About Laura Hartley - Founder of the Scintilla Centre
I’m Laura; founder, teacher and voice behind the Scintilla Centre. There are two roots that led to the creation of Scintilla, and the work I do today.
The first started young, in my adolescence, when I found myself in and out of psych wards and police cars with emotional experiences I couldn’t control, understand or contain.
I carried a rage inside me that I didn’t know what to do with - and so it spiralled inward; manifesting as depression, substance abuse and self-hatred – and sometimes outward, uncontrollably.
These years were not easy, nor were the years of healing, but I remember a clear choice-point I found myself at; one where I could commit to deep work and transforming the darkness I was afraid of, or one where I could find my life controlled and succumbed by it.
I chose the first.
These experiences became a catalyst for exploring my inner landscapes, for my love of good questions and their potential, and for truly knowing the capacity we each hold for deep healing and change.
They started me on the path of wisdom.
The second root that led me to Scintilla was born out of the first; in learning to love myself and my life, I also learnt to fall in love with the world.
I fell in love with all manner of people and places; I discovered the wonder and magic that was held in nature, in food, in cultures, in landscapes. And in loving the world, I also came to understand the threats we face: climate and environmental crises; war, genocides and violence; cultures of extraction and supremacy.
The polycrisis - and indeed - metacrisis.
In my efforts to reshape the world - to shape one more just, loving and regenerative in nature - I’ve been active in climate and environmental activism, become a trainer of nonviolent direct action, and studied Kingian Nonviolence and Conflict Reconciliation.
I’ve travelled to Bhutan to learn about Gross National Happiness (solidifying my passion for wellbeing economics), and I’ve authored a chapter on internalised capitalism in in the book Inner Development Goals: Stories of Collective Leadership in Action.
And now, these two roots - my experiences in both inner and outer change, in wisdom and activism - fuse together in the Scintilla Centre; a space for us to develop the skills, wisdom and community we need to do the deep work of social healing and transformation.
From the World As It Is… To The World As It Could Be.
We live in a space between worlds; the world as it is - built on extraction, scarcity and disconnection - is unravelling. Many of the systems and structures that we considered cornerstone, including democracy, are under threat, with rising disinformation, dark money and polarisation threatening their limits.
Climate change and biodiversity loss are causing catastrophic events around the planet, their impacts likely to become only more pronounced in years to come.
The world’s conflict zones have increased by two-thirds in the past three years.
Our world is more brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible (BANI) than ever before.
And yet… as one world unravels, so too can another begin.
This is the space we inhabit at Scintilla Centre: the space between collapse and emergence, between the world as it is and the world as it could be.
Our work is to equip changemakers with the skills, wisdom and community to navigate this liminal time - not by waiting for the old systems to fully crumble or the new ones to fully form, but by developing the capacities to lead the transition itself.
Why a Wisdom Centre?
We are an incredible species; we’ve sequenced the genome, mapped millions of species on Earth, travelled to the moon, looked deep into galaxies, created mass cooperative movements of change, designed life changing medical and technological innovations with everything from penicillin to electricity to video calls to airplanes.
Our capacity for creativity, intelligence, and indeed even cooperation, is at the heart what it is to be human.
What we lack in creating a more just, loving and regenerative world is not intelligence, or science, or even power (even if these need developing).
It’s wisdom.
We can hold vast technologies, and not know how to use them well.
We can hold the skills of changemaking and still not know what's ours to do.
We can push hard for the world we want and burn out in the process, replicating the very patterns we're trying to change.
We can understand understand nuance and still collapse into binary conflicts under pressure.
We can know the theory of nonviolence and still reach for domination when conflict gets hard.
We can see what's being lost and still not know how to grieve it while moving toward what's possible.
Skills are the how of changemaking. Wisdom is what allows us to answer the when, the where, the why and the whether.
We focus our workshop, courses and 1:1 work on three interconnected levels:
The Personal: Developing your inner compass, discerning what's meaningfully yours to do in this time, unlearning the dominant stories keeping you stuck or exhausted, cultivating practices to navigate grief, uncertainty, and possibility.
The Relational: Building the skills this moment demands: conflict reconciliation, nonviolence, working across deep difference, wielding power wisely, and cultivating moral imagination in the face of complexity.
The Systemic: Understanding the narratives shaping our world - and how to shift them. Practicing complexity thinking and emergence, visioning regenerative futures, storytelling, learning to seed new possibilities while old systems are still standing.
How We Work
What We Offer
Through our membership & courses, we create space for changemakers to:
Develop the wisdom to navigate chaos & uncertainty
Build relational skills to work across difference and bridge divides
Cultivate the creativity and imagination to envision and seed new possibilities
Find community with others doing this work
Discern their unique role amidst a world in crisis.
Why Scintilla?
The word “scintilla” means a tiny trace, spark or amount, often of a feeling, eg, a scintilla of hope.
In the space between the world as it is and the world as it could be, the smallest sparks matters.
Moments of connection.
Sparks of creativity.
Threads of care.
Our role is to listen to the sparks - the scintillas - and cultivate the skills, wisdom and community to bring forth a more just, loving and regenerative world.
