Between October and December 2019, Spirit Lab facilitated an ‘Oceans Lab’ with 21 participants, who were drawn from 35 applications to attend the Lab. Participants were diverse and all worked in a field connected with Tikapa Moana, including environmental organisations, local government, researchers and business people. The three month process involved a four day residential on Rotoroa Island, two one day hui and connecting online.

The original intent for the Oceans Lab was to use innovation processes to support people to create prototypes to improve the mauri of Tikapa Moana/Hauraki Gulf. This changed as the facilitators realised a need to connect people with themselves (their own mauri or life force) and with the mauri of the Gulf, before they came up with ideas and solutions.

Participants were supported to cultivate their intuition and sense where the mauri wished to take them and how it wished to work through them. Processes included being in the water and measuring its quality through a feeling based process (‘hauora moana’, facilitated by Ocean Spirit), meditation, creative activities, mindfulness and journalling. The innovation in this project was considered to be intentionally working with mauri to support connection with and action for Tikapa Moana.

Challenges were as follows:

• Attracting Maori (14% of participants) and Pacific participants, despite facilitator connections. The application process is being reviewed to help address this.

• One or two people had come to work on their existing project and were not as drawn to processes of connecting to self and mauri.

• The budget of $25k was not enough to run this project and facilitators gave a lot of voluntary time. They had expected to gain other funding but learned that for funders, ‘mauri’ can be an ambiguous concept. As such, GIFT’s willingness to be open to this way of working was highly valued by participants.

The facilitators learned that for many of the participants, the biggest need was to deepen their connection with mauri and the mauri of the gulf to shift the way they work in relation to the gulf, and that is what their projects became. Also, that innovation comes from connecting with the mauri of the thing you are seeking to support (in this case the Gulf), and from feeling, intuition and sensing processes, more than from ‘thinking’ processes.

Another learning is that working with mauri is a new way of being and working for many people, and that it takes a while to make it your ‘norm’. The inner work needs to occur first, then generating ideas and tying them action and practice. Implications for GIFT for this kind of work include facilitating contact with mana whenua, understanding that other funders may not support this kind of work, connecting Trustees with the work of mauri and bringing the GIFT community together.

Here is an article that Andy Kenworthy from the Sustainable Business Network wrote on his experience of the lab. A video of the experience can also be viewed here.

Next steps

Based on a request from participants to continue this work, Spirit Lab made a successful request to GIFT for $25k to help participants embed ways of working with mauri into their work and workplaces. This will occur from March to June 2020 and take the form of tailored workshops and coaching. This ongoing journey of working with mauri and its impact will be evaluated and shared later in 2020.

This team is also running a Climate Lab in the first week of May 2020, focusing on senior leaders and rangatahi/ young people, leaders of climate strikes, Gen Zero and CEOs in philanthropy and government.