Our Methods and Frameworks
Seven Years of Designing from Spirit
Seven years of inquiry, experimentation, and collective practice have given rise to a growing body of methods and frameworks. Each emerged from our encounters across different ways of knowing, and from our commitment to build economic and governance systems that strengthen, rather than displace, the living relationships that sustain us.
Margin-Centered and Spirit-Centered Design
Starting with who. Listening for why.
Every human-made system tends to concentrate power at its center. At the margins, those with the least access to that power often develop meaningful alternatives to sustain their communities, relationships, and lifeways.
Margin-Centered Design begins with these alternatives. Rather than inviting subordinated groups to participate in systems that have excluded them, we explore what becomes possible when these groups bring their distinct ways of knowing and living into a new assemblage of power-with.
Our approach was not intellectual. We came from different spiritual traditions, yet shared a desire to engage the wisdom emerging through our relationships with spirit, ancestors, land, and the more-than-human world. Shaped by our different places in nature, society, and dominant systems, these ways of being came together in a sense of oneness and infinite difference — a fertile bed for innovation.
Spirit-Centered Design emerged as a facilitation framework to protect these diverse ways of knowing and bring them into collective practice.
Through practices such as ceremony, meditation, movement, dreaming, intuition, silence, and collective sensing, we make room for capacities for perception and understanding that mainstream design can degrade or demonize. These are not simply alternative sources of information. They transform how we experience and participate in the world.
Spirit-Centered Design honors the coexistence of oneness and infinite difference. It makes room for mystery and revelation while grounding collective action in consent, shared responsibility, and accountable agreements.
Together, these approaches help us design from the margins, listen beyond the intellect, and discover possibilities that dominant systems have struggled to recognize.
STREAM: A Theory of Relational Value Creation
Tending to how.
In 2023, during a Spirit-Centered Design intensive, our beloved teacher and co-creator, Venerable Bhante Buddharakkhita, shared a vision:
“Generosity flows in a STREAM...”
His vision gave us words and imagery for each letter. Our collective developed this revelation into a framework for recognizing, cultivating, and circulating the forms of value that sustain Life.
Dominant economic systems prioritize what can be measured, owned, exchanged, and accumulated. Yet markets depend upon forms of wealth they rarely recognize: the labor of care, the generosity of ecological systems, the strength of kinship, and cultural and spiritual practices sustained across generations.
Wealth exists before the market gives it a price.
- Sacred Space
- Honoring the conditions in which spirit, relationship, and our full capacities for knowing can emerge.
- Time
- Caring for present needs while holding responsibility for future generations.
- Respect
- Approaching all beings and their differences with humility, curiosity, and reverence.
- Energy
- Cultivating the aliveness, belonging, and generative potential of the collective.
- Attention
- Listening for what is ours to do and acting through trust and shared purpose.
- Matter
- Bringing money, technologies, and material resources into service of living relationships.
STREAM is not a linear sequence. Like water moving through an eddy, value circulates and regenerates.
Rather than treating a community's existing assets as its primary wealth, STREAM recognizes the collective itself, in relationship with Life, as the source of wealth.
Our task is to bring money and material resources into this living field, strengthening the relationships through which care, creativity, and abundance become possible.
KinMaking: Two Pathways to Living Economies
Becoming what our bodies know.
We cannot build economies of liberation while continuing to enact the patterns of domination that organize our existing economies.
Generations of colonialism, industrialization, and market dependence have shaped our institutions, bodies, and relationships. We have learned to compete, distrust, control, and fear scarcity, even when we consciously believe in generosity, reciprocity, and collective freedom.
KinMaking is our practice of recognizing and transforming these patterns. Through embodied experience, relational learning, and the work of rupture and repair, we cultivate trust, generosity, discernment, and shared responsibility.
We are developing two complementary pathways, beginning from profoundly different conditions.
KinHubs
Strengthening What Has Endured
Across the world, communities continue to sustain BioKultural economies rooted in generations of relationship among people, land, waters, ancestors, spirit, and the more-than-human world. KinHubs begin where these living systems have endured.
Through community-directed resources, BioKultural Praxis Labs, and shared learning, KinHubs strengthen and renew the practices communities have safeguarded.
They also develop ways to protect their knowledge and data, exercise their own authority, and engage outside institutions and scientific practices without surrendering the relationships and social technologies from which their knowledge emerges.
KinMaker Returns
Rebuilding Where the Market Has Departed
In other places, extraction, industrialization, displacement, and cultural fragmentation have severed many of the relationships that once sustained collective life.
When capital leaves former industrial towns and cities, people, places, skills, memories, care, and intrinsic value remain. KinMaker Returns begin with this living wealth.
Through gathering, gift, ancestral inquiry, embodied practice, and relational repair, communities can rediscover their capacities for belonging, healing, and collective action.
Rather than recreating an imagined past or borrowing another culture's traditions, people of different lineages develop new practices of interdependence rooted in the places they now share.
KinHubs strengthen living BioKultural economies that have endured. KinMaker Returns regenerate relational economies where their foundations have been fractured.
These pathways often intersect — for example, in the work of preserving Native lifeways on Turtle Island while living in post-industrial mill towns alongside people of many lineages.
Both begin with the same understanding: wealth emerges through living relationships before markets recognize, price, or extract it.
Together, they invite us to practice our way toward economies in which money serves Life, power becomes responsibility, and our collective capacity to care becomes the foundation of wealth.