About Us
We are a public benefit corporation dedicated to the exploration of our collective longing for a new world, while tending to our grief as the old ways die.
We are inspired by the map of emergence created by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, also known as the two loops model. We believe that change occurs cyclically: as legacy systems end, new ones emerge.
Our role is to steward the ascending system, to quantify and qualify the new for individuals and institutions, while navigating the loss and disappointment in the death of the old.
We are indebted to our mentor, Chris Corrigan, for our understanding of the two loops model.
Art by Inknes
People
Yvonne Yen Liu
President
Yvonne Yen Liu (she/her) is the President of the Center for Sehnsucht Studies, the container for her work as a militant researcher, death doula, artful host, movement chaplain, and historian of consciousness.
She is the Co-Founder and outgoing Executive Director of Solidarity Research Center, a worker self-directed nonprofit organization that builds solidarity economy ecosystems using data science, story-based strategy, and action research. Yvonne is a Research Fellow at the Transnational Institute. She is a practitioner of research justice with over 20 years of being a nerd for social movements.
Yvonne serves on the boards of the Institute for Social Ecology, New Economy Coalition, and Policy Advocates for Sustainable Economies. She has taught in the gender studies and sociology departments at California State University, Los Angeles and City University of New York.
Yvonne has a BA in cultural anthropology from Columbia University and a MA in sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she pursued a PhD.
She is based in Los Angeles, California, where the sun smiles on her every day. Although a native of New York City, she and the city have broken up and went their separate ways.