Welcome to What a World, a newsletter about meaning, relationship, design, and the connections between them. Here you’ll find writing and links concerning resistance, liberation, social change, and art (meaning); community and friendship, spirituality, family systems, romantic and platonic love (relationship); and organisational design, world building, speculative futures, and critical theory (design). The space between them all is where I like to spend my time.
I’m Hanna Thomas Uose, a writer and organisational designer, researcher, strategist, facilitator, and coach. I’m a Co-founder of the consulting firm, Align, where I have worked with UN Global Pulse, Greenpeace International, Liberty, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Free Tibet, and the National Union of Students, among others. I was previously Chief Product Officer at 350.org, Co-Founder of Level Up, and Campaigns and Culture Director at Ekō.
I’m also completing my MA in Prose Fiction from UEA, and in 2022 won the Morley Prize for Unpublished Writers of Colour for a novel-in-progress.
You are receiving this because you signed up to my last newsletter, The Quarterly Review. These will still go out every quarter, with the added bonus of a very occasional longer form post, all under the umbrella of What a World. If you’d like to read some of what I have written before, visit my Substack and check out the pinned posts like The Trauma of Zoom or Mission, vision, values, metaphor. If you’d like to unsubscribe from this new configuration, no hard feelings! Just hit the button at the top of this email.
Now, on to the recs!
The Quarterly Review, Q2 2023
Autotheory
Food
Going Through It
Pod: Going Through It (season two)
Is It Beauty That We Owe?
Happiness
Comedy Special: Wanda Sykes: I’m An Entertainer
Heartbreak
Poem: Closure by Omotara James
Mixtape: Heartbreak is a Vehicle
Short Story: The Depressed Person by David Foster Wallace
Pod: The Heart, DAD
Places to Intervene in a System
Anthology: Abolition Science Fiction edited by Phil Crockett Thomas
Book: Against Borders by Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha
Report: Holding Our Own: A Guide to Non-Policing Solutions to Serious Youth Violence
Article: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System by Donella Meadows
Agency: Transforming Film
The Feminine Heroic
Saw It Coming
Wild
Things I made
Last summer I was lucky enough to host a workshop on worldbuilding for MAIA and it is now online! Worldbuilding, speculative futures, design fiction… whatever you call it, it’s a key tool in the strategic toolbox to help us plan for and have agency within an ever more complex world. I’d love for you to check it out.
Where to catch me
And I have some capacity opening up in the autumn for new work projects. If you or your organisation needs support with org design, alignment, research, foresight, or coaching then get in touch at hanna@wealign.net.
Have a lovely summer folks,
Hanna