This year’s enquiry for AWAKEN, our community-building program, has to do with the nature and quality of these interactions. Together with our Community of Practice, we have created an experimental research tool designed to foster self-reflection about the ways in which we engage with the people that we see on a daily basis but that we don’t consider part of our social circle.

Through the gentle disruption of the social expectations that surround these daily encounters, we aim to understand and dissect what supports them. What happens when we ask the person who sells us our daily cup of coffee (or the cashier at our local supermarket, or the person we always park next to in our building) a question about themselves, instead of just giving them our routine greeting? What impact does that have on our relationship with them? How does that transform the way we perceive each other? Does it have an effect on our and their sense of self? If you’re curious to engage in our little experiment, click here to find the instructions, or reach out to us!

Ultimately, we hope that this collective exploration will give us insights into how we can transform transactional relationships into ones driven by care, for ourselves and each other as individuals and as a part of the same society, no matter our real or perceived differences. Our connections with others, however small or fleeting, are the threads that weave the fabric of our shared humanity—reminding us that in this vast web of interdependence, every interaction has the power to create ripples of change.