My passion is bringing people together in ways that unlock and ignite personal, group, and community potential.

Beth Tener: Facilitator, Coach, Podcast Host, Community Weaver.

Here’s my story: For over 30 years, I’ve worked with businesses, non-profits, and communities helping people sense what is changing and find ways to take action aligned with their values. As a consultant I developed a broad perspective by working with over 200 different organizations and networks, helping them to think strategically to “make change happen” and create systems to move from vision to action. I founded New Directions Collaborative over ten years ago to experiment with new ways to tackle the challenging issues of our times, particularly by working across silos to get many organizations collaborating to change systems and do more together than they could alone. My bio there has more details of this experience, working on issues such as climate change, community redevelopment, racial justice, and growing local food systems.

Working across such varied contexts I learned how to help groups build trust and work together to get clarity and take wise action within complex situations. I saw again and again how genuine participation enables the best thinking of the group to emerge and grows the shared willingness to act. I worked in collaborations exploring what collective healing means and helped curate and facilitate the NH Business for Social Responsibility NH Workplace Racial Equity Learning Challenge, a deep dive into fundamental questions of how we confront, heal, and shift from historical patterns of oppression and separation to participation, belonging, and opportunities for each person to grow and flourish.

Now in Kinship, I want to go deeper.

You could say it’s the opposite of Facebook’s mantra – “go fast and break things.” I believe in: “Go slow and grow things.” Grow people, grow vital relationships with each other and nature, and grow trusting supportive communities that sustain and fortify us in these intense, changing times. We can grow into a living expression of what we value.

Lack of caring community is a root cause of so many problems and it is a solution that supports most other solutions.

Over these years, I had a series of profound experiences that were a taste of what’s possible, and inspired me to ask, “how can I bring forth more of this?” In the “darkest dark” time in my life in my late 30’s, I got to see what a community could be. I faced the hardest challenge of my life with my beloved husband Rick’s terminal cancer. Month by month the disease progressed, despite everything we tried. Our friends both new and old, family, neighbors, and co-workers rallied, bringing food, raising money, providing help with household needs, emotional support, and even writing a song for him. We were carried in a flow of generous gestures. Everyone was focused on doing all we could to preserve his life, to express love and appreciation every moment we got, and show up, whatever it took. People had my back when I needed it most. After his death, I was held by this community I loved and trusted, as we grieved the loss, with rituals, shared food, and hours of caring presence and conversation.

The power of being held in love by a community was like alchemy, helping to transform the pain and give me strength, courage, and stability to transition through hard times into a new chapter of life.

Amplifying this was the fulfillment I discovered, coming into a deeper relationship with nature. The spring after Rick died, I cultivated soil and planted, amazed to watch a barren site transform into an abundant garden of vegetables and flowers. I learned permaculture, the art of designing with the regenerative patterns of nature. I spent hours in the forests and mountains with my dog, fed by the beauty and fun of foraging for wild edible plants and mushrooms. When things got hard, I’d take a long walk in the woods and inevitably feel a shift or get a new insight.

In these times of so much loss when we feel at the mercy of changes we didn’t choose and can’t predict, I want everyone to know that feeling of having a community at their back. We can show up this way for each other. And we can restore our relationship with the alive natural world that we are part of, that feeds us. (You can listen to Season 2 of the podcast to hear this story.) 

I’m inspired by how the Aboriginal teacher and writer, Tyson Yunkaporta, describes kinship in his ancient tradition: “deep connections between generations of people in custodial relation to a sentient landscape, all grounded in a vibrant oral tradition.”