There is no easy way to begin this, so I will begin directly.

Greaterthan Collective — seventeen members, spread across four continents, doing work we deeply believed in — has been in a process of composting for the past months, and will formally cease to exist as a global collective. We are sad. We are also, in the way that comes when something long-unresolved finally finds its form, relieved. Both things are true, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

If you are reading this and this is news to you, that is by design — we have been living inside this process while continuing to show up to the world, which has not been easy. Greaterthan has been part of many of your networks, your thinking, possibly your work. It shaped ours. What we owe you, and ourselves, is honesty about what happened and what is continuing.

What follows are three perspectives on how we got here — written by three members, from three different lenses. We are not attempting to offer a single definitive account. In a collective of seventeen people navigating something this complex, there is no such thing. What we are offering is what we actually saw, from where each of us was standing. We share it because we believe there is something in it worth learning from — for anyone building, sustaining, or letting go of purpose oriented work and/or a collective.

Greaterthan’s Ecocycle

Ashish Arora | India | Member since 2022

We live in ecocycles. No matter how hard we try to prolong our lifespans, we still move through the rhythms of nature and life — from gestation, to birth, to growth, to maturation, to death, and finally to renewal — again and again and again. That is how life has evolved, and how freshness and creativity have continued to thrive for millennia. 

Organizations are not immune to these cycles either. 

Since joining Greaterthan in 2022, I have witnessed these ecocycles unfold in many forms — both at the level of the collective and within the various internal and client-facing initiatives we have led together. While one initiative was arriving at maturation, another was emerging through gestation. Many were passing through birth, trying to navigate ‘the chasm’ in order to bloom into their full potential.

By 2024, Greaterthan as a whole began entering the stage of composting. What were the underlying dynamics, and how did the process unfold? My attempt here is to offer my perspective from the lens available to me while being based in India, whereas the other members are spread across Europe, New Zealand, and Canada.

Operating as a global collective has been both an advantage and a limitation for Greaterthan. Having active members across multiple continents and time zones — many of which were nearly impossible to bring together — created significant challenges. Some members consistently made extra efforts to maintain alignment and coordination in the collective’s day-to-day functioning. Yet it was not always easy, especially as we also tried to honour the principle of working within capacity. 

Over time, I also began to see more clearly the deep interplay between the systemic layer and the relational layer beneath it. Systems, structures, processes and roles can only hold for so long if the underlying relationships are not continuously tended with care and mutual accountability. In many ways, systems are only an expression of the quality of relationships that sustain them. When tensions remain unspoken, when feedback becomes difficult to offer or receive, when power dynamics remain unacknowledged, or when people slowly begin withdrawing emotionally from one another, the system itself gradually starts losing vitality. What may initially appear as a structural or operational issue often has deeper relational roots underneath.

What composting actually requires: of people and of systems

Anna Kopacz | Switzerland | Member since 2022

Composting is not a metaphor I reach for to soften what happened. I reach for it because it is accurate. Something real is returning to the ground. And what grows from it - incredible professionals continuing the work - will carry the nutrition of what decomposes. That is not consolation. It is how organic systems actually work.

The somatic lens is the one I cannot put down. Not because it is the lens I trained in formally, but because after years of working with leaders and collectives in transformation, I cannot unsee what it shows me. And what it showed me inside Greaterthan, over these years, was not primarily an organizational challenge. It was a trauma response, playing out at a collective scale.

In September 2023, many of us were together in Portugal for a week. Several of us got sick. I have come to trust the body as a diagnostic instrument, not just in individuals but in collective fields. When a system cannot yet speak what is true, it finds other channels. A systemic constellation that week confirmed the signal: we were turned inward with stuckness, not facing the clients and ecosystem reaching toward us. That information arrived. It was swallowed without being digested.

What followed was the move that you’ll likely recognize: straight to strategy. How do we fix this? Who carries this forward? The problem-solving mode that forecloses the slower, harder work of actually understanding what the pain is about. Strategy applied to an undiagnosed wound does not heal it. It relocates the inflammation. Over the months that followed, I watched that inflammation move - into the relationships, the sales, the way we showed up for clients, the way we held space for each other.

What was at the center, and what took the following two years to name, were among other things - tensions in some core conditions. In Staci Haines' language: the early shaping that becomes identity, that determines what is safe to acknowledge and what must remain unspeakable. Those patterns were not invented inside the organization. They were carried in by individuals, including me. They shaped what we were willing to resource, what kind of support we allowed in. A number of attempts to bring in external help were turned away. The belief, as I perceived it, was that the situation did not deserve that investment.

This is something I see repeatedly in purpose-driven organizations doing systems-change work. The capacities we bring to our clients - holding complexity, naming what's unspoken, creating conditions for genuine transformation are not automatically applied internally. If anything, fluency with the language of healing can become a protection against actually doing the healing. We know the words. We can describe the dynamics. And yet.

What eventually moved something - was support that arrived without an invoice and without conditions. That detail matters more than it should have needed to. It tells me that what was required was a quality of presence, non-transactional, genuinely held, that we had not been able to offer each other from the inside. That is not an indictment. It is, I think, the most important thing this experience has to teach.

Life happens

Ria Baeck | Belgium | Member since 2019

Beyond a systemic lens, and beyond a trauma-informed lens - which I am all in favor of! - there can also be a developmental lens, and even see through an evolutionary lens. Beyond the frustration of the different attempts and the sadness that things are changing we can come to a point of being OK with what is changing. Life is happening.

Because the kind of work Greaterthan is offering relies a lot on the web of relationships, we can take that metaphor of looking at what has been happening. Like in a (romantic) relationship, first there is the falling in love, the honeymoon - look what great things we intend to do! Over time some habits form and an internal culture builds. All good and great! Lots of experimentation has been happening within Greaterthan and could flow into working with client organisations.

There is a saying that if you survive 7 years of a romantic relationship, then you are good for another cycle of 7 - a deeper alignment takes form, or not. It doesn't need to be a big conflict, sometimes it is more a sense of 'it doesn't fit anymore'. We each have evolved, in slightly different ways or directions, and the original alignment seems to have evaporated or isn't strong enough to weather another cycle.

We are not accustomed to notice these signals. We try to save the relationship in all kinds of ways. Related to companies and organisations there is an even stronger assumption that they exist for eternity. Not noticing the subtle growing apart that has happened, the tension can easily become a power struggle. Once people see the reality of the gap that has been growing, a kind of divorce or forking is possible.

There is a trap to psychologise these cycles, but a stronger feedback culture cannot 'heal' what has been growing apart. That's not what it is for. If we keep seeing the gap - between what is right now, and what we hope for - as conflict, we fall into the trap of 'one versus the other'; while it is possible to look at this dynamic through the lens of evolution: people change, their preferred or needed habitat changes, and we can adapt to that, no struggle needed.
Time to say goodbye and wish each other well on the journey.

What happened, and what is continuing

In 2025, after more than a year of the partners investing significant time and energy to find a path forward, Greaterthan sought external support from Miki Kashtan and the Nonviolent Global Liberation community. The process they facilitated — Convergent Facilitation — held the collective in something different from what we had been able to hold for ourselves: the experience of every member's truth being genuinely heard before any decision was made.

What emerged from that process was a shared understanding that Greaterthan as a global collective could not continue in its current form. The decision, reached with grief and with care, was to compost.

From this transition, two new regional collectives have emerged: Common Ground in Europe, and Greaterthan Aotearoa in New Zealand. Others are continuing ventures Working Together and with Intention Studio, and many of us are continuing independently, in informal collaborations. The work lives on, in different containers.

Over the next weeks you’ll see a number of shifts in our space - including the shift of the website with associated links to the work being carried forward and the new emerging. One thing will remain as is - this newsletter, The Weekender. Ashish and Susan have committed to continuing to write weekly, occasionally with some guest voices from other spaces.

With intention, 

Anna, Ashish and Ria