About us

Who are we? 

We are Katherine Cunningham, Karen Crawford, Pia Cameron, Simon Williams and Peter Grounds. More about us on the substack. 

What do we do? Currently, we are working through the many projects that live within our founder members. These range from .pdf's on Money Madness, to worker cooperative education, with our first board game developing. There are plans for a new scientific platform to share science in different way. We have processes and practices we want to share and a deep challenge to the adult industry as well. 

How do we work? We use Dragon Dreaming as a project management toolbox. It fits us and we have tweaked it already as we are learning to use it. In our cooperative governance we are exploring indigenous protocols for wealth management. For those that have had a continuous culture for so very long, and took such grand care of such an incredible continent such as so called Australia, are incredible in their understanding of being with collective wealth. 

We will always battle the tendency to cult-ish behavior, by making sure everyone can leave when they need to. The whole thing depends on people being with the truth they want to live, the deep desire to do the work with, self, other and earth. That commitment to deep listening, building trust and showing respect. Worker Cooperatives are not common in the western white mindset of individualism. The foreignness of collective wealth as a way of life will take many levels to transform, which is why we use the term Alchemical. 

The Alchemy of Transmutation, where we transform what we have been into what we can become. Mindful that the cocoon, that going to mush, before the butterfly arrives, is all part of the process, and we can hold each other in that process. Respecting it happens to us all. 

Every solution the earth needs we already have, we just seem to lack the will to use them. 

Alchemical Worx is about cultivating that will. About exploring collective wealth, finding the cure for greed and maybe avarice, in the simple states of being enough, having enough, held in community. We want to be human, not consumer, citizen, producer, eyeballs, extracted from, and extracting from others. We aim for none of our work to be exploitative, exploring what work means, what it looks like, if it is not part of the extractive consumerism that we have been well trained to participate within, then what is the work like? 

We are a worker cooperative and all the work we do does get paid. We are non-dividend paying worker cooperative, so all our profit, goes back in our coop. We shall be building collective wealth, funding our current work, our future work, then our collective housing (Hearths), then in time as a local collective has a 120-150 members a large chunk of land (Sanctuary) to build all manner of community wealth and wellness with. We earn it together, we own it together. Then we share it with the indigenous of the lands we are building upon. We have plans to be in Melbourne Victoria, Vancouver Canada, Scotland and Portugal. 

We aim to be a global worker cooperative because what we face as humans is a global level set of issues/problems. We need to respond globally to build the paths for us all to travel these next decades of turbulence, preparing for the 1000 year clean up we have ahead of us. We know our earth deserves that we clean up the mess we have made, and that these opposable thumbs and incredible frontal cortex are worth more than the current systems are extracting. 

Let us mine the imagination of humanity, not the earth. Do better. Be better humans and return to our custodial place with earth, part of earth, an animal like all the others that deserve to live too, with earth. 

Musings about us, from Katherine Cunningham, a founder member (one of five) of Alchemical Worx. 23/09/2023. 

 try my substack where I have been trying to leave the gluten-free bread crumbs of how it is we got to here.