With the new moon of October 15, 2012, Kumu was officially born.  The idea of creating an  innovation lab for transformative activism has been in my mind, my heart, my spirit, and my body for over two years.  A long gestation nurtured by my own work, and my own personal journey –but also by the work and personal journeys of great human beings around me, many of which have joined Kumu as Founding Innovators.  Without their inspiration and support Kumu would have not become a reality.

Kumu seeks to explore and foster transformative activism. I have been using this term to describe ideas having the power to transform the paradigms that create our envirosocial problems.

I’ve been using the term envirosocial to refer to the blurring of the separation between environmental and social issues that takes places as our lens and consciousness widens, and we delve deeper into their causes, and consequences.

Transformative activism forces us to go beyond an activism that mirrors our masculine and entropic culture (to fight, to stop, to fix…) and urges us to enter the counter-cultural territory of the femenine and the creative (to not do, to listen, to prevent, to conceive…) I believe and hope that this is potentially a more transformative exercise, and a fertile ground for innovation that may benefit all.

Kumu seeks to be of service, and so do I.  I am full of gratitude for the honor and the privilege to work for the ideals I believe in the most, on behalf of everything that lives and feels, and surrounded by people I love and admire.

As a founder of Kumu I humbly hope to bring into every aspect of it what I believe is the essence of being human: great love. Great love for ourselves, great love for others, great love for the web of life, and great love for the entire cosmos, past, present and future. May it be so.

Manuel Maqueda