Te Pā Collective Action Lab · Systems course
Where to intervene in a system — Donella Meadows, translated to Aotearoa, wired to the street.
In 1997, systems ecologist Donella Meadows published a short essay arguing that most policy energy is wasted at the shallowest tiers of a system — twiddling numbers, patching feedback loops — while the deepest leverage sits in the paradigm the system takes for granted. This course takes her twelve tiers, teaches them deep to shallow, pairs each with an Aotearoa indicator and an Indigenous motif, and hands you an action pack for each — a sticker, a chant, a letter template, a workshop card — so learning doesn't stop on the page.
Ngā rārangi — The twelve tiers
Numbered as Meadows numbered them — 1 is deepest, 12 is shallowest. We teach 1 → 12 because starting at the paradigm makes every shallow move afterwards make sense.
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He aha tēnei — How to use this course
Twelve weeks. Each module is roughly a fifteen-minute read plus a five-minute action. Follow the course calendar or read at your own pace.
Every module ends with something you can do this week: print a sticker, book a hui, file an OIA, write a placard. The observatory tells you what's changing; the course tells you what to do about it.
Every module carries a Kōrero thread powered by Giscus. Reply with what you tried, what worked, what didn't. Every reply becomes an entry in the public archive.
The whole course is CC BY-SA 4.0 and lives on GitHub. Fork it, translate it, run it in your union / marae / community centre.
Ngā puna kōrero — Sources