“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.” ― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
The Great Revelation (and revolution)
And it came to pass, in New York City, three years before the great financial crash of 2008 when the acceleration as humans began to collectively question many of the structures that were engineered to mine our energy and enslave us while consuming the resources of the planet were in the zeitgeist. An apocalypse was underway. In its truest definition, the word means to reveal, or to have a revelation. Our desire was to reveal how business-as-usual mindsets were driving inequality, and insecurity.
Advertising was at the heart of the propaganda engine that manipulated, distorted, and drove our perceptions, beliefs and behaviors, so a resistance began forming with many other reputable movements emerging at that time, such as Foundation For A Better Life’s Pass it On, and Saatchi & Saatchi’s Lovemarks to replace the capitalistic Goliath’s of the world and Called2Create was born.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” -Buckminster Fuller
The concept was to build an ad agency for the collective that allowed users to generate connections and public messaging for service and products, creating personalised brands, amplifying those that were contributing to social engineering for the possibility of manifesting solutions within our culture one human at a time.
During that time our cooperative partnerships were featured in several media outlets like Vogue, partnered with agencies like MEA Digital (now Team Lewis) and creatively elevated brand campaigns like “We Are Diamonds” for Royal Asscher, and “Fashioning Our Freedom” for Forever 21, and “Crash The Super Bowl” contest, challenging fans to create their own big game Doritos ad. Finalists were voted on by fans, and the winner got $10,000 and a trip to the 2007 Super Bowl.
Mind you, this was before Instagram (which inadvertently disrupted the fashion industry), or geospatial connections in real time provided by dating apps, and the Pandora’s box potential of social media was just being harnessed by PHP coding and algorithms. It was also a time when the Sustainable Development Goals were being designed, to extend the Millennium Goals to 2030. It was also an era when the end of the world crept toward the auspicious date on the mayan calendar of 2012.
A book titled The Seven Shifts was designed by our agency as a guiding framework for this era through self-awareness and collective intelligence. For the transformation of the species to continue, the path forward would require the following:
Accept Death - Recognize death as a transformative part of life, encouraging a deeper appreciation of the present and freedom from fear.
Embrace Diversity - Honor the differences among people as strengths, fostering unity and understanding in diversity.
Trust the Now - Cultivate presence and trust in the moment as a foundation for growth and possibility.
Allow the Alchemy of Love - Open yourself to the transformative power of love, which can heal and unite.
Appreciate It All - Practice gratitude for all aspects of life, including challenges, as opportunities for growth.
Make Belief - Shift limiting thoughts and feelings to empowering ones, unleashing your creative and transformative potential.
Awaken the Creator Within - Recognize and activate your innate ability to create and shape your reality from a place of love and vision.
Want to know more? Use our Clarity AI who can guide you on this process.
Let Thy Food Be Thy Medicine
Being part of this accelerating zeitgeist, Called2Create decided to pivot from ads to focus on what we determined to be the keystone solution of addressing the entire upgrades to the communication, energy logistics network (how we experience revolutions), and we set our sights on SDG number 2, zero hunger. To our team this was at the core of the issue - of which we want to credit The Hunger Project for pioneering the shift from food scarcity being inevitable, to providing data that indeed food security was achievable.
Food is why people do work they despise, or puts them in danger, takes them away from their families, to put food on the table. It’s the primary source of energy, the calorie exchange that we all need to even do work, or even function at a cellular level. And we highlighted that the equation was broken, as it required 10 calories invested for every 1 calorie extracted.
It was at the center of degradation in the use of land, water, energy, and waste. Our topsoil was poisoned and depleted of nutrients, we only had 60 crops left on planet. Finally, it was tantamount to human rights, with minorities, like women, people of color, and indigenous people growing most the food, but never having access to it due to the colonial, patriarchal, hierarchical ownership model that perpetuated hunger.
“Control the Food, control the People. Control the Energy, control the Continents. Control the Money, control the World.” -Henry Kissinger
We grew enough food to feed ten billion people and yet almost a billion were starting, many of them children. All the technology, and resources existed. So in response, SkyFarms, a volunteer based organisation to leverage ICTs for distribution of assets and access to knowledge to turn food consumers into food citizens was born.
We empowered social entrepreneurs, spotlighted and accelerated solutions, added to the wave of enthusiasm and awareness rising around the second agrarian age that was exploding. We mapped out agricultural solutions from rural to urban, from low-tech to high-tech, and created DIY tools, ran Victory Farm marathons, Open-Source Hackathons and channeled consumers toward the best solutions for food sovereignty.
Bridging The Connectivity Gap - from separation, competition, and fragmentation to interconnection, collaboration and amalgamation
After years of our collective efforts, and the hundreds of agripreneurs we empowered, we were running at a loss, in market share, in visibility, in participation. As the space became saturated, and fragmented, there was a “green rush” (similar to a gold rush) - a wave to invest in and monetize off of the ability to provide everyone with the power to grow fresh, local food. Solutions were competing, not collaborating, for time, attention, money and methods. Many scams arose during this time. When this bubble burst, we made our last pivot from food to formation of partnerships around the holistic pillars of what we knew would be necessary for real transformation.
Necessity is the mother of invention. -Plato
Like a new seed sprouting from the soil, or a phoenix rising from the ashes came Under One Sky - retaining our open-source approach to tackle all the pillars of what makes a healthy, thriving community that has not only the capacity to endure, but to restore through: energy, innovation, narratives, economics, design, consciousness.
We began forging partnerships that would unleash tools, methods, and resources that led to building better communities - including onboarding 30+ luminary expert leaders of our time in our Onwards & Upwards Podcast. We found many of those communities already existing in a “green road” of Global Eco-village Network - rooted in regeneration, and Smarthoods, who we merged with, to EMERGE.
Our intention now is to solve issues through networks, solving the connectivity issue of being too connected, not connected enough, or connected in the wrong ways. Since our journey began, we have worked with prestigious groups like EIT, UN Project Breakthrough, EU COMMISSION, YGL from WEF, YPO, EO, EY, ACCENTURE, IMPACT HUB, RSA, in addition to bringing those connections and resources to local people on the ground in the trenches doing the real work.
Navigate all our FREE tools, resources, and methods in our LinkTree below.
For 2025 we are committed to working with NEXT GENERATION leaders, bridging that gap between corporate power and youth in our regenerative EMERGE initiative.
Now that you have heard our tale, would you like to see the transformation ripple out into the world? You can make that happen with a small contribution.
For the price of a cup of coffee you can keep us moving, shaking, and visionary making. Here you can also purchase our Onwards and Upwards sticker as a passport to possibility. Thank you for sticking with us! And remember that non-monetary contributions of SHARING, LIKING, COMMENTING and SUBSCRIBING all support the impact we make together, Under One Sky.
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