Origin – Emerge Institute

01 – The shape of the work

Emerge was founded in 2018 by three non-profit organisations – the Ekskäret Foundation in Stockholm, Perspectiva in London, and Co-Creation Loft in Berlin – to ask, openly and in public, what was emerging at the edges of philosophy, contemplative practice, systems thinking and cultural renewal. Four gatherings followed across Berlin, Kyiv and Austin, drawing together pioneers in the fields converging on the meta-crisis. Alongside them grew a media platform, a podcast, and a sister relationship with the Inner Development Goals.

What was built was less an organisation than a field – held together by shared seriousness rather than shared doctrine. The Emerge Institute is what that field has now become: a place where the work of the last eight years takes institutional form, and where the question that animated all of it can be carried deeper.

02 – The gatherings · four moments

Berlin 2018 – Jonathan Rowson presenting the Perspectiva Press and Spiritualise titles on stage. — Berlin · 2018Jonathan Rowson · Perspectiva

i 2018 Berlin · November

The first gathering – on the anniversary of the Wall.

≈ 100 participants Kreuzberg & Neukölln 9–11 November

Three non-profits – Ekskäret Foundation, Co-Creation Loft, Perspectiva – convening pioneers in complexity, philosophy, spirituality, psychology and sustainability. The whatisemerging.com platform launched the same weekend.

Daniel Görtz · Jonathan Rowson · Indra Adnan · Erik Fernholm · Joana Breidenbach · Bettina Rollow · Caroline Stiernstedt Sahlborn · Pamela von Sabljar · Tomas Björkman.

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Kyiv 2019 – a workshop circle at IZOLYATSIA, with the prompt 'What is your DNA and your Membrane? What is your True North?' projected behind. — Kyiv · 2019IZOLYATSIA workshop

ii 2019 Kyiv · September

The frontier land.

≈ 180 participants IZOLYATSIA · Dnipro riverbank 27–29 September

A converted industrial space on the Dnipro, a city still living the aftershocks of the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. One of the last large European gatherings of its kind before the pandemic changed everything.

Elizabeth Debold · Thomas Steininger · David Fuller · Maria Clara Parente · Jan Artem Henriksson · Daniel Görtz · Elke Fein · Daniel Thorson · Joana Breidenbach · Halea Isabelle Kala.

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Berlin · 2021bUm · Kreuzberg

iii 2021 Berlin · October

Returning in person – and the question of an 'impossible we'.

≈ 250 participants bUm · Kreuzberg 9–10 October

The first in-person gathering since Kyiv. Two days at bUm in Kreuzberg, holding the question of a coherent collective we across three registers: imagination, presencing, and practical innovation.

John Vervaeke · Elizabeth Debold · Phoebe Tickell · Indra Adnan · Anthea Lawson · Indy Johar · Jamie Bristow · Mariana Bozesan · David Fuller · Jan Artem Henriksson · Joana Breidenbach.

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Austin · 2022Daniel Schmachtenberger · Indy Johar

iv 2022 Austin · June

Emerge crosses the Atlantic.

≈ 160 participants Austin Central Library Late June

A weekend in the event space of Austin's Central Library – depth over breadth. The gathering named honestly what the network risked becoming, and asked what it would take to be genuinely useful beyond its own boundaries. Field-creation, not just field-finding.

Daniel Schmachtenberger · Tristan Harris · John Vervaeke · Charles Eisenstein · Jeremy Lent · Nate Hagens · Jamie Wheal · Roger Walsh · David Sloan Wilson · Liv Boeree · Indy Johar · Joe Edelman · Layman Pascal.

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Kyiv 2024 – a violinist performs beneath the ancient frescoes of St Sophia Cathedral before a seated circle. — Kyiv · 2024St Sophia Cathedral

v 2024 Kyiv · Autumn

A pilgrimage to the frontier of the future.

Five days Kyiv · Borodyanka · Bucha Autumn

Five years after Emerge first gathered in Kyiv, the network returned – not as observers but as pilgrims into a country at war. Held with Ukraine's New Thinking School, the gathering moved through the city's ancient treasures and the fresh scars of war. Presence as solidarity; proximity as a condition for genuine learning.

Volodymyr Yermolenko · Oleksandra Matviichuk · Ukraine's New Thinking School · the Ukrainian integral community.

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03 – The platforms

The field, thinking out loud.

Two parallel artifacts – different forms, same project. Where the gatherings happened in rooms, the platforms made the inquiry public.

iThe publication

whatisemerging.com

A platform for a field in formation · 2018 → present

For eight years, the intellectual home of the network – never a magazine in the conventional sense, but a shared space of inquiry for a field still discovering itself. Essays, interviews and reflections taking seriously the conviction that what is missing is not better policies or smarter institutions, but a deeper quality of human understanding.

Jonathan Rowson · Zak Stein · Tomas Björkman · Elizabeth Debold · Nate Hagens · Jeremy Lent · Layman Pascal · Phoebe Tickell · Anna Katharina Schaffner · Anne Caspari · and many others.

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iiThe podcast

Emerge: Making Sense of What's Next

119 episodes · Hosted by Daniel Thorson · 2015 → 2025

One conversation at a time, for a decade. Created and hosted by Daniel Thorson – a Buddhist monastic at the Monastic Academy in Vermont – whose quality of presence, rather than preparation or performance, made the conversations come alive. He attributed it to silence. Listeners noticed.

The podcast was never formally a production of the Emerge project. It was Thorson's independent work under the Emerge brand, running in cooperation with the platform from 2019 onward – part of the same field, animated by the same questions. Its archive remains one of the richest single records of what this network has been thinking about, and why it has mattered.

Daniel Schmachtenberger · Robert Kegan · Zak Stein · John Vervaeke · Nora Bateson · Bonnitta Roy · Jordan Hall · Thomas Steininger · Jeremy Lent · and many others.

Listen to the archive

The series

Among the most significant intellectual contributions to emerge from the whatisemerging.com platform is a seven-part series of essays by Jonathan Rowson, written in the summer of 2022. Under the title Now That You've Found the Others, What Are You Going to Do?, Rowson – philosopher, chess grandmaster, and co-founder and director of Perspectiva – offered the most sustained attempt anyone in the field had made to answer the question the gatherings kept circling: not what is emerging, but what is actually required of the people who feel its weight. Moving through epoch, method, ethos, resolve, goal and entelechy, the essays remain the sharpest available map of the territory the Institute now inhabits. They are where field-building begins to become something more serious than finding each other.

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04 – Emerge, IDG and Cohere+

Emerge has not worked alone.

Investigating coherence for social change – a three-year Erasmus+ research consortium, two IDG Summit cycles, and a body of intellectual work that surfaces the questions the Institute now exists to take further.

Emerge has never worked alone. With Ekskäret Foundation, the Inner Development Goals initiative, and a European Erasmus+ consortium, Emerge spent three years – through the Cohere+ research project and workshops at the IDG Summits in Stockholm in 2023 and 2024 – investigating what coherence is, and how it arises among people working for change. The work also surfaced the unfinished question the Institute now exists to take further. That chapter now has a home of its own.

Read the full account – Emerge IDG 2023–2025 · Stockholm

05 – What the field taught us

What the field taught us.

Eight years of gathering, publishing and convening taught us something that could not have been assumed at the outset: that the transition we are living through is not inevitable in its direction. It is emergent – genuinely open, genuinely uncertain – and its outcome depends, in ways that are measurable and addressable, on what human beings bring to it. Civilisational breakdown and civilisational breakthrough are both real possibilities. The difference between them is not primarily a matter of policy, technology or resources. It is a matter of human capacity.

This is what the work kept returning to, across gatherings and continents and traditions: the same gap, named differently each time. The people in the rooms understood the crisis. Many were working on it with intelligence, commitment and genuine skill. And yet something was consistently missing – not in the analysis but in the formation. The depth of being that the moment requires was not yet equal to the depth of the challenge being faced.

What the field revealed, specifically, is this.

i.

Capacity precedes change.

The inner capacities that make wise action possible – the ability to hold complexity without collapsing it, to remain open under pressure, to act from something beyond the defended self – are not byproducts of good intentions or intellectual understanding. They are developmental achievements that require deliberate cultivation. Without them, intelligence becomes manipulation, collaboration fragments, and the most sophisticated frameworks in the world produce more capable people inside the same story.

ii.

The transition requires openness to emergence.

What comes next cannot be designed from within the logic of what is ending. It has to be participated in – with enough interior steadiness to stay present to what is actually arising, rather than retreating into familiar frameworks when uncertainty becomes uncomfortable. That steadiness is not a personality trait. It is something that can be cultivated.

iii.

Different ways of knowing are not optional.

The challenges of civilisational transition exceed what any single mode of knowing – analytical, empirical, relational, participatory – can address alone. Integrating the insights of systems science, developmental psychology, contemplative traditions and cosmology is not intellectual eclecticism. It is a minimum requirement for seeing the situation whole.

iv.

We are shaped by stories we cannot see.

Individuals and societies are formed by worldviews and, beneath worldviews, by mythos – assumptions so fundamental they feel like the texture of reality rather than assumptions at all. Becoming aware of this dependence is not the end of the work. It is the beginning. The modern mythos has brought us to a threshold it cannot help us cross. Crossing it requires both the interior capacity to bear a larger picture and the willingness to genuinely encounter other accounts of what is real.

These are not conclusions the field reached quickly or easily. They emerged across years of serious conversation, and they point toward something specific: not more connection, not more analysis, not more frameworks, but formation – the deliberate cultivation of people whose depth of being is becoming equal to the world they are trying to shape.

That is what the Institute exists to do.

From field-building to formation – the turn the work has always been moving toward.

For eight years a conversation has been unfolding through gatherings, media and relationships. The Institute grew out of that work and gives it a more sustained form.

The Emerge Institute