We Rise and Win Together Week opening session. Dr. Somava Saha, Founder and CEO of We in the World, told the group about a trip she once took to Tunisia, where she saw an oasis for the first time — not the two trees over a pool of water she’d always pictured, but “hundreds of thousands of trees whose root system was together reclaiming the desert.” It became the through-line for everything that followed: “the truly wise trees know how to use their root systems to begin to build together,” she said, reminding the group that “no one of us has to be a hero to change the world.” This movement, as she put it, “is beyond one network” — and the speakers who followed made that case one story at a time.
Dr. Ruby Gibson, Director of Freedom Lodge Nonprofit Group, opened with a story that felt like it reached back through generations. She’s the developer of a healing technique called somatic archeology, which she described as a way to “excavate our own body, so that we’re able to look into the things we’ve inherited.” That work led her to a dream — a word, Konmadi, chanted by 200 people in a cave — and then, strangely, to the same word echoing across the traditions of twenty indigenous elders she later interviewed from around the world, none of whom had ever met one another. It became the seed of her forthcoming book, and of a practice she now leads: chanting in caves to strengthen the heartbeat of the earth. “It’s just amazing,” she said, “how the rocks respond and the air responds.” She closed with the line that seemed to stay with the room longest: “global warming is not something we can really fight, but in the meantime, we can honor our mother, because she’s on fire right now, and she needs our help.”
From ancient practice, the conversation turned to present-day proof of what interdependence can build. Jeff Campbell, Creative Director of Emancipation Theater Company, uses storytelling “to help groups build trust, strengthen communication, and imagine new possibilities together” — and he showed the room what that looks like in practice. In one production, his company put a live audience inside the foster care system itself: sorting their belongings into trash bags, separating them from the friends they’d come with, seating them as jurors in an immersive courtroom. By the end of the night, that audience had raised $250,000 for the Denver nonprofit behind the story. Campbell summed up the thinking behind it all: “A shared message creates a shared mindset. A shared mindset creates a shared movement. A shared movement is fueled by a shared meaning, which then creates shared making.”
That same logic showed up at a much larger scale in Colleen Flynn’s remarks. As Co-Executive Director of Build Healthy Places Network, she described a vision of “communities where health, opportunity, belonging, and well-being are accessible to all people” — and how climate-driven disasters are now forcing sectors that rarely coordinate, like housing, public health, and community development, into the same room, even as climate gentrification pushes long-time, often lower-income residents further out. Ahmed Calvo, joining from HHS, offered the line that tied it back to something simpler underneath all of it: “things spread at the speed of trust.”
Wangui wa Kamonji made that same idea tangible. She shared the land restoration work behind her project From the Roots, describing a baobab tree she’d just planted, knowing she would never see it reach its fullness. “I’m planting literally for future generations,” she said. Maissa Khatib, reflecting on years of community-engaged research in Phoenix, echoed the same faith in what patient, collective work can do: “the more we connect together and do this collectively, the better outcomes, and more sustainable for years to come.”
Geordan Shannon closed the remarks on building a shared commons. “We are actually the commons,” she said — “collectively the knowledge and the assets and the story that we hold… becomes the commons that we steward for generations.” Her closing line captured the spirit of everything said before it: “no one should be holding this high cost of change making alone.” The session ended with a poem, as Jeff Campbell pulled single lines from dozens of participants into one collective piece — built the same way the week itself was: together.
