Plex: 4 June 2025

The Biweekly Plex Dispatch is an inter-community newspaper published by Collective Sense Commons on first and third Wednesdays of each month. Price per issue: 1 USD, or your choice of amount (even zero).

In This Issue

• Reflections Through the Mirror of Facebook: Who Are You? (Stacey Druss)
• DayBalancer: Where Mission-Driven Professionals Find Compatible Opportunities (Jessie Upp)
• Duo Talks: A Common-Sense Collaboration (Jerry Michalski)
• What to Do About the Metacrisis (Ken Homer)
• Lionsberg: Rise With Us (Jordan Sukut)
• More Pix from Valencia (Ken Homer)
• Making 'Place' Mean More (Wendy Elford)

Reflections Through the Mirror of Facebook: Who Are You?

by Stacey Druss

Originally published at Reflections Through the Mirror of Facebook: Who Are You? (Medium).

“Through the Eyes of Facebook: What We Can Learn About Ourselves and Those Around Us”, was an article I wrote back in 2018. To the extent that anyone can accurately remember their feelings at the time of past events, I know my intent was to try to provide guidance that would aid in harmonizing the world that was being reflected back to me.

In that piece, I recounted my experiences on social media and offered some tools to help neutralize what I had perceived as toxic chaos. I attempted to be open and authentic, testing the limits of my own vulnerability with the hope that others would be able to connect. Now years later, I feel drawn to concretize the questions that every one of us are asked to answer in each moment.

Who Am I?

Who Do I Want To Be?

Who Will I Show Up As?

The first question is one whose answer many may never know, and only the most courageous will even seek to answer. The second is more clear and likely the one that aids in the enormous amount of cognitive dissonance that many of us witness. You see, our ego knows when our heart and our behavior is out of alignment. It will work to trick us into thinking it isn’t, just to avoid the fear of recognition. Once something is recognized, it must be addressed. And that requires responsibility.

Who amongst us wants more responsibility?

Surely some of us do. Is that you? Are you prepared for it? Will you work for it? Do you deserve it? Will you accept it or will you leave it to someone else?

Responsibility Deserves Power. It’s the work that is required to keep things in balance and operating at maximum potential. It’s the necessary ingredient in which Trust maintains it’s integrity. And it’s ok to not want it. It’s not ok to give it away to those who are ill equipped to handle it.

Maybe until now we’ve gotten that all wrong. Collectively we’ve given power away to those who haven’t earned it. We’ve allowed those who were unprepared, to take it; by any means necessary. And they have.

Perhaps we didn’t know we were doing it. Had we ever bothered to think about it? How much time do we spend thinking about why we do what we do? Most of us fall into the trap of directing that question towards the actions of others.

And so I ask you again. Who are you? Do you want to be responsible? It’s ok to say “no”, provided it’s the truth. The truth matters. Remember, it’s what sets you free. You do want to be free; right? How hard are you willing to work for that?

DayBalancer: Where Mission-Driven Professionals Find Compatible Opportunities

by Jessie Upp

DayBalancer emerged from a simple truth: those who help others need support too. Founded by Jessie Upp in 2016, we’ve evolved from helping frontline workers prioritize self-care into a full-service talent solutions firm dedicated to collective impact by giving people resources to thrive, one person at a time.

What we offer: Our talent platform automatically connects professionals with compatible opportunities that support multiple income streams rather than just one job, where if it’s lost, families experience economic hardship.

We are flipping the traditional hiring model - instead of endless applications and self-promotion, compatible opportunities find you. We operate as a peer-to-peer circular talent network and partner with community leaders who want better ways to engage with their members by providing the value of a network that matches their members to compatible opportunities such as full-time/temp work, volunteering, pro bono experts, mentors, board members, partners, collaborators, and funding.

We give free network access for professionals seeking impact-driven work. For community leaders, we help increase member engagement by providing them with our system that combines the best of Indeed, LinkedIn, and eHarmony. For hiring managers, they can publish jobs and receive pre-qualified candidates for free, only paying a 15% fee on successful hires.

What we’re working on right now: We are exploring a cooperative business model and a community designed for peer support. For anyone who helped someone get paid work in the network, we want to send them referral income.

What we’re looking for: Connections with community leaders in climate tech, health innovation, and social impact who want to provide real professional value to their members.

Our biggest win: We’ve built a 250+ member talent pool, proving professionals want authentic connections over endless networking.

Looking forward: We’re exploring cooperative models to scale our proven approach and expand our network further. Success means 10,000 thriving mission-driven professionals by 2030.

What keeps us motivated: By helping each person thrive individually, we help our entire network thrive and access changes family trees. When talent connects based on true compatibility rather than polished resumes, we create generational impact.

Duo Talks: A Common-Sense Collaboration

by Jerry Michalski

My better half and I both give keynote speeches for a living, and so far, the more successful we are, the more time we end up spending apart 🥺. Enter the Duo talk: book us both, and we'll each give a talk, plus we'll add in a multiple-choice bonus session. All for less than the sum of our individual fees.

While duo talks will help us travel together more, that's not the main reason we've just launched this offer. The biggie is how nicely our themes and insights weave into and support one another. Where April talks about adopting a Flux Mindset by practicing eight Superpowers that can help all of us cope with the never-ending waves of change that keep breaking over us, I talk about using that wave energy to catalyze changes you want, often by examining your constraints in new ways. I help them rethink their futures, then help make them real.

We're both about seeing differently, trust, and letting go of old beliefs. We've already been helping one another with content and approaches for a long time. This is a lovely level-up for us.

The challenge is that the unit of sale in the keynote market is the single speech. Duos are rare. We're proposing to help event producers schedule an entire morning or afternoon, with less complexity (one contract) and some fee savings. This is the key thing we're experimenting with now, so please send any insights our way.

What to Do About the Metacrisis

by Ken Homer

Project: No formal name, but if it had one, it would be something like: Coming to Grips with the Metacrisis or Learning to Cope with the Metacrisis.

People: My friend Joe Redston who founded something called the Metacrisis Diplomats, asked me if I would be interested in helping to design a series of learning conversations around the metacrisis. So the “leadership team” is Joe and myself.

We, in turn, invited several friends as participants. Out of all the invitees, a total of four were able to accept so there are six of us in the pilot cohort.

Pilot cohort: Consists of 5 two-hour conversations with some light homework or reading prep between sessions. We convened our first call last month and we will wrap in July.

Purpose: Explore how our current level of thinking - which might be labeled something like ModernityOS - needs to change to address the unintended consequences of that mode of thinking has created in the world.

Goals and objectives

• Learn how participants are framing, affected by, thinking about, and coping with the metacrisis.
• Learn what is effective/ineffective about those ways of relating to it.
• Where the edges of people’s thinking is with regard to the metacrisis.
• Explore different levels of action to be undertaken, such as: personal, community, cultural, policy, language, narratives, vocabulary and definitions, somatic responses, nervous system regulation and co-regulation, etc.
• Determine some appropriate responses to working with both the metacrisis and how people relate to it. One way of framing that is to identify those who are in denial, which fall into three categories
  • Pre-tragic - people who do not see a world that is imperiled, just one that needs some minor tweaking.
  • Tragic - those who are waking up to the metacrisis and know things must change but are overwhelmed and perhaps even paralyzed by what they see and the fear that accompanies it.
  • Post-tragic - those who have accepted the harsh reality of the reality that Earth has been in overshoot since 1970 and is now in various phased of collapse and are either wondering how to respond or are actively responding and looking to connect with others who recognize the threats and want to learn to be more effective.

Status and additional details

• Currently a volunteer/unfunded effort.
• Intentionally convened with white men, mostly older, who are located in and beneficiaries of the global north. We want to be able to explore and recognize our privileges on our own terms before we attempt to speak with those who do not enjoy such privileges so that we can be more transparent about them when the time comes.
• Very much a bootstrapped learning experience. We may move forward at a later date with additional offerings but we are holding it lightly now as a learning experience and until it has run its course and we’ve done an appreciative after-action review we are not committing to anything.
• Highly emergent design. We sketch out a general agenda a week before each meeting and then lightly facilitate conversations based around a few provocative ideas to get things going and we follow the threads that seem most alive. The we reflect on what arose during the session that seemed to be enlivening for participants and figure out how to weave those threads into the next session. Our planning sessions are likewise emergent with a lot of deep listening and sensing into what feels most appropriate versus trying to throw in some cool idea or process that either of us might be familiar with. I’ve never designed anything quite like this before. We are truly designing for both emergence and coherence rather than a pre-determined outcome.
• The designers/facilitators and the participants are all well versed (post-tragic) and we went deep into personal territory - which is paradoxically quite universal - in the first two sessions. This is a courageous group I am delighted to be associated with!

Lionsberg: Rise With Us

by Jordan Sukut

Originally published at June 4, 2025 Plex Update (Lionsberg Wiki).

Dear Friends and Allies,

What an extraordinary adventure we are on together!

Our Quest to connect and empower The First Three Percent continues, energized by vibrant new momentum emerging this spring.

Over the past 12 months, we have diligently collaborated with talented tech teams to strengthen the essential tools, infrastructure, and support frameworks required for the success of our broadest shared mission. Following J's initial seed investments over recent years, more than $500,000 from external sources has flowed. Major technical updates will be integrated by the end of June. By this summer, we anticipate a convergence of teams reviewing each other's innovations and charting an exciting shared roadmap forward.

After unequivocally realizing by summer 2024 that effective self-governance no longer exists within the U.S., the Western world, or globally, we decisively withdrew our participation and consent and accelerated our strategic efforts to connect and empower The First Three Percent by December 2026. As of today, a mere 19 months remain to activate and awaken 250 million souls.

As the chaotic energy from the 2024 election supercycle subsided, we embarked upon a vital Spring 2025 quest: hosting intimate 1:1 and small-group briefings, dialogues, and intensive training sessions to share profound revelations and actionable insights from our collective discoveries and progress.

Through this process, we are identifying a dedicated core of individuals prepared to commit at least one-tenth of their weekly availability—approximately four hours—to work synergistically within small, autonomous teams to advance The Mission. Meanwhile, a committed few continue to invest full-time efforts into this sacred work.

In May, urgent messages arrived from several schools in East Africa we previously helped establish. Their food pantries had alarmingly emptied. Swiftly mobilizing emergency resources ensured that children were nourished and teachers reengaged. Four of these schools have courageously chosen to federate with LIONSBERG, recognizing our mutual strength. I have accepted an interim director role to support the stabilization of two of these flagship institutions.

Simultaneously, beautiful transformations continue blossoming: deepening international bonds, a new martial arts program, emerging women's councils, and the rapid weaving of new relationships, inspired visions, and potent partnerships.

To extend our runway and catalyze the necessary participation, my family and I placed our last meaningful asset—our new home—on the market this spring, an act of profound commitment and trust. Now, compelled to confront why children remain hungry for lack of a ten-cent bowl of gruel, and determined to awaken our networks and realign resources into harmonious flow, Lord willing, I intend to be boots-on-the-ground in East Africa by mid to late June. Meanwhile, dedicated local teams will diligently sustain ongoing efforts.

As we press forward on the ground in the United States, Kenya, and Tanzania, and digitally through our international community, we continue working towards the powerful series of transformative books, documentaries, and gatherings essential to awaken and engage The First Three Percent.

If you have not yet deeply recognized and internalized the ongoing genocide affecting tens of millions and the existential threat imperiling billions over the coming years, now is the time to fully awaken. Please.

Should your spirit resonate with stepping beyond observation into tangible support or active participation, please contribute your energy by clicking the link below. Any contribution, regardless of size, is deeply appreciated. As an opening gesture of reciprocity, all contributors in June will receive a complimentary digital copy of the The Great Unveiling upon its summer release.

As many of us sacrifice our last pockets of resources and security, and young leaders, hearts, and stomachs cry out for support from around the world, I pray that We will collectively set significant resources in flow as rapidly as possible.

We and the world need you.
To take a simple next step into active support and potential participation, please respond below. We look forward to seeing you soon!

Love and Blessings,

~ J

More Pix from Valencia

by Ken Homer

Making ‘Place’ Mean More

by Wendy Elford

There is something special about visiting a place. The visit is important to get to grips (the exact words are noteworthy) with what you can do there. ‘Vocation of Place’ is not a straightforward phrase especially if vocation means doing.

In other words, until you are actually there, everything is in your imagination. It is doing by thinking, not doing in practice

So I would like to take on a tour ‘as if’ you were with me visiting a place called Northcote yesterday.

The starting point to remember that everything we know has a starting point in our physical, feeling and experiencing bodies.

So here we go.

Imagine you were on a light rail trip from a major railway station in a big city. The station was called Southern Cross. This city is called Naarm meaning ‘Place’. Naarm is otherwise known as Melbourne in Australia.

The number 86 tram travels northwards; the number 11 or 109 also get us close by via the retail and business strips. The tram is a little microcosm of people with plans. Going places to do things. Some push trolleys, others nurse children. We might walk from Northcote railway station. I have images of all of those transit points.

We go past Merri Creek. This is our main attractor – water and trees, birds and other critters. If you sit there you can see that it is full of vitality. If you look around, you can see that the surrounding places, not so much.

Walking, ambling on the west side of the creek we would go past an environmental park called CERES. They are reaching out for help this month to stay afloat. There is a café there. People are gardening, chatting, children are playing.

Walking, passing the creek on the east side, you would come past houses of different levels of health, past a child care centre, past a business park to a spot that used to be a warehouse.

And it isn’t a storage place anymore. As accommodation though, what can we expect if we were to dwell there? Is it a store house for people on the way to somewhere else? Or stuck? Do they want to stay there or to leave on the way to somewhere healthier?

The sunshine, paths and plants in the central part. A growing landscape but no kids there during the middle of the day. Maybe an ambulance moves through the central mews in the evening. Or a police car at night on the periphery where the light is low or absent at the nearby creek.

This place is only just making sense as a place to live, to dwell.

To look at it as an outsider, imagining a life there, what might I feel I can do?

Might I go across the creek on the swing bridge to my vegetable plot after hours in the dark? Perhaps not.

Might I go to the shops for my friend to pick up her medication. Yes – and only in the day time and with spare time on my hands.

Might I get to know the lizards, even the snakes along the creek. Or go for a run? Or go to the golf course? Perhaps, and all dependent on the time of day, who was around and how much I trusted the spaces to be safe, where were the gates and the ‘activities’ that make me believe I can be safe while there and get home again. And the Body Corporate might set the rules. No gate to the golf course here – too much risk that the wrong people would pass my front door.

It feels like this space has had a close brush with becoming something interesting but in the end it has fallen short. It’s not my happy place. And yet in some ways the stories it can share are the almost, not quite, looking to becoming something greater value we can learn from. What sparks are struck but not quite catching fire?

Can this place be something, some space that is a place I can, that my community can grow up to be well in?

I will need to listen more carefully!

Are we there yet?

A journey towards making ‘place’ means more.

Photos

Thank you for reading! The next edition will be published on 18 June 2025. Email Pete with suggested submissions.

Grateful appreciation and many thanks to Charles Blass, Stacey Druss, Wendy Elford, Ken Homer, Jerry Michalski, Jordan Sukut, and Jessie Upp for their kind contributions to this issue.