Syntony Quest: Our Mission

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Our Mission

Syntony Quest is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization seeking to catalyze learning processes that empower individuals and groups to develop the competencies necessary for the co-creation of sustainable and evolutionary futures.

Syntony Quest is an evolutionary learning organization dedicated to helping those who wish to learn how to cope with change and uncertainty in ways that foster community and sustainability. It responds to this challenge by tapping the creative potential of individuals and groups through community building, learning, design and action.

Our work is grounded in an evolutionary ethic — one that seeks to promote what is good for individuals, societies, ecosystems, and future generations — and, as a result, fosters sustainable development. This explicit ethical commitment is what makes the activities of Syntony Quest unique and of importance for the co-creation of a sustainable and evolutionary future for humanity and planet Earth.

Syntony Quest is about finding and developing the knowledge, abilities, attitudes and values required for evolutionary action, and thereby, for the pursuit of sustainable modes of being. Our mission is to catalyze learning processes that empower individuals and groups to develop the competencies necessary for the co-creation of sustainable and evolutionary futures, and our projects bridge cultures, generations, and worldviews.

To realize our mission, we have developed a soft technology called Evolutionary Systems Design (ESD) based on:

Evolutionary systems theory
Social systems design methodology
Transformative learning philosophy

Through the application of Evolutionary Systems Design, Syntony Quest seeks to foster the emergence of:

Evolutionary Learning Communities (ELC):
Communities dedicated to self-directed evolutionary learning and action for the creation of sustainable and evolutionary futures. ELCs serve as the catalyzers, the think tanks, the interactive access centers that create the conditions for the emergence of communities, social systems, and ecosystems of syntony.
Communities of Syntony:
Communities of Syntony do not adapt their environment to their needs, nor do they simply adapt to their environment. Rather, they adapt with their environment in a dynamic of mutually sustaining evolutionary co-creation. They are evolutionary communities where work, learning, and play is integrated in everyday life.
Social Systems of Syntony:
A community of ELCs, and other communities of syntony. Each individual community is dedicated to its own path of learning how to learn and consciously seeking to do so in ways that are evolutionary while collaborating with other communities to create a shared subculture of syntony among them.
Ecosystems of Syntony (EoS):
Social systems of syntony that engage with their more-than-human world in the creation of greater ecosystems of syntony. At the level of the ecosystem of syntony, people no longer ‘come first’ — the whole ecosystem comes first. All aspects of the ecosystem, from psycho-personal and socio-cultural to bio-physical and process-structural — all are ‘actors’ with a voice in the creation of evolutionary consonance or syntony. All listen to and create with one another.

Each of these systems of syntony represents a different type of community. Each one has its own boundaries of self-interest and future inclusion, and therefore, its own degree evolutionary sustainability. Nevertheless, they all involve people acting as stewards of their own futures in syntony with their dynamic surroundings, and the path from one type to the next is what we call a syntony quest.

Syntony Path

The path of Syntony Quest