Austin, June 2022
Carrying the work across the Atlantic – the first North American gathering.
The first North American gathering took place over a weekend in late June 2022, in the event space of Austin's Central Library. Around 160 people attended by invitation – deliberately smaller than the Berlin events. The intention was depth over breadth: to bring the relational quality of the European gatherings into a new geography, and to begin building something that could hold its own weight on the western side of the Atlantic.
The participant list reflected that breadth. Daniel Schmachtenberger and Tristan Harris brought their analysis of civilisational risk and the attention economy; John Vervaeke his account of the meaning crisis; Charles Eisenstein and Jeremy Lent the mythic and ecological dimensions of transformation; Nate Hagens his work on energy and overshoot; Roger Walsh and David Sloan Wilson different scientific frames. Tomas Björkman and Jonathan Rowson attended as co-architects, alongside the main facilitator Pamela von Sabljar.
Field-creation, not just field-finding – what would it take to become genuinely useful beyond our own boundaries?Austin 2022 · the question that remained
What Austin represented, in retrospect, was a threshold. The gathering named honestly what the network risked becoming – a community known only to itself – and asked what it would take to become genuinely useful beyond its own boundaries. The Emerge Institute now exists, in part, because those seeds needed somewhere to grow.
The gathering · in motion
From the weekend