Leading from within the web of life
About us
Our vision
Our vision is a future in which everyone knows that we are part of an intelligent, living Earth.
Our aim is to lay the foundations for a new paradigm of leadership and polycrisis mitigation grounded in kincentric ecology, weaving human beings back into the wider web of life - experientially and practically.
Our Story
The spark that became Kincentric Leadership was born in August 2022 at a gathering of researchers, practitioners and activists dedicated to mitigate, navigate and understand the polycrisis. Through conversation, meditation and workshops amongst and with beech, bladderwrack and flint, a group of us found a resonance - a kinship - in our love for life, our openness to many forms of knowing and un-knowing, and our fascination with the mindblowing intricacies and intelligences of the more than human world.
​
That resonance turned into the Kincentric Leadership Through the Polycrisis project, led by Justine Huxley and Anna Kovasna, generously funded by the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, and has become the cornerstone of our work.
Our Inspirations & Teachers
We are grateful to all those who came before to show the way, including Thích Nhất Hạnh, Desmond Tutu, Gandhi, Wangari Maathai, Malidoma and Sobonfu Some, countless tribes of Earth Peoples who have come and gone, and multiple teachers of interbeing including but not limited to Buddhist, Sufi, Hindu, Jain and Shamanic lineages.
We also thank and honour the many teachers still with us exploring what kincentrism means in the 21st century, including Joanna Macy, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Alice Walker, John Francis III, Barbara Smuts, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Pat McCabe, Suzanne Simard, Dennis Martinez, Enrique Salmón, Winona LaDuke, David Abram, Martin Shaw, Paco Calvo, Bayo Akomolafe, Anna Breytenbach, adrienne marie brown, Monica Gagliano, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Leah Penniman, James Bridle, Lyla June Johnson and Sophie Strand as well as the Matés, Shipibo and many other indigenous peoples, Maroon communities, the Ecovillage, Permaculture, Defend the Sacred, Black Feminist Thought, Queer and Decolonial movements, Local Futures, the Yaquerana and Druie rivers, several plant teachers, and many friends and more than human beings we have built close relationships with in our lives.
​
All human life and being is inextricably entangled with and suffused by everything else. This broad commonwealth includes every inhabitant of the biosphere, the animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses. It includes the rivers, seas, winds, stones and clouds that support, shake and shadow us. These animate forces, these companions on the great adventure of time and becoming, have much to teach us and have already taught us a great deal.
We are who we are because of them, and we cannot live without them.
- James Bridle
Our People
Justine Huxley
Project Co-founder
Justine's core passion is working with others to awaken humanity to a deeper understanding of our kinship with all life. As CEO of St Ethelburga's Centre, she ran programmes on spiritual ecology, radical resilience and communion with the wild for over 18 years. She has a PhD in psychology and belongs to a Sufi tradition, where she has led meditation and dreamwork groups for many years. She is also the author of 'Generation Y, Spirituality & Social Change'.
Anna Kovasna
Project Co-founder
Anna is dedicated to exploring community as a tool for resilience, regeneration and liberation. With a long history of leadership within the Global Ecovillage Network, she until recently lived in the Findhorn Ecovillage - a 60-year experiment in inner listening and cocreation with nature. Deeply in love with the world and its myriad inhabitants, Anna now lives in the Pyrenees with her human and nonhuman kin, hoping to support vibrant biodiversity, rich soils and abundant health for all who share her west-facing mountainside.
Kaira Jewel Lingo
Retreat Facilitator
Kaira Jewel Lingo is a much-loved Dharma teacher who has been practicing mindfulness since 1997. She lived as an ordained nun for 15 years, during which time she trained closely with her teacher, Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh. Her teaching focuses on activists, educators, artists, youth and families, and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and includes the interweaving of nature, ecology, embodied mindfulness practice, art and play. She is the author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons in Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption.
Kritee Kanko
Retreat Facilitator
Kritee (dharma name Kanko) is a Buddhist Zen priest, Climate scientist and Educator & Founding spiritual teacher of Boundless in Motion. She is an ordained teacher in the Rinzai Zen lineage of Cold Mountain, a co-founder of Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center and faculty for many organizations for courses at the intersection of Ecology, Justice and Spirituality. She is committed to working in relationship with young adults, permaculture communities, LGBTQ, black, indigenous and other people of color.
Bayo Akamolafe
Advisory Group
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) is rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world and is a widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, and author of 'These Wilds Beyond our Fences'. He is the Founder of The Emergence Network and hosts the postactivist course, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He is the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of the Othering and Belonging Institute (University of California, Berkeley), Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, and Critic-in-Residence at the Otis College of Art and Design (2023).
Danielle Celemajer
Advisory Group
Dany is a thought-leader working at the intersection of human rights, environmental justice and animal justice. A Professor of Sociology at University of Sydney and Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute, she leads interdisciplinary projects for researchers, civil society groups and governments to develop praxes for facing the climate crisis in just and imaginative ways. She lives as part of an intentional multispecies community and is the author of Summertime: Reflections on a vanishing future.
Lyla June Johnson
Advisory Group
Dr. Lyla June Johnston is an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community orga-nizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her messages focus on Indigenous rights, supporting youth, and traditional land stewardship practices. Her PhD focused on how pre-colonial Indigenous Nations produced abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.
Laurie Layborne
Advisory Group
Laurie researches, writes and speaks on the global environmental emergency and explores the leadership needed to transition to more sustainable and equitable societies while contending with the growing destabilisation. He is the founder of Cohort 2040 and a Visiting Fellow at Chatham House, & an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). He has a MPhil in economics from Oxford and a BSc in physics.
Betsy Taylor
Advisory Group
Betsy Taylor has a solid reputation as a philanthropic advisor, social change leader, motivational speaker and problem solver. She has led several non-profit groups and foundations. Betsy works to build the field of regenerative agriculture through grant-making, network development and global convenings about the potential of our lands to sequester carbon pollution while boosting food security and habitat protection.
Pat McCabe
(Woman Stands Shining)
Advisory Group
Woman Stands Shining, Pat McCabe belongs to the Dine (Navajo) Nation. She is a Mother, writer, artist, activist and speaker and her work is driven by the study of the Science of Right Relations. Born to a People who have deep understanding and methodology for Restoration, Pat brings the understanding of Indigenous ways of knowing into discussion and inquiry on Sustainability. Pat is an active participant in Indigenous Peoples gatherings worldwide.
Rachael Petersen
Advisory Group
Rachael is the founder of Earthrise Services, a consulting firm tackling our world’s greatest challenges. With a BA in Anthropology and Environmental Policy, Rachael has worked in remote sites from the Arctic to the Amazon. She has been a Senior Advisor to National Geographic Society and founding Deputy Director of Global Forest Watch, advancing climate change solutions by transforming our approach to food, agriculture, and land use. A practitioner of Zen Buddhism. Rachael is also a visiting fellow at Harvard Divinity School.
The Living Earth
Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old. She is the third planet from our sun and has one moon. She is, so far, the only planet known by humans that sustains life. Along with many indigenous traditions, some religions and a growing number of contemporary scientists, we understand Earth to be a living, intelligent being. We aspire to include her perspectives through observing the natural world, watching global trends, using embodied imagination practices, through prayer, asking and subtle listening.
Our Funders & Partners
Human life is not sustained by its own power. Nature gives birth to human beings and keeps them alive. This is the relation in which people stand to nature. People do not create food, nature bestows it upon us. ― Masanobu Fukuoka
Photo credit: Diane Barker