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2021-12-31-accounts

Charity number: 1170492

Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society Trustees' report and financial statements For the year ended 31[st] December 2021

Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society Annual Report

Contents

Page
Legal and administrative information 1
Trustees report 2
Director’s report 4
Independent examiners' report 13
Statement of financial activities 14
Balance sheet 15
Notes to the accounts 16

Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society Annual Report

Legal and administrative information

Charity number 1170492
Principal address PO Box 75779
London
SW15 9HW
Trustees Mr Hans Tomas Bjorkman
Dr Jonathan Rowson
Mr Ian Christie
Independent Examiner Ash & Associates
Chartered Accountants
First Floor
1A Leadenhall Market
London
EC3V 1LR
Principal Bankers Lloyds Bank plc
25 Gresham Street
London
EC2V 7HN

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Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society Annual Report

Report of the trustees

For the year ended 31[st] December 2021

The trustees present their report and the financial statements for the year ended 31[st] December 2021. The trustees who served during the year and up to the date of this report are set out on page 1.

Structure, governance and management

The charity is registered with the Charity Commission (Registration number 1170492) and constituted as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation. The charity is governed by its constitution dated 30[th] November 2016.

Objectives and activities

The objects of the charity are to seek to advance education for public benefit through:

In meeting these objectives, the trustees have given due consideration to the guidance on Public Benefit issued by the Charity Commission.

Achievements and performance

See the attached report from the Director.

Financial review

The charity received funds totalling £264,982 (2020 - £375,319) and incurred costs totalling £342,919 (2020 - £325,625). At the year end the funds held by the charity amounted to £163,243 (2020 - £241,180).

Reserves policy

At present no specific reserves are maintained, this will be reviewed once the charity becomes more established and has secured further funding.

Statement of trustees' responsibilities

The trustees are responsible for preparing the Trustees' Annual Report and the financial statements in accordance with applicable law and United Kingdom Accounting Standards (United Kingdom Generally Accepted Accounting Practice).

The Law applicable to charities in England and Wales requires the trustees to prepare financial statements for each financial year which give a true and fair view of charity and of the incoming resources and application of resources of the charity for that year. In preparing these financial statements the trustees are required to:

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Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society Annual Report

The trustees are responsible for keeping proper accounting records which disclose with reasonable accuracy at any time the financial position of the charity and enable them to ensure that the financial statements comply with the Charities Act 2011 and the Charity (Accounts and Reports) Regulations 2008. They are also responsible for safeguarding the assets of the charity and hence for taking reasonable steps for the prevention and detection of fraud and other irregularities.

On behalf of the trustees

Dr Jonathan Rowson Trustee

8[th ] March 2023

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Director’s Report For the year ended 31[st] December 2021

2021 was a year afflicted by the pandemic, but also a year in which Perspectiva made significant progress in several areas of its activity, particularly publishing. 2021 included Perspectiva’s fifth birthday, so to mark the moment of consolidation, this report includes an updated statement of the philosophical foundations of the charity’s purpose, to help reaffirm why its activity is of significant public benefit today. If you prefer to go straight to a report on activity, please go straight to the material beginning with ‘1.Insight’ below.

Perspectiva is registered in England and Wales as: Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society (#1170492). Our charitable aims are: ‘To advance the education of the public in general, particularly amongst thought leaders in the public realm on the subject of the relationships between complex global challenges and the inner lives of human beings, and how these relationships play out in society; and to promote research, activities and discourse for the public benefit in these subjects and to publish useful results’.

One way to understand the point of Perspectiva is that we exist to provide a distinctive kind of public education that seeks to give people intellectual and social permission to reimagine the world from first principles through a spiritual encounter with our precarious historical context. We believe the first principles we need to work with stem from two fundamental recognitions:

First, that this is a distinctive historical moment of the kind that only arises every 500 years or so; it is a Kairotic time, ‘a time between worlds’, characterised by the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity and all the ecological, technological and military risks that brings; but co-arising with the nascent, inchoate, rhizomatic beginnings of a revitalised and reenchanted world that is ecologically sane and technologically wise. Second, our world is really three worlds in one, and the world in transition is therefore really three worlds in transition – an exterior world of processes and events, an interior world of thoughts and feelings and a social world of norms and narratives. Perspectiva’s shorthand for these three worlds is ‘systems, souls and society’. Since we see our role as helping to bring about a viable world that is refashioned and reenchanted from first principles, our work is about improving the public understanding of the relationship between systems, souls and society in theory and in practice. That’s the organisational test actually: Does what we are about to do help improve our understanding of the relationship between systems, souls and society in theory and practice?

We feel this integrative challenge is the right focal point because the new world we seek to help to bring into being will need the three worlds it contains to be aligned and mutually reinforcing. Perspectiva was created because we felt the acute need to get beyond two kinds of spiritual bypassing – broadly the error of thinking everything is a spiritual problem or thinking nothing is. Calls for systems change need to factor in the enigmas of self and shadow, but spiritual retreats cannot by themselves rebuild broken political economies; and how do we find the illumination offered by love amidst the heat of ‘the left’ and ‘the right’, the power that sets the agendas, the pain of injustice, the endurance of corruption?

When people speak of transformation, we see that ‘form’ at the heart of it – an underlying organismic pattern of systems, souls and society - with changes in one effecting changes in the others. That view undergirds our work on intellectual leadership and social and spiritual innovation. One way to understand the shift in systems, souls and society is through their overlap with ontology, axiology and epistemology respectively (it’s not a perfect parallel analytically, but it’s still a useful heuristic).

The path from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is broadly a shift in perceived ontology from a world reduced to physical things to a world emerging from (subtle) mental processes; a shift in axiology from a world focussed on

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pleasure-seeking to a world concerned with meaning-making and receptive to the grace of love; and a shift in epistemology from a world of fragmented specialisms and the valorisation of knowledge to a world of expert generalists and the appreciation of wisdom. These shifts of emphasis informed Perspectiva’s inception in 2016 and it helps that they are broadly aligned with the fuller exposition of them in the scholarship of Iain McGilchrist in The Matter with Things, published by Perspectiva in November 2021.

To put it more simply still, we can locate the distinctiveness of Perspectiva as a civil society actor with three trios that it speaks to (Philosophically there are three Ss – systems, souls, and society; Temporally there are three Ts – Triage, Transition and Transformation; and Strategically there are three Ps – Problems, Policies and Paradigms). We are working on all these things, but we have a point of relative emphasis within them that helps guide our actions.

With respect to the philosophical foundations of systems, souls and society we believe they are inextricably linked but we place a particular emphasis on souls, because few others in the civil society space do so, apart from religious organisations that carry their own histories, associations and limitations. We are aware of useful and important distinctions between soul and spirit but use soul as a placeholder for all matters that are broadly spiritual.

With respect to time horizons of triage (minimising risk and harm in the present over the next 1-5 years), transition (working with legacy institutions to adapt to new technological and ecological conditions over the next 5-20 years) and transformation (redesigning and refashioning the world over the next 2050+ years) Perspectiva recognises there are real and present dangers (incipient fascism, ecological collapse, automated AI weapons falling into the wrong hands) and we have many allies working on medium term transition work relating to sustainability especially. We are mostly focussed on transformation, but with significant interests in how visions of transformation inform and are informed by decisions taken with respect to triage and transition – that’s why we half-jokingly describe ourselves as ‘an urgent one hundred year project’ – urgent because it helps (and is perhaps even a matter of human survival) to figure out, and/or allow ourselves to intuit, the pattern/ethos/feeling/sensibility of where we are trying to get to over a hundred years to inform what wise action looks like today.

Finally, in terms of the object of inquiry and sphere or concern, our focus is not on solving immediate problems as such (eg finding homes for rough sleepers) and nor are we concerned to influence policymaking in the near term (eg influence a political party to change its housing policy) but we are interested in the paradigm as a whole (eg what would prefigurative living conditions look like today if we are serious about creating a viable civilisation with over 8 billion people over the next few decades?).

What follows for our activity is that we are interested in soul-work broadly conceived in its full historical (and therefore political and technological) context, and how that informs the gradual process of paradigm change in the second- and third- time horizons. That means our work is a 21st century Bildung (transformative civic, aesthetic and moral education) and that means we have a role to play in articulating the nature of that work and bringing more people to it.

We describe our activity in 2021 below according to the conceptual structure and incipient theory of change relating to insight, praxis, realisation and emergence, but begin with the visual redesign process that is part of all of our work.

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Visual Rebranding Process:

Since its inception, Perspectiva had never invested in its visual identity, but with so much of our work taking place online, during the pandemic especially, it seemed important that we developed a visual language that was worthy of our mission. A trusted contact alerted us to Jim Sutherland at Sutherland Studios, whom we worked with for several weeks to establish the new visual language. We are delighted with the outcome, which is best appreciated by going to our websiste www.systems-souls-society.com. The Design community were also impressed, with two articles praising the work in

The Creative Review and Design Week from which these extracts are taken:

“The designer says that the same words kept cropping up throughout the initial discussions: “Thoughtful, beautiful, playful, experimental and transformative”. The team used typography to embody these concepts. “We initially worked on variations of the name itself,” Sutherland says, before also considering the difference perspectives and angle. These have been combined into variations of the full name, which also prompted the development of the full headline typeface. The broad range of views and content posed challenges for the project, according to studio founder Jim Sutherland. The identity had to “try and encapsulate the range of topics and opinions within one identity system”, he adds. “We focused on the literal idea of multiperspective,” he says. “Lots of views from different angles.” This reflected the organisation’s approach too, as the debates are “not simple but multifaceted and multilayered”, Sutherland adds…Multiple logotypes have been created from setting the type in a variety of directions on an isometric grid. These can be animated to unroll according to different pathways (we do this at the start of our online videos, but an illustration can be seen here.). The studio also designed “contrasting statements” that are used on the website and a set of promotional postcards, with titles like Systems, Souls, Society (the organisation’s strapline), Serious Play and Renegade Scholars. The imagery here is “literally reflective and emphasises shifts in ways of looking”, Sutherland adds. A set of “perspective icons” have also been created for the website and future products which include question marks, ampersands and exclamation marks. The identity is based on three core colours – a soft purple and blue, a brighter pink as well as a more neutral grey tone. The website also incorporated a series of angled shapes to group together articles and essay, which change perspective as people roll over them.

Structuring Activity and Incipient Theory of Change:

Insight, Praxis, Realisation, Emergence

Perspectiva does not have a ‘theory of change’ as such, but that’s not because we haven’t thought about what we are trying to do. Instead, our activity relates to critique, vision and method with a view to helping overcome our collective immunity to change. (If you’re interested in reading more, this post on method goes a little deeper).

As indicated above, our premise is that not only are we in a time between worlds, but the world that is in transition contains three distinct kinds of world, all of which are changing in different but related ways. We live in an objective world of things, processes and events; a subjective world of self, thoughts and feelings and an inter-subjective (and inter-objective) world of discourse, symbols and institutions. These are entirely different kinds of phenomena, but they also co-arise and influence each other. This distillation into three worlds comes from many different places and the language varies (I, we, world; structure, agency, culture; infrastructure, social structure, super structure) and in recent years the main proponents include Karl Popper, Jurgen Habermas and Ken Wilber.

The persistence of the gap between understanding and action on major collective action challenges today suggests that meaningful method has to speak directly to our stuckness, our scandalous inertia, our immunity to change; and it can only do that if it is grounded in a recognition of the dynamic relationship

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between what is changing outside us, inside us and between us; as well as the abundant forces of inertia and resistance that characterise the human condition. When we look closely at how inertia works, how it shifts between systems, souls and society and thereby hides from itself, it is striking that so little work in the world today explicitly acknowledges the importance of the relationship between these different worlds. This is also why the main short descriptions of Perspectiva’s purpose is that we seek to overcome immunity to change in a time between worlds by understanding the relationship between ‘systems, souls, and society’ in theory and in practice.

To grasp the relationship between systems souls and society in theory and practice, we believe need Insight, Praxis, Realisation and Emergence. We need Insight to highlight, describe, elucidate, experience, analyse and communicate the relationship between the three worlds in a range of contexts (contexts, as opposed to mere events or situations, are characterised by their three-world nature – how things are, how they are experienced and how they are communicated) and the relationship between contexts (what Nora Bateson calls ‘transcontextual awareness’). But since immunity to change is the target, insight alone is not enough due to the well-known gap between knowledge and action, or more precisely knowing that and knowing how. We need to connect insight to action, theory to practice, with forms of social and spiritual innovation, which is why Perspectiva is also about praxis. In a sense, Insight and Praxis are where our outputs are about creative leadership – new ideas and new practices, and that’s what we want to teach/share/communicate through Realisation (our interpretation of ‘Bildung’) but also what we want to see come to life in cultural and institutional form in Emergence. (Another conceptual structure we sometimes use that does similar work is ‘perspective, praxis and poeisis’ which in plain language is about getting real, becoming real and making real respectively.) I will describe our activity since 2019 with the Insight, Praxis, Realisation and Emergence framework in mind.

1. Insight:

Perspectiva Press: Soul Food for Expert Generalists.

One way to describe Perspectiva’s purpose is that we offer intellectual and social leadership on how to improve understanding of the relationship between systems, souls and society in theory and practice. The praxis of writing, and writing (and editing) well, is a key part of that leadership, but there is an open question about the best genres and modalities of the written outputs; newsletters, social media posts, reports, blogs, essays, books. Even though the world is ‘going digital’ we decided to commit initially to the relatively old-fashioned forms of essays and books. It is unusual for a charity like Perspectiva to become a publisher, even a small one, but we value books as dignified cultural artefacts with their own kind of analogue power, and we believe ideas travel further and connect more deeply when they are rooted in the mandate of a publication designed to last for years, not merely moments. We also saw a gap in the market for books that specialise in the kinds of integrative and imaginative sensibilities that speak to the challenges of our time.

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Perspectiva’s co-founders had some experience of publishing, but not much, so we initially partnered with Whitefox, who specialise in helping people and organisations with the production (editing, copyediting, proof reading, cover design, ISBN, typography, printing) and distribution (including storage, accountancy, marketing) of books. This worked relatively well for Tomas’s book, but while considering the subsequent publishing round below we began to think we could do it in a more cost-efficient way ourselves. With hindsight, this was a questionable decision, because it significantly slowed down the process and took up significant amounts of organisational capacity, which in turn slowed down other aspects of our organisational development. Nonetheless! Finally, in June we published five books and here’s a short description of each:

The Entangled Activist: Learning to recognise the master’s tools by Anthea Lawson. A seasoned campaigner on how your sense of power and possibility changes when you realise ‘getting the bastards’ is not working.

The Politics of Waking Up: Power and possibility in the fractal age by Indra Adnan. A psychosocial therapist on refashioning politics by meeting people where they are.

Unlearn by Hanno Burmester. A compass for societal transformation, arising from the personal testimony of coming out in the shadow of Nazi Germany.

Collective Wisdom in the West: Beyond the shadows of the Enlightenment by Liam Kavanagh. A Cognitive Scientist and Contemplative on the nature of ‘collective wisdom’ and what we need to do to get there.

Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and emergence in metamodernity . Authors include Jonathan Rowson (ed), Layman Pascal (ed), Zak Stein, Bonnitta Roy, Daniel Gortz, Lene Rachel Andersen, Sarah Stein Lubrano, Minna Salami, John Vervaeke & Christopher Mastropietro, Tom

Murray, Mark Vernon & Jonathan Jong, Siva Thambisetty, & Brent Cooper.

The first four of these books are all about a relationship between the spiritual and the political, see through the prism of personal experience and development. The compilation will hopefully be the first of several ‘dispatches from a time between worlds’ – a way of building intellectual community. The origin story of each book is quite distinct, but hopefully shows Perspectiva’s role in manifesting good work.

Anthea’s book began in a meeting between us, followed by a funding application to The Emergence Foundation to create a project initially called ‘beyond activism’ which included time for a range of interviews and workshops that informed the book and made it the success it has become.

Becoming a publisher was a bold move, and we have often had doubts about whether it was wise, but The Entangled Activist - has sold well and along with The Politics of Waking up it was named as one of the books of the year (2021) by the prestigious Times Literary Supplement.

Moreover, there is a saying: “If you build it, they will come”, and that appears to have happened here. To our surprise and delight, when Iain McGilchrist decided not to proceed with Penguin Allen Lane (perhaps the most prestigious publisher of intellectual/academic non-fiction) because they required him to reduce the book length by more than he was willing to; and he had planned to self-publish, he became aware of Perspectiva Press at just the right time. To publish a book that is arguably of worldhistorical importance is of course a huge coup for a small organisation with a new publishing arm.

Plans for the next phase of Perspectiva Press include consolidation in relation to E-books and audiobooks. We now need to establish a revenue model so that we can make the relationship between the upfront investment in a book and its prospective revenue clearer. In a more substantive sense, we are currently considering several manuscripts for publication and exploring possible themes for the next Dispatches compilation.

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‘Essays by Humans’

In addition to books, Perspectiva also publishes edited and designed essays that can be consider ‘deluxe blog posts’. In our experience they carry more authority than mere blog posts, and over time we anticipate publishing with us will carry some kudos. We are also committed to the essay as a genre, particularly in the age of artificial intelligence being able to write essays well. What makes our offering distinctive is that the authors are asked to speak directly from their vantage point and life experience on the matter at hand – we do not want to publish ‘views from nowhere’. We believe in the Carl Rogers maxim: “What is most personal is most universal” and encourage our authors to speak from their own experience in a discerning and compelling way. Our publications in 2021 included the following:

  1. Tasting the Pickle: Ten Flavours of Meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilization. By Jonathan Rowson, February 2021

  2. Finding Virtue in the Virtual by Tom Chatfield. February 2021.

  3. What is this? The Case for continually questioning our online experience by Dan Nixon. March 2021

  4. Metamodernism and the Perception of Context: The Cultural between, the political after, and the mystic beyond. By Jonathan Rowson, May 2021

  5. The Equality Complex: by Liam Kavanagh, September 2021.

  6. Can Emergence by our Saving Grace? Anna Katharina Shaffner, October 2021

  7. Spiritual Intelligence: What it is, why it’s needed and how it might return by Mark Vernon, October 2021.

  8. What Next on Climate? The need for a new Moderate Flank by Rupert Read, October 2021. This essay led to the creation of a new organization dedicated to building ‘A Moderate Flank’

2. Praxis

We have many praxis-related ideas that have yet to properly surface, and our most tangible offer in terms of Praxis is The Antidebate, for which we successfully raised funds from the John Templeton Foundation. Our most recent filmed attempt gives a clearer idea of what we are now trying to achieve, and this was theorised in a blog post: Bad Debate, Good Debate, and Antidebate.

The antidebate is a form of praxis arising in the context of the meta-crisis that can be defined in many ways, but one of which is particularly pertinent to the praxis as we’ve designed it. According to Alexander Bard’s interpretation, we face three main converging crises that underlie all the others, a crisis in Logos (limits of reason, less care for truth, challenge of sensemaking and sound decision making), a crisis in Mythos (the story of who we are is in question, the meaning of life is no longer a given, our operative myths and metaphors no longer align with reality) and in Pathos (the world is full of suffering, self-harm, abuse of power, systemic oppression, ecocide, sociopathy, anxiety, depression, racism, poverty, violence, cruelty; and while statistics can be used to show many things, pathos is not going anywhere, given the context of ecological breakdown, and economic and bio-precarity. If poor debates reflect the crisis in Logos, and good debates help to mend that, the antidebate is an attempt to connect the challenges to Logos with the challenges in Mythos and Pathos.

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The antidebate is a form of social inquiry worthy of the character of this time between worlds and the meta-crisis. More precisely it is about the participatory knowing of deep democracy, in which we experience collective sense-making and choice-making through a simulated encounter with the nature of ‘the impossible we’. The aim is not to find a consensus position, but rather to create what Robert Kegan calls ‘optimal conflict’ in a way that helps to outflank platitudes and see ourselves and others more clearly. The active ingredient of the antidebate is the problematic set of issues embedded in the question, and the aim is not so much ‘solving a problem’ as ‘allowing a problem to solve us’.

We have developed a methodology that moves from

  1. Selecting an initial question/prompt designed to be rich and provocative and in some sense resonant or timely. EG: Is War Natural? Or If peace is the way, we will always have violence.

  2. This question is then the central prompt for an online Polis survey which serves to ‘warm up’ prospective participants, as well as showing the richness of the question and the range of views and interpretations of it.

  3. The survey gives rise to partially analysed data, which helps to distill the original question into major thematic issues and highlights the areas of convergence, divergence and ambivalence.

  4. We begin the session with a brief overview of what we are doing, why, and what to expect.

  5. The first phase is called ‘tableauing’ in which we draw attention to the major thematics from the polis data, and ask people present (30-60) to show where they would place themselves in terms of strong agreement on one side and strong disagreement on the other; and then to specify their sense of how much that issue matters to the main question/issue at hand. That means six different snapshots showing divergence, convergence and ambivalence of viewpoints in the room, and in each case people are asked/interviewed by a facilitator (of which there are currently three)

  6. We then ask people to reflect on what they think is happening – ‘what’s this about?’ and describe the range of feelings and viewpoints in the room, and why the divergence might be the way it is. This phase often highlights some tension between what people think and what they feel, and it calls into question matters of identity with respect to the question(s) at hand.

  7. We then send people off for a break, asking them to reflect and come back and take a stand on something they feel particularly strongly about, in an attempt to steer the conversation and bring people with them. We also make it clear that people who feel disengaged or tired or unsure are welcome to sit it out around the edges of the room, but are asked to

  8. This phase is called ‘swarming’ and it enlivens the room. After people ‘take a stand’ on a particular issue, others are allowed to join them. This process keeps happening until nobody wants to move or talk anymore.

  9. At this point we turn our attention to those who are disengaged, who have opted out, and we ask them to say what they are missing. We give each of the remaining swarms a chance to speak to that, and bring them on board. Once that is exhausted by say to the swarms that they have things in common (a desire to speak, to join, to move) that the disaffected don’t have and the room divides into those engaged in the process and those who are disengaged. We bring people’s attention back to how this process began and the original question.

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  1. We ask people to place themselves on a line again, in terms of whether they agree/disagree with the question at hand and we speak to those who have moved and asked why, and those who have stayed and asked them why.

There are three plans for the antidebate. First, to establish the main elements of the offline form and practice 2-3 more times. Second, use the learning of the offline form to inform a method that works online. This method is likely to be very different in its form and sequencing, but it should have similar aims and underlying principles. This method might be quite ‘big’ in that we plan to broadcast it through the media assets of what was formerly Rebel Wisdom. Third, preparing a manuscript for Perspectiva Press that will be a theory and practice of the antidebate, and we hope it might be something that will appeal to schools and universities, amongst others.

3. Realisation

Our work on realisation has taken on one tangible form (the annual festival) but it is a much broader thematic, and will eventually become bigger due to our plans for online courses. Realisation is our rendering of the Germanic term Bildung which is a form of civic, moral and aesthetic education. The book, The Nordic Secret is part of Perspectiva’s hinterland, and in an invited essay for the University of Surrey in 2019, I made the case for Bildung as an indispensable part of any effective response to the challenge of creating sustainable prosperity at scale. The term does not work well as an attractor in English however, and on advice we settled on realisation as the best working alternative. The term has three main meanings for us: to get real (perspective), to become real (praxis) and to make real (poeisis) and we plan for our flagship course(below) to show the value of growing into these aspects of realisation together.

The Realisation Festival is a partnership between Perspectiva and St.Giles House in Dorset with the theme of ‘unlearning and reimagining’ and is now in great health. We took a while to get started properly due to Covid, but it now looks like it will be a feature on the UK festival circuit. The original case: What’s the point of the Realisation Festival? has been somewhat superseded, but shows the underlying rationale. Here’s an extract:

“The Realisation Festival is a three-day non-profit event about the soul, by which we mean the experience of being human; and it’s for the benefit of society, by which we mean it is grounded in a gravity of purpose that goes beyond individual attendees and is befitting of this historical moment. We call it a festival of unlearning and reimagining because the programme has been conceived and designed to help participants collectively experience ‘the post-conventional imperative’. We believe the overarching early 21st century conundrum is not so much about problem solving or policy innovation, but primarily a challenge of perception and imagination. The most fundamental task is to help each other to reorient our life, work and sensibility towards a view of the world that is post-tragic (hope on the other side of despair) post-growth (new societal purposes) post-rational (ways of knowing that transcend and include the intellect), post-exploitation (reflective about the uses and abuses of power) and posttribal (togetherness in a world of love and power; an expansive ‘We’ is sought, but neither presumed nor coerced).

The event stems from a partnership reflective of the combination of support and challenge required for any transformation in outlook or disposition; it is hosted in the comfort and beauty of St Giles House, with an exacting programme of activities and discussions designed and curated by Perspectiva. The focus is on what happens over three days in the early summer, but much of that will be recorded for wider dissemination, this is the inception of a new tradition, and there will be satellite events between festivals.

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4. Emergence

The Emerge project was initiated in 2018 by The Ekskäret Foundation in Stockholm, the CoCreation Loft in Berlin and Perspectiva in London. We noticed that across Northern Europe many people working in a diverse range of fields – in media, education, enterprise, technology, arts and politics – shared an emerging sensibility (see below) that went beyond these particular fields and highlighted connections between them. Such people often had several digital homes but typically they housed relatively limited remits and sectors and geographies, and we noticed a need to bring these tribes together in a much larger tent.

Inspired in part by the success of Rebel Wisdom in reaching mostly male meaning-hungry postliberal audiences disaffected with legacy media, Emerge was initially conceived as a relatively feminine post-progressive counterpart, informed and inspired by the idea of emergence and the open question of what is emerging. The name Emerge is inspired and informed by the meaning of emergence , particularly the way it highlights the possibility of a different intentional stance towards the world; one that is grounded in receptivity, intuition and subtlety rather than ideology, reason and force. We (and yes, it might be an impossible we ) are informed by the scale of the meta-crisis and we are not politically naïve, but some call it a spiritual perspective in the sense that it’s less about imposing our wills than listening deeply to what we appear to be called upon to be and do.

Emerge gradually become an image and brand, a website (www.whatisemering.com), a network (by loose affiliations and on Mighty Networks), and a series of gatherings (Berlin in 2018 and 2021, Kyiv in 2019.

The Emerge Berlin gathering in October 2021 was in many ways a great success, attended by 150 social entrepreneurs, artists, activists, and academics from around the world. This event led to the creation of several generative connections as well other Emerge gatherings in other parts of the world (e.g. Austin, Texas in 2022). The Emerge project made further significant strategic and practical strides in 2022 that built on the Emerge Berlin gathering, which will be detailed in the next annual report.

Overall, Perspectiva ended 2021 with clarity over its sense of identity, purpose and an increasingly respected and established body of distinctive activity.

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Independent examiner's report to the trustees on the unaudited financial statements of Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society.

We report on the accounts of Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society for the period ended 31[st] December 2021 set out on page 14 to 17.

Respective responsibilities of trustees and independent examiner

As the charity's trustees you are responsible for the preparation of the accounts, you consider that the audit requirement of section 144 of the Charities Act 2011 (the Act) does not apply and that an independent examination is needed. It is our responsibility to examine the accounts under section 145 of the Act, to follow the procedures laid down in the General Directions given by the Charity Commission under section 145(5)(b) of the Act, and to state whether particular matters have come to our attention.

Basis of independent examiner's statement

Our examination was carried out in accordance with the General Directions given by the Charity Commission. An examination includes a review of the accounting records kept by the charity and a comparison of the accounts presented with those records. It also includes consideration of any unusual items or disclosures in the accounts, and seeking explanations from you as trustees concerning any such matters. The procedures undertaken do not provide all the evidence that would be required in an audit, and consequently we do not express an audit opinion on the view given by the accounts.

Independent examiner's statement

In connection with our examination, no matter has come to our attention:

...........................................................

Ash & Associates

Chartered Accountants First Floor 1A Leadenhall Market London EC3V 1LR 8[th] March 2023

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Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society Annual Report

Statement of financial activities For the year ended 31[st] December 2021

Notes
INCOMING RESOURCES
Donations recieved
Grants received
2
Events
Publications
Bank interest
Total incoming resources
RESOURCES EXPENDED
Office Rent
Staff costs
3
Consultants & researchers
Event Costs
4
Office & IT Costs
Publishing of materials
Recruitment costs
Accountancy fees
Legal fees
Bank charges
Total resources expended
NET SURPLUS/(DEFICIT) FOR THE YEAR
Total funds brought forward
TOTAL FUNDS CARRIED FORWARD		 2021
£
3,312
220,976
35,703
4,952
39
264,982
-
147,653
90,405
67,197
5,715
28,399
-
2,250
763
537
342,919
(77,937)
241,180
163,243		 2020
£
-
373,673
1,131
474
41
375,319
3,025
75,197
138,122
87,638
818
18,140
680
1,662
-
343
325,625
49,694
191,486
241,180

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Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society Annual Report

Balance sheet as at 31[st] December 2021

2021 2020
Notes £ £ £ £
FIXED ASSETS
Investment in subsidiary 5 23,289 23,289
CURRENT ASSETS
Cash at bank and in hand 145,758 219,091
CURRENT LIABILITES
Accrued expenses (1,980) (1,200)
Social security and other taxes (3,824)
NET ASSETS 163,243 241,180
FUNDS
Unrestricted fund 163,243 241,180
TOTAL FUNDS 163,243 241,180

The accounts were approved by the trustees on 8[th] March 2023 and signed on their behalf by:

Dr Jonathan Rowson Trustee

Mr Hans Tomas Bjorkman Mr Ian Christie Trustee Trustee

Page 15

Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society Annual Report

Notes to the accounts For the year ended 31[st] December 2021

1. Accounting policies

1.1 Basis of accounting

The financial statements of the charity, which is a public benefit entity under FRS102 are prepared under the historical cost convention and in accordance with FRS102 “The Financial Reporting Standard applicable in the UK and Republic of Ireland”, “Accounting and Reporting by Charities” the Statement of Recommended Practice for charities applying FRS102 and the Charities Act 2011.

1.2 Incoming resources

All incoming resources are included in the statement of financial activities when the charity is entitled to the income and the amount can be quantified with reasonable accuracy. The following specific policies are applied to particular categories of income:

1.3 Resources expended

Expenditure is recognised on an accrual basis as a liability is incurred. Expenditure includes any VAT which cannot be fully recovered, and is reported as part of the expenditure to which it relates.

2. Grants Received
The John Templeton Foundation
The Fetzer Institute
The Society for the Study of Science and Religion
The Scientific and Medical Network
Hans Tomas Bjorkman		 2021
£
158,625
51,551
10,000
800
-
220,976		 2020
£
-
287,429
-
-
86,244
373,673

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Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society Annual Report

Notes to the accounts For the year ended 31[st] December 2021

3. Staff costs
Salaries
Social security
Pension contributions
Average number of employees:
4. Event Costs
Public Events
Realisation Festival
Emerge Network – Berlin		 2021
£
134,782
11,552
1,319
147,653
3
2021
£
2,761
21,000
43,436
67,197		 2020
£
66,000
7,883
1,314
75,197
1
2020
£
1,900
-
85,738
87,638

5. Investment in subsidiary

During the previous year the charity acquired Cocreation.x gGmbH a Berlin based nonprofit making organisation, to make it easier to work with our European network, particularly in light of the impact of Brexit which may make it harder for organisations in the UK to raise funds within the EU.

6. Related party transactions and trustees’ expenses and remuneration

The charity received grants totalling £nil (2020 - £86,244) from Mr Hans Thomas Bjorkman, one of the trustees.

During the year Dr Jonathan Rowson, was employed as the Charity’s full time Director, and received remuneration of £67,125 (2020 - £66,000) and pension contributions of £1,319 (2020 - £1,314), as permitted by the Charity’s constitution and approved by the remaining trustees.

The remaining trustees all give freely their time and expertise without any form of remuneration or other benefit in cash or kind (2020: £nil).

Page 17