Metacrisis Initiative – salons and peer mentoring

The Metacrisis Initiative provides its participants with the insight and support to live well within fracturing societies. That ‘living well’ involves being helpful and kind to oneself, others, and wider nature (that can involve moments of difficult emotions and conflict, as long as there is awareness of why one experiences that).

With monthly salons, the Metacrisis Initiative provides participants with the opportunity to learn about and discuss the trends beneath the headlines, and the range of responses to those trends which aren’t yet mainstream.

With peer mentoring groups, participants benefit from advice and fellowship as they integrate their awareness of metacrisis, and even collapse, into their professional and personal lives.

Launched in September 2025 by the internationally-renowned scholar and advocate in leadership and the metacrisis, Professor Jem Bendell, this initiative brings together people of a variety of ages, professions, ethnicities, and locations. To participate, you must be a paid-up member of this website and proficient in English. As such a member, you will also receive member-only posts that prepare you for the monthly salons and peer mentoring meetings. The fees enable a small team to research, write, organise meetings, and offer free participation of young professionals from the Global South.

SALONS

Each month Jem hosts a 2-hour participatory webinar, featuring a guest with an interest in the topic being discussed. It occurs at two different times, typically on the first Monday of the month, to be suitable for your time zone (typically at 10.00 UTC then at 23.00 UTC). Typically some time in each meeting is made for people to share what they are working on, or what is alive for them. To enable open sharing, the dialogue is not recorded and there are no formal outputs i.e. these monthly salons are for intellectual stimulation and inspiration of participants, nothing more. Topics explored in the first months included: 

• the future of collapse subcultures and the potential for a solidarity-based politics of collapse
• spiritual aspects of the metacrisis
• the need to shift the climate conversation in light of recent temperature hikes
• changing our lives to survive collapse, including community development and alternative economics
• the many psychological responses to perceptions of collapse, and how to help each other with that

PEER MENTORING

Starting April 2026, around 80 members of the initiative are meeting in groups of 10 to support each other to live well within fracturing societies (at home or abroad). Participants are provided with a peer mentoring methodology and basic tools to enable meetings. They occur at least once a month for two hours, with the first series lasting for six months. New cohorts begin every six months. Members can read more about this peer mentoring.

COMMUNITY CHAT

Members can join a community chat to privately share information and ideas with each other. That often occurs in relation to the latest essays published on this website, but is not restricted to that.

There is some “small print” on the process of being a member and participating in the monthly salons.

SOME SMALL PRINT!

General information

• Membership is non-transferable. 
• Participants contribute financially to the general activity required to maintain the outputs of the initiative, including research, writing, salons and peer mentoring. 
• Participants are not required to attend the salons. If a participant misses a meeting (for whatever reason) or is no longer interested, there can be no refunds.
• Participants in the Peer Mentoring go through a registration process where they commit to fellow group members to attend. Participants are told when enrollment opens, typically every 6 months. 
• The payments should show up on your credit card bill as “jembendell”
• To cancel your paid subscription, with or without receiving the free newsletter from Prof Jem Bendell, you need to cancel the payments, not just unsubscribe from emails (information on that follows at the end of this document). 
• If you are involved in socially positive work and either from the Global South or a young professional, you can request a complimentary membership.

Not getting the info on time?

If members aren’t receiving blog emails from jembendell.com then please:

• Check the email you subscribed with is the same as the one you check
• Add donotreply@wordpress.com to your safe senders list
• Log in to jembendell.com and visit your user page and check that you haven’t chosen to not receive emails (this is the most frequent reason). Yes, you have a user page, which you can access via asking for a log in link. 

If members aren’t seeing the links to sign up for the zoom link for the individual meetings, please: 

• log in to jembendell.com and then view the background reading for the next meeting, as it will then show you how to sign up (not being logged in, you won’t see those links)
• Log into stripe.com and check you haven’t inputted a different email into Stripe, or written it incorrectly 

More on the Salons

• There is one salon a month, with 2 different session times for different time zones, which are always stated on the meeting invites. Members of the initiative will receive emails about the times of each meeting about 3 weeks before the meeting. Apart from that, the hosts will not respond to individual members about scheduling. 
• The salons are participatory with small group discussion & plenary discussion. They are not recorded & there are no formal outputs (video, audio or text). 
• They occur under the ‘Chatham House Rule’ so if participants want to write about the event afterwards, they must not mention who said what. They can write about what was discussed. Anyone who breaks this rule will be permanently removed from the initiative (without refund). Hosts cannot guarantee that such behaviours won’t happen – so participants speak freely but remain aware of potential misbehaviour. Therefore, some participants might choose to use a pseudonym for their zoom name. 
• When you receive a confirmation email from zoom, please click on a ‘calendar invite’ so you are reminded by your own software.
• These Monthly salons are not focused on emotional co-regulation in the face of the metacrisis & collapse. We recommend the Deep Adaptation Forum for that. 
• We invite participants to seek to be curious and kind during the discussions, including the breakout rooms. However, we cannot guarantee that nor act on any complaints about other participants. Therefore, we ask participants to express any concerns at the time, and then leave any breakout room if not enjoying it. 
• The salons are not about generating ideas for working together via this initiative. 
• The salons are not for advertising your activities. 
• Participants will probably discover people they wish to connect with. To enable that, they can ask for contact info via 1-2-1 chats during the meeting – not in the group chat & not by requesting introductions from the hosts (which would be ignored). 
• Alternatively, participants can engage with each other within the Telegram group. 
• Hosts will not answer emails from participants that request for actions different or additional to what is explained in this document. 

Cancelling your paid subscriptions

To cancel your paid subscription with or without receiving the free newsletter from Prof Jem Bendell, you need to cancel your subscription, not just unsubscribe from emails. 

1. Find a newsletter email from jembendell.com and click the “Manage Subscription” link
2. Sign in using the email address you used to subscribe. If you have never set a password, WordPress.com will help you access your account by sending you an email from which to log in.
3. Then go to your subscription settings.
4. Cancel your paid subscription.

You will continue receiving free newsletter emails unless you separately choose to unsubscribe from the newsletter itself.  If you unsubscribe but continue to be billed by Stripe, then please contact Jem and team via the contact form on this website the address of the email you used to subscribe and we will fix it for you.