Holding Space Where Transformation Takes Root
The gatherings can appear simple—people in a room, sharing, listening, being together without a transactional goal. But what Another World Exists (AWE) creates through its facilitated exchange spaces is anything but simple. It is deliberate, radical infrastructure for collective care.
In 2025, AWE brought together hundreds of people across sectors, issues, and identities: parents addressing grief, cultural organizers focused on the Just Transition, leaders of aligned arts organizations, multidisciplinary practitioners, youth poets and more.
Evan Bissell, AWE’s Director, said, “Participants frequently share back how they have shifted and emboldened their own practice … Others share about the energy that comes from being in community without a transactional goal attached, but with an intentional curation of the community, clear purpose and thoughtful facilitation.”
Each gathering was designed as what AWE calls an “edge zone”—a concept borrowed from ecology, where two or more ecosystems overlap to create greater diversity and adaptability. In practice, these are spaces where radical imagination and the implementation of new systems based in interconnection and collective care are not separate conversations, but one fluid exchange.
“Participants frequently share back how they have shifted and emboldened their own practice … Others share about the energy that comes from being in community without a transactional goal attached, but with an intentional curation of the community, clear purpose and thoughtful facilitation.”
Evan Bissell, AWE’s Director
This work responds to something urgent and often unnamed: the fragmentation, isolation, and dismembering of relationships that undercut people’s collective capacity to care for each other and the planet. Dominant economic and governance systems depend on that disconnection. AWE’s exchange spaces are designed to counter it—strengthening connection, regrounding participants in existing value and expertise outside of capitalist rubrics, and releasing barriers that prevent communities from living into and implementing new systems.
AWE is now developing and expanding these formations to strengthen the role of artists and cultural workers—as well as cultural strategy and cultural organizing—in multisector social change efforts.
The premise remains the foundation: another world already exists. The work is creating the spaces where people can see it, feel it, and build it together.
