Thriving Networks

How to grow networks where value, money and leadership flow

An 8-week online course that will help you take your collective, community, or distributed organization to the next level and find support from peers to address common challenges around money, value and leadership.

Next cohort starting February 6th, 2025

Express InterestApply NowEnroll Now

Next cohort starting February 6th, 2025

LEARN MOREApply NowEnroll Now

Starting networks is easy, sustaining them is not.

The complex and interconnected challenges we face today demand collective action. More networked, distributed and community-based ways of organizing are needed for this to be possible, and many are leading the way: impact networks, self-organized collectives, place-based communities, and DAOs. Yet too often, challenges around money, power and value flow hold these networks and communities back from fulfilling their potential. If that's you and your network, we have good news is: this is a path many have walked before, and you don't have to walk it alone!

As experienced community builders and network practitioners, we have seen many typical challenges of growing networks. To name a few: power and workload imbalances, tensions between volunteer and paid roles, burnout of core members, developing healthy and effective leadership, attracting sufficient resources and contributions, difficulties speaking about money openly.

We have created this course to help you navigate these challenges. It will support you take your network to the next level and create a space for you to safely explore these topics with a cohort of peers.

Get an overview of the course content and a taste of it here.

Duration

8 Weeks

Cohort Size

Up to 30

Live Sessions

2 hours per week

Time Commitment

4-6 hours per week (incl. live sessions)

Fee

Flexible pricing: 0€-1400€+ (Contribution within capacity)

This course is for you if...

Este curso es para ti si...

You are starting or part of a nascent network that is facing questions of value and money flow for the first time.

You are a network leader or highly active member of a mature network and want to take it to the next level.

You are a curious explorer who wants to learn about this topic in a concrete, applied way.

You are starting or part of a nascent network that is facing questions of value and money flow for the first time.

You are a network leader or highly active member of a mature network and want to take it to the next level.

You are starting or part of a nascent network that is facing questions of value and money flow for the first time.

Your Hosts

Las facilitadoras

Francesca Pick

Francesca Pick

Francesca is an ecosystem builder, organizational explorer and founding partner of Greaterthan. Everything she knows about growing healthy networks and communities stems from over a decade of practice and experimentation. She was a core member of the self-organized communities Ouishare and Enspiral, and has supported dozens of organizations with shared leadership, network governance and community building. She is co-author of Better Work Together and Fellow at Edmund Hillary Fellowship.

David Weingartner

David Weingartner

David is a collaboration catalyst with a passion for supporting transformation journeys, participatory processes, systems practice. He has been part of the self-organized Ouishare community form its early days and co-led its conscious closing process, and brings a broad toolkit with him: systems practice, appreciative inquiry and sociocracy. David teaches on management tools for networked organizations and digital transformation at Munich University.

What You'll Learn

¿Qué vas a aprender?

Each week we dive into a different topic starting from the hosts lived experience in networks. You will apply what you are learning in your own network projects. To learn more about the context and why of this course, check out this article.

After this course, you will walk away with:

  • An in depth understanding of the challenges networks face in terms of how they think about and attribute value, make decisions about money and develop leadership; as well as how these can be addressed
  • Having explored your personal relationship to money and how it manifests in the group context through a variety of practices
  • A toolkit of practices, tools, techniques, frameworks and templates that you can start using immediately
  • New relationships in a high trust group of network leaders who you get support from and keep learning with beyond the course

What to expect:

A great curation of resources on networks, communities and collectives on the topics of value, money and leadership. This is a course about the intersection of systems and personal development. In our experience with networks and collectives, relationships are at the center. We will engage in experiences that will lead you to personal reflection and, if done in a group, these experiences will help you deepen your relationships. We think this is key to sustaining thriving networks.

Networks are complex systems. Please do not expect a linear roadmap or a magic formula. Instead, this will be like a writing course. There are many different approaches to writing. We will share tools, our experiences and reflections. But you have to get to practice and write, write, write. You don’t get better at writing by theorizing about it (end of analogy 🙂). If you want to make the most out of this course it’s necessary for you to experiment with your networks by trying the practices we introduce.

What do we mean by networks and communities?

This course is for what we call "Purpose Networks" and "Impact Communities". This ranges from professional to livelihood-focused networks, online to locally rooted communities, communities of practice or interest, to DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), "neo-guilds" and movements. What they all share is that they have a larger purpose and intention to catalyze action, beyond connecting people and organizations.

We use the terms network and community interchangeably, since the difference between them is often blurry.


Questions? Reach out to us on academy@greaterthan.works

¿Quieres saber más? Escríbenos.

Course Partners

Zebras Unite is a founder-led, cooperatively owned global movement creating the culture, capital & community for the next economy.

ConsciousU: creating conscious tribes. ConsciousU delivers scalable personal development programmes that facilitate collective transformation in organisations.

Schedule & Format

Estructura del curso

The commitment

  • 8 weeks of learning in a cohort of peers
  • Assignments in between weeks, some which you may do with your network
  • 2 hours of online Zoom sessions weekly + the money game + potential extra session with guests
  • 2-4 hours of asynchronous solo work (reading and assignments)

Weekly Sessions

The course contains 8 x 2 hour participatory live sessions, featuring a combination of content, reflection and practice.

Week 1 | What is a thriving network? Introductory session to connect with your cohort and dive into what it means for a network to be thriving.

Week 2 | Crafting Roles & Contribution Pathways
Creating a system where network membership, different levels of engagement and types of contributions are in balance.

The Money Game
An experience to deepen your reflections and learning about your personal relationship to money. Learn more about the Money Game.

Week 3 | Reclaiming Money
Surface and explore your personal stories and myths about money.

Week 4 | Collective Money Practices
Discover how to work with personal money patterns in the collective context. Learn about innovative models for accounting value.

Week 5 | Making Decisions Around Money
Explore the challenges of collective budgeting and financial decision-making, as well tools and practices to address them.

Week 6 | Unlocking your network challenges
Reflect, digest and apply what you have learned so far to your network

Week 7 | Redefining Leadership and recognizing 'Source'
Discover Peter Koenig's Money and Source work, and how to apply it in networks to unlock collective leadership capacity.

Week 8 | Integration & Closing
Walk away with tangible insights, practices and experiments to try in your network

Enroll Now

Ready to Apply?

What's next?

Próxima edición

Next cohort

Our next cohort starts February 6th and runs until March 27th. Live sessions take place weekly, every Thursday at:
4pm-6pm Paris │ 10am-12pm NY │ 11am-1pm Buenos Aires │ 7-9am Los Angeles │

Can't make this time? Learn about asynchronous learning options.

Or let us know about your timezone so that we can register your interest and let you know when a suitable cohort for you will be available.

Pricing: contribution within capacity

We have decided to take a needs based approach* to pricing, because we want this course to be both accessible to all participants and sustainable for us to run as facilitators.

Below you can find several pricing options to choose from, or you can also choose your price with the "Increased Accessibility" option. Our invitation to you, to quote Miki Kashtan, is to “give the most that you can do without overstretching or resentment”.

To help you decide how much to pay, please read this information about our needs to run the course.

It's great to take this course with fellow network members! If you're participating with one or more members of your network, you can reflect this is the pricing of the ticket by subtracting 20/25% of the sustainability option or reflect together what contribution would feel right.

*This needs based approach registration model is based on Miki Kashtan (& NGL) and her course Responding to the Call of our Times.

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Students share their experience

Testimonios

A deeply empowering and transformative experience—a true treasure box for every network nerd. I'm still impressed by the co-creative and safe space created by the hosts.

Jannik Kaiser
Unity Effect

Thanks to this course, I now have the foundation to help take my networks to the next phase and am excited to start working with the tools this course provided!

Viviana Jiménez
Red Mujeres y Sostenibilidad

Highly recommend for anyone starting and scaling a network that wants to clarify how to collaborate, exchange value and honour the principles of cooperation. A practical space to learn with peers, access real case studies, and put the learnings into action during the course timeline.

André Pawan Vashist
Coliberate

A brilliant way to meet other people, share experiences with organisational structure and decision making models, and think through collective solutions to common problems

Jamila Squire, Finance and Funding Coordinator
The World Transformed

I've been in leadership in many different kinds of organizational structures for over 4 decades. I have a master's degree in organizational leadership. I've been involved in the field of networks and 'self-organizing systems' for well over a decade, and all my clients for the past decade have been struggling with leadership in flatter systems.

And yet I found much to value in this training.

The trainers are well-grounded in long experience with networks and the content addresses real and serious challenges networks face. There's a lot of hype and fluff about networks out there, but real insight based in lived experience is still relatively rare. This course fits that description and is well worth taking.

Christine Capra

Greater than the sum

The Thriving Networks Course skilfully locates the balance between personal exploration and practical application. The course is beautifully held, with excellent facilitation, clear structure, and collaborative tools that are accessible and intuitive. In just 8 weeks our group of disparate and diverse participants formed deep collaborative bonds and have cultivated a rich collective sense of support and learning. I would sincerely recommend this course to others, regardless of the scale or scope of their network(s).

Peter Lefort

Transition Network and the University of Exeter's Green Futures Network

Greaterthan Academy is facilitated online learning for people, teams and organizations ready to lead towards the future of work.

Greaterthan Academy is facilitated online learning for people, teams and organizations ready to lead towards the future of work.

Our courses are practice-based, intimate and participatory. It's your entry point into the emergent knowledge and practices that Greaterthan has developed and tested over the past decade.

Our courses are practice-based, intimate and participatory. It's your entry point into the emergent knowledge and practices that Greaterthan has developed and tested over the past decade.

Academy Partners

  • Individual discounts and scholarships
  • Group discounts for business
  • Interest free payment plans
  • VAT Invoices
  • Inquiries for in-house courses

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