Discover Kincentric Leadership

Kincentric Leadership new way to center nature in all that we do. Plus: learn about Wild Rice (Manoomin)!

August 09, 2025

Mari Raphael, Kitchi wiikwedong Anishinaabe from the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians in Michigan, harvesting Manoomin with her daughter, Monni. Source: Interlochen Public Radio

Happy Manoominike Giizis (Ricing Moon)! Manoomin (the Anishinaabe word for Wild Rice) is of great spiritual, cultural, and nutritional importance for the Anishinaabe peoples in the Great Lakes region and beyond.

“[The Ojibwe Migration] was a migration that took hundreds of years, across mostly the great lakes, until they got to Mille Lacs here in about the mid 1700s. They were told they were supposed to go until they found food growing on the water, and when they got into the Northern parts of Wisconsin and into Minnesota, they found that food growing on the water, which is Manoomin or wild rice.”

“When you look at the people of the three fires - the Ojibwe, the Odawa and the Potawatomi – the three major tribes which once inhabited the entire Great Lakes region – wild rice accounted for at least one sixth of our whole economy, and accounted for about half the calories that we needed to make it through the winter as a people.”

“I think that’s one of the most important parts about [ricing], is regaining that knowledge and trying to share it in a good way to young ones or anybody, adults – whoever has that interest in learning more. There’s an older term for it called manidoomin meaning the Creator’s grain. And so we also call the beds the Creator’s garden. And you feel that when you’re out there. You’re so connected to nature and all of the life around you.”

If you want to know more about the importance of Manoomin, you can watch this documentary, listen to this interview, or read through this guide.

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Centering Nature through Kincentric Leadership

Last month, the Kincentric Leadership project, which started in 2022, made a huge leap forward when they released their toolkit! There is so much to cover about this project that it would be impossible to fit it all in a single newsletter, but I’d like to give you an introduction!

What is Kincentric Leadership?

“Kincentric Leadership is an experimental field that places direct collaboration with the more than human world at the heart of all interventions, strategy, culture and ways of working. It asks that we include radically other ways of being, learn from multiple forms of intelligence, and that we use our influence to move towards a shared purpose of reciprocal respect, dignity and mutual thriving.”

Kincentric leadership teaches us to center our Earthly Kin, and to do this, we need to change how we think about them. We need to think of our Earthly Kin as intelligent, sentient beings with their own needs and intentions, so that we can understand their perspectives and learn how to connect and collaborate with them.

Kincentric leadership is made up of 8 principles:

  1. Sacredness: Revering, celebrating, and showing gratitude for all of our Earthly Kin.

  2. Interdependence: Accepting that we are a part of a system in which all beings are connected.

  3. Animacy and Intelligence: Recognising the sentience, needs, and volition of all beings.

  4. Kinship: Understanding that everyone benefits when we recognise all beings as kin.

  5. Diversity & Cocreation: Listening and learning from our Earthly Kin, and discovering ways to collaborate.

  6. Justice & Equity: Acknowledging the equal value of all beings in our world.

  7. Belonging & Place: Centering community and locality in our work.

  8. Unravelling: Looking beyond ourselves in time and space to create and navigate change.

Each principle has its own tenets (called “capacities”) as well as specific practices that we can use to create Kincentric leadership. We’ll leave them for future newsletters, but I encourage you to read through the Kincentric Leadership Handbook which has all of the details about these principles, capacities, and practices.

Applying Kincentric Leadership

I love to see concrete ways in which theoretical concepts are being applied - sometimes it’s hard to understand how everything actually works until you see it in real life. Luckily for us, the Handbook has a section dedicated to “Stories from the field”, describing real examples of Kincentric Leadership being used to make positive change. There are 12 examples in the book, but for now let’s just look at one: the Fungi Foundation.

Photo of a fungus growing at the base of a tree in Ottawa, Ontario

The organisation was founded by Giuliana Furci in Chile in 2012, and its first goal was to catalogue the numerous Chilean fungi, many of which had not been ‘discovered’ by the scientific community prior to that. But the mission grew, and now Furci is a sort of “ambassador” for the fungi of Chile, spreading knowledge and engaging individuals at all levels - she even helped the country to become the first to recognise fungi, yeasts, and lichens as essential parts of the natural world!

Through this project, Furci helps individuals and organisations to recognise the sacredness of the fungal world, to understand how we depend on it, and to collaborate with it. She also has unveiled the intelligence and sentience of fungi, demonstrating their animacy through her research.

Furci’s project is so cool! Her advocacy was so successful that Chile and the UK proposed that fungi receive the same protections as plants and animals at the UN. And check out this guide to adopting a “mycologically-inclusive” approach to organisations’ operations.

I’m sure there is lots more to unpack about her work and her achievements (of which there are many), and you can also watch this short documentary following her work, but for now, I’ll leave you with this quote from her:

“I have a responsibility working for the fungi. When we’re in the field together, we test ways forward for fungal protection, and many a time, magic happens. As soon as you know a little bit more about them, you really do realise that [...] they’re extremely charismatic, and versatile, and gracious, and important, and dangerous, and elegant. They have it all. Any biologist, any ecologist, understands that without fungi, the world as we know it doesn’t exist. It’s convincing people in power that they’re the way forward in the protection of habitat, that's the challenge.”

- Robert