately. Enrolling in the full course provides a holistic understanding of sustainability and is more cost-effective.
The Design Studio is the integration piece of the GEDS Full programme that you can join after complete the 4 Dimensions.
Participants have life-long access to the course material. Though the course has a defined length, participants can go back to the material any time after the course completion.
