Five Calls-to Action from the 2022 Facing Race Conference
What happens when thousands of racial justice leaders and practitioners come together after a pandemic? So much power and knowledge-sharing – and plenty of dancing and hugs, and even a few martinis!
At the 2022 national Facing Race Conference in Arizona, sponsored by Race Forward, participants were graced with gratitude for their work for racial justice, invited to be even bolder in our approaches, and instructed to avoid internal implosions at a time in which our organizations and the movement are needed the most.
I heard five important calls-to-action:
- Backlash Means We’re Winning. Keep Going!
We’re winning! The number of people of color leading and pushing change in institutions is at its highest levels. We see movement wins such as the growing people of color electorate and the halt of the Keystone pipeline. The use of the word “systemic racism” is now commonplace. We were encouraged to keep pressing forward and harder to break through on our biggest ideas. Opening plenary speakers said, “Fight for your impossible idea… and let us dream and fail.”
- Get out of Isolation. It’s Time for Reconnection!
We’ve become accustomed to quarantine and staying close to home but we were encouraged to move out of our comfort zones. Specifically, we were reminded to talk to people at their doors and to bring them back into protests and visible organizing. One speaker said, “we have to retrain people, including ourselves, to interact again, especially in person and in public.” At IISC, our mission is creating skills for collaboration and interaction. We’re exploring how we can enter and hold physical spaces with care while still centering those at risk from COVID through an equity and disability access lens.
- Don’t Underestimate White Nationalism. Expose and Bring it Down!
As distinct from the ideology of white supremacy, white nationalism is coordinated and direct action fueled by hatred and violence. Organization-building to support white racist and anti-semetic attacks and violence is on the rise and getting very sophisticated. From Boston to Michigan and Florida, leaders pointed to overt and well-organized actions in their communities from white nationalist organizations. They encouraged us to work with community organizations, government leaders, and neighbors to develop strategies to prevent their inroads and to frame messaging to drown out their discourse.
- Stop Internal Organizational Implosions. Build Organizations on Soul Work!
We heard a loud and clear call for each person inside an organization to take responsibility for extinguishing the internal fights we are waging against each other so we can focus on the external fights for justice. No organization, person, or leader is perfect so we can’t cast each other to the curb in punitive and harmful ways, stay in victimization, attack each other, and fall into gossip. They asked us to build our organizations so people can do their soul work and be liberated to do work with joy and happiness.
- Move Forward. Live into Possibility!
I was struck that you barely heard the name “Trump” around the conference. The focus was on moving and organizing for what we want and imagine. Not that we don’t pay attention to the war on our democracy and progressive values but that we go in the direction of creating even more conditions for change and living good personal lives as we do it. IISC held a workshop at the conference on fighting the return of the old normal by envisioning and leading for liberatory systems and racial justice transformation. We produced a resource guide to help you and other organizations do that while attending to the current challenges before us. Check it out.
In summary, we have power, we’re winning, and we need to reconnect and get our own house in order. Now that’s a push we at IISC appreciated and definitely needed, and maybe you feel that way, as well. We hope to see you at the next Facing Race conference in 2024.
As president, Kelly Bates (she/her) leads the strategic direction of Interaction Institute of Social Change and supports its dynamic and diverse team of consultants and trainers to meet the organization’s highest aspirations for social change and racial equity.
Kelly is a social changer, nonprofit civic leader, and lawyer who for more than twenty-five years has led advocacy, organizing, racial justice, and women’s organizations promoting collaboration, equity, and civic engagement, both locally and nationally. She strives each day to develop and embody the heart, skills, and mindset of a facilitative leader and civic innovator for progressive movement building across the country and in communities.
originally published at Interaction Institute for Social Change on December 13, 2022
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Creative Freedom for True Equity
Equity is often discussed, but rarely understood in a context that speaks to the core challenges of people who are under-represented in race, religion, gender, socio economic status or who may be geographically excluded and differently abled. In particular, the necessary experiences and spaces for communities within rural Texas are just beginning to receive the attention and resources required to spark conversation and change. Paying homage to deep rooted history and lineage of community members is essential for Black communities in Bastrop County, Texas (and beyond). In Bastrop, home to 13 original Freedom Colonies, the untapped power of equity-for-all lies in the centering of Blackness. In order for our society to evolve, it is imperative to recognize Black America's contributions and sacrifices as a strategy towards equity for everyone. This has been the primary focus of my personal work, which aspires to bring about social change for all.
Grappling with the core roots of exclusion and inequity, Network Weaving helps to build a framework for connection, access, support and consistent learning– a critical necessity for many who have generational ties to this local land. In Central Texas, approaching community organizing from a network weaving paradigm has supported an evolving model of rural mental health equity in many ways by building on existing culture of community-led organizing. By providing resources for gatherings and trainings for local community leaders, network weaving has become a pillar of support for the work already being done by many on-the-ground community members of these rural networks.
As a weaver, the support of this network and the ability to work collectively and autonomously alongside like-minded people has helped me develop the courage to continue down the path of creating safe spaces for Black women and Black boys. While they continue to be challenged by those who rarely experience the feeling of being othered, safe spaces continue to be places where, as Kelsey Gladwell writes, “we can simply be — where we can get off the treadmill of making white people comfortable and finally realize just how tired we are. Valuing and protecting spaces for people of color (PoC) is not just a kind thing that white people can do to help us feel better; supporting these spaces is crucial to the resistance of oppression.”
After the George Floyd Protests, people began coming to us, as community leaders to shoulder the burden of anti racist organizing, but as a mental health clinician, I saw that my community required a more communal approach that centered their mental, spiritual, ancestral and physical health. This led me to co-create a series of social wellness brunches for Black women in central Texas, a podcast about centering community voices in healing, and the Bastrop County Black Boys Collective which aims to nurture their innovation through connection with other boys and men.
Resistance has been the bedrock to creating safe spaces for local black communities, and it has often been misunderstood as an exclusionary act. Finding the courage, self-love and dedication to create from a vulnerable place has been an emancipating experience, making it hard to return back to “business as usual.” My vision and purpose, as I reflect on my life thus far, are to find ways to enhance freedom and liberation for like-minded communities. To get to this creative utopia, I often reflect and ask myself;
- How can I continue to create spaces for renewal, healing, safety, trust and belonging?
- Who understands and can support this desire for creative freedom?
- What are my strategies to unearth the core stories around me that have led to freedom and prosperity for rural Black America?
- How can we as a collective redefine “success” to allow space for our inherent goodness?
- Where and how can I build upon my connections to others dedicated to liberation?
Through my partnership with the network weaving community since 2019, I’ve been able to form lasting relationships to other community organizers, writers, and social change agents who also see a path towards healing for the communities in which they identify. Weavers are a set of individuals looking to bring attention to the causes that they are most passionate about. Working with advocates and activists dedicated to equity initiatives has been confirmation that we have much more work to do but…I am not alone.
As a Black woman, Mother, mental health strategist, and safe space creator, I’ve been able to carve out a path of healing with my community. These experiences have enabled me to have a clear awareness of those around me and the resources needed to build upon a framework of freedom, liberation, reciprocity and resilience while redefining my understanding of self within the totality of my community.
The thought-leaders within the network have remained bold, focused on serving all populations and dedicated to creating a system of social entrepreneurs with the belief that social entrepreneurship which honors the lived-experiences of community leaders and disruptors is the catalyst towards rural social and political change.
We are innovators and creators. My legacy will be the creation of a physical space for healing, freedom, and creativity for the under-represented. As an act of rebellion and love, weaving through my social change work has helped to heal my battle with power by stepping into my potential as a Network Engine, connector and artist. Weaving has become an important aspect of reclaiming my right to connect and create with like-minded individuals. I’ve already begun to witness the shift in our local narrative, relying on the voices, contributions and vast experiences of the black community.
The function, the profoundly serious function, of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, repeatedly, your reason for being. - Toni Morrison
Krystal Grimes, M.S., LPC is the President and Founder of AMMA Empowerment Services, LLC. Krystal is recognized regionally and internationally as a safe space creator and mental health strategist. Through an intrinsic ability and desire to support others, Krystal has positioned herself as a local convener and facilitator for healing and diversity initiatives, supporting the creation of inclusive and brave spaces for dialogue and innovation.
featured image by Alicia W. Brown
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6 Reasons Why Liberatory Leaders Need to Take Play Seriously
When was the last time you played, did something just because it was fun and felt good? Did you finish feeling enlivened, relaxed, energized, or something similar? Leadership Learning Community has been exploring the roles of fun and play in our activities. This exploration didn’t start out super intentional, but rather as a reaction to the pandopalypse we’ve all been living in. Over time LLC began discussing play in relation to our work, referring to aspects of our work as “playful” or describing meetings and convenings as “play spaces.” For us, this isn’t a cutesy communications strategy. As LLC began to turn our attention to play, we realized that play, when grounded in collective purpose and steeped in values, can be a liberatory act.
Here are six reasons why we believe play can help leaders embrace liberatory practice.
Fuel Ideation
- Play can be described as “something that’s imaginative, self-directed, intrinsically motivated and guided by rules that leave room for creativity.” By creating space for creativity and imagination, play helps to quiet the self-conscious, judgemental inner critic. This voice discourages deviations from the known norm and makes trying on new things feel too risky. Without that voice, perhaps there is room for a little bit of magic to invite in new possibilities. Taking a playful stance allows us to adopt a child-like or beginner's mind, and helps us to develop mental plasticity and adaptability while simultaneously reminding us that our options aren’t all pre-determined and that there is space for the not yet known. This opening of possibility is critical as liberatory transformative efforts are dreaming and imagining into being something that does not currently exist. To do that, we have to stretch our imagination muscles.
- Practice: Start the meeting with a playful check-in question like, “If you could go back in time (or to the future), who would you want to meet?” or pick a favorite zoom filter to start the meeting with. Check out more of our check-in questions here.
Nurture, Healing & Wellness
- Play is an effective way to manage stress and can be a tool of both self and collective care. Play helps us to be in the moment, similar to meditation. In contrast to oppressive practices, which are confining and restrictive, sapping our spiritual and figurative energy; the enlivening nature of playful activities may help to heal these wounds.
- Practice: Host meetings near a park, the ocean, or in nature. Take a walk. Find new analogies for the work we do.
Create New Models of Strategic Thinking
- Playing makes things real, during play we don’t just imitate we also imagine and embody (something). Trying on liberation in play spaces/playful ways allows us to feel the benefit of liberation in the moment while we are learning more than we currently know. This focus on liberation now means that during play liberation doesn’t just have to be a future goal. In addition, some studies suggest that play supports memory and thinking skills, so play may literally help us think our way to freedom.
- Practice: Do some creative writing. Some of us have and are taking a writing course with Dara Joyce Lurie. She shares a quote from Edward de Bono, “Rightness is what matters in vertical thinking. Richness is what matters in lateral thinking. Vertical thinking selects a pathway by excluding other pathways. Lateral thinking does not select but seeks to open up other pathways. With lateral thinking one generates as many alternative approaches as one can. With vertical thinking one is trying to select the best approach, but with lateral thinking one is generating different approaches for the sake of generating them.”
Expand Leadership Opportunities
- Because play utilizes “creative rules” that are distinct from the rules and restrictions of regular life, in play, there exists the opportunity, though not the requirement, to separate capacity from expertise. All of a sudden, players “can” do things even if they aren’t experts at said activity. So you can play at being a pilot without actually knowing how to fly a plane. In playful spaces more people can function as leaders, meaning more people can be actively involved in imagining liberatory practice into being.
- Practice: Acting and improvisation exercises like “Questions Only” where you act out a scene given to you with only questions.
Build Community:
- Play offers us the opportunity to connect. When we create safe play spaces there is little risk to engaging. People can show up with a less performative stance. BIPOC leaders frequently find themselves under a spotlight or a microscope. The labor of being forced to code-switch or deal with being othered is exhausting so I imagine that BIPOC leaders especially are eager for safe spaces to be themselves. Where showing up as one’s whole self is an invitation and a demand, and for the purpose of supporting the BIPOC leader not to be of utility to others. Often BIPOC leaders are told to show up as their full self because observing BIPOC leaders is good for an observer, not for the benefit of the BIPOC leader.
- Practice: Shorten the strategic side of the meeting, and incorporate the karaoke, fun, and games as part of the meeting, not just extra at the end.
An Invitation to Wholeness:
- By allowing us to focus on pleasure and fun rather than objectives and outputs, play encourages us to be more than what we can produce. Perhaps play is akin to rest in that way, and maybe we can view embracing the revolutionary possibility of play in the same way that we have begun to respect how rest can be resistance. This need for play spaces may prove to be especially important for BIPOC leaders given that kids of color are often adultified early, and deprived of the space to play freely. By recapturing play, as we have attempted to reclaim rest, we may enliven our work and find new paths toward liberation.
- Practice: Make space for play at every meeting whether it’s a check-in, the location, the activities, or the bonding event. Make play and joy part of your community agreements so they show up intentionally during your work.
Ericka Stallings is the Co-Executive Director of the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) a learning network of people who run, fund and study leadership development. LLC challenges traditional thinking about leadership and supports the development of models that are more inclusive, networked and collective. Prior to LLC, Ericka was the Deputy Director for Capacity Building and Strategic Initiatives at the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD), supporting organizing and advocacy and leading ANHD’s community organizing capacity building work.
Nikki Dinh is the daughter of boat people refugees who instilled in her the importance of being in community. Though she grew up in a California county that was founded by the KKK, her family’s home was in an immigrant enclave. Her neighborhood taught her about resistance, resilience, joy and love.
originally published at Leadership Learning Community
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by Ericka Stallings and Nikki Dinh, co-executive directors of Leadership Learning Community
Liberatory Governance... and belonging
How do we organize ourselves... in a world where everyone belongs?
Of the many barriers to living into a world where everyone belongs, this question feels fundamental: how do we organize ourselves? What might it look and feel like to work in an organization without coercion, without domination hierarchies… where everyone belongs?
So today I want to talk about governance. The term sounds bland, but I think it’s sexy: it is the magic that makes everything else possible, and the curse that can undermine even our best work if we don’t pay attention to it. I like this simple definition from the WeGovern community:
Governance is how we choose to be together.
Zen priest and movement strategist Norma Wong names what we all feel, looking out at the world, our institutions, and our movements:
Governance as it exists right now is in collapse.
While I think about governance at every level (family, organization, nation-state), today I want to focus on the scale of an organization, network, or collective: a group of people with a shared purpose and defined membership.
No transformation without governance
I want to thank Brandon Dubé in particular for pushing me, and Building Belonging, to embrace governance as a tool of transformation, and to explore sociocracy in particular. He helped remind us: if governance is about how we choose to be together, then by definition we are all involved in governance all the time, every day, in all of our relationships. Kali Akuno, one of the founders of Cooperation Jackson, agrees:
Governance is just how we make collective decisions together.
In a previous post reflecting on the nature of power, I adopted Priya Parker’s simple definition: “Power is decision-making.” Following this logic, governance is about making visible how power operates, and treating the question of how we wield power with intentionality.
I love Ted Rau’s delightfully provocative question and book: “Who decides… who decides?” If you really sit with it, it’s a radical question, and one that helps distinguish acts of leadership (someone has to speak first, to take responsibility for initiating or facilitating a conversation and the act of collaboration) from acts of domination (preventing others from speaking, my way or the highway, etc.).
Here’s the thing: I’ve come to believe that there is no durable path to transformation without attending to both the process and structure for how we make decisions together in a collective context. As Sean Andrew, Louise Armstrong and Anna Birney explain:
How we relate, work together, and organize are cornerstones of change making… Governance is central to any form of organizing or organization creating change.
We’ve been socialized to view governance as something annoying that gets in the way of “doing the work.” I want to flip this conventional understanding to expose a deeper truth: practicing good governance is the work; without it, anything we create will ultimately be fragile or even antithetical to our aims. As john powell reminds us:
If we don’t do things at a structural level, the structural level will undermine the progress we are making at the personal level.
What we agree on
To generalize broadly we can divide governance into two aspects: structure (think org charts, roles and decision-making authority, etc.) and process (how we make decisions, how we relate to each other). While the two are of course inseparable, today I want to focus primarily on structure: how do we embed the principles of liberatory governance in our org design?
Specifically, I want to distill three foundational principles that practitioners seem to agree on. Of course this is just my subjective perspective; I very much welcome generative pushback and other efforts to synthesize a broad and diverse field.
1. The opposite of coercion is consent
In a world where everyone belongs, we don’t want coercion. As Zakiyya Ismail notes:
Wherever there is coercion, there is oppression.
Dominant culture organizational hierarchies enshrine coercion: “bosses'“ are elevated above other workers; disobey your boss and you risk getting fired. In his beautiful handbook on Mutual Aid principles, Dean Spade notes:
Our society runs on coercion… Most of us have little experience in groups where everyone gets to make decisions together, because our schools, homes, workplaces, congregations, and other groups are mostly run as [domination] hierarchies.
Because we lack practice, too often when we seek refuge from this authoritarian model we make the mistake of swinging to the opposite extremes: either rejecting structure altogether (all hierarchy is bad! inevitably leading to the infamous “tyranny of structurelessness”) or demanding an overly rigid homogeneity that calls for universal consensus. As experiments like Occupy Wall Street have shown, relying only on consensus (everyone agrees on the way forward) is both inefficient and can allow bad-faith actors to impede progress… itself a form of coercion.
The antidote is consent-based governance. As Stas Schmiedt notes:
Consent is how we operationalize liberation.
There are a range of methodologies emerging that seek to codify what a consent-based governance structure/practice might look like; my favorite thus far is sociocracy, a concept given life by the team at Sociocracy for All. This article by Ted Rau is a great introduction, and here is a helpful companion piece distinguishing consensus-based governance from consent-based governance. To be clear: majoritarian democracy (what we purport to practice in the United States) is NOT based on consent. Majority rule doesn’t seek to integrate minority objections; it seeks to overrule them: in my view, that is a coercive system.
The core idea is that the bar for action is not agreement but willingness (a term I prefer to “tolerance”). People can (and must!) object to a proposal that they believe will undermine organizational purpose, but that objection is not a veto: it’s naming an issue that must be addressed and integrated into an improved proposal before it can move forward. The assumption is that the proposal will move forward once the objection has been integrated.
It’s a subtle but radical shift that provides the basis for everything that follows. As the folks at Circle Forward note:
Consent is the foundation for an entire governance system.
2. Structure codifies, reflects, and creates culture
OK, we’re organizing around consent: this is already a radical departure from dominant cultures (and organizational structures) predicated on coercion. But precisely because we have so little practice/training in operationalizing consent, we need help. Our structures have to support us, individually and collectively, in practicing different ways of being. In his comprehensive study about how change happens, sociologist Damon Centola concludes:
We don't make decisions as individuals; we are reciprocally influenced by the environment and people around us… It is largely the structures in which they are embedded that determines whether things work well or not.
On this all the practitioners I follow agree: the structure both reflects and creates culture; it serves to codify how we relate to each other. Tracy Kunkler explains:
Governance is how we set up systems to live our values, and leads to the creation, reinforcement, or reproduction of social norms and institutions. Governance systems give form to the culture’s power relationships.
The folks at Brave New Work name the implication for our org structures:
Whatever we want to be true about the way we relate, is it in the system, is it in the structure?
Taking this question seriously underscores the importance of governance. If we acknowledge that our default patterning is shaped by systems of oppression (white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, etc.), then without intentional effort—and lots of practice!—we are likely to repeat those patterns in our organizations. bell hooks names the challenge:
To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.
Without a structure that supports us in practicing these more liberatory ways of being, we will find ourselves struggling. I love this vulnerable share from Dana Kawaoka-Chen documenting her own efforts at culture-change inside her organization:
Even if I as the executive director had a vision for another way of being, I did not have the organizational structure in place to reinforce a different set of values, which allowed the default operating system to prevail.
3. We want a decentralized structure that enables people to share their fullest gifts
Here we begin to wade into murky waters. I think practitioners generally agree on three things:
- Liberatory governance systems must be decentralized: there is no central command and control structure.
- The structure must seek to, as Alanna Irving notes, “align power with responsibility.” And I would go one step farther: to align responsibility with authority: whoever is best-positioned to act (as a function of the healthy expression of power, whether derived from knowledge, capacity, or relationships) has the responsibility and authority to act.
- The structure must help maximize and channel “discretionary energy” in service of our shared purpose. (Indeed, this has long been one of my core definitions of leadership: the ability to inspire and support others in tapping into the fullest expression of their gifts… and sharing those gifts in support of the collective).
Emergent paradigms seek to solve for these concerns; frameworks like sociocracy do a good job of speaking to the first two points here. While in theory sociocracy can also provide a structure to unlock and channel people’s gifts, I have yet to see it work like that in practice… for reasons I’ll get into below.
Where we still struggle
There is so much that is difficult about this… even as the promise remains tantalizing and delightful when we taste it. As Ericka Stallings notes,
This lack of knowledge about how to operationalize liberatory values exists because we’ve never actually experienced it, so we are almost imagining it into being.
I want to name here three of the core challenges I see that we haven’t yet collectively found a way to effectively navigate. These are areas of experimentation and practice in real time among all the organizations, networks, communities, and collectives that I see on the cutting edge of this work (groups like Wildseed Society, Change Elemental, Resonance Network, the Fierce Vulnerability Network, the Post-Growth Institute, the Thrive Network, and Open Collective, among others).
1. Leadership, agency, power, and self-governance (structure alone will not set us free)
There are books written on each of these topics, but the dynamic I want to highlight here turns on the question of agency (defined as the capacity to exert power).
The general pattern I observe splits along lines of privilege and marginalization. Those socialized into power and privilege, once they become aware of that socialization and not wanting inadvertently to perpetuate domination, shrink from exercising their power: they abdicate their agency (white people in multiracial space, e.g.) At the same time, people marginalized and oppressed by dominant culture have a hard time feeling safe enough to exercise their rightful power. Everyone is afraid to take on the responsibility that comes with leadership, especially amid the radical complexity of proposing a course through uncharted waters… and make decisions that will inevitably have an impact on other people.
The result can be a leadership vacuum, where no one is taking the action that all can see is needed. Gopal Dayaneni names this as one the biggest obstacles we face on the path to liberation:
The primary barrier is our ability to democratically self-govern… The practice of self-governance is the hardest thing. We have to make the hardest decisions, and we don’t have any practice.
Instead, we often look to the structure, or to others with more visible forms of social, positional, or structural power, to get us unstuck. But this misses the point. Quanita Roberson offers this provocation:
So much of what we are struggling with as a culture is that we want everything to be external so that we don't have to take responsibility for what is actually ours to do.
Norma Wong puts it simply: “Transformation requires agency.”
Self-organizing is dead: long live self-organizing!
So here’s the paradox. On the one hand, I agree with Gopal Dayaneni, who declares:
The future must be self-organized.
And I agree with Alanna Irving, who asserts:
I believe there is no such thing as “self-organizing”—there is always work to be done and a skillset required to coordinate people to move together toward a larger shared goal.
The challenge I’m naming here has to do with coming into right relationship with power: our own, others’, and power as made visible and reflected in organizational structure. For self-organizing to work, individuals have to assert agency: to take responsibility for making decisions with and on behalf of the collective. This is by definition an act of leadership. Nwamaka Agbo frames the challenge:
We don’t what it means to lead, until we have to make difficult decisions and take accountability and responsibility for those decisions… collective decision-making still requires that we make decisions.
2. We don’t know what to do with money
If power, agency, and self-governance is hard… that difficulty increases by a degree of magnitude when we introduce money. Two things were clear to me in launching Building Belonging: I wanted to avoid the funder-appeasement / movement-capture trap of the nonprofit industrial complex; and I wanted to avoid the opposite extreme of relying entirely on a volunteer-based community without any money. Both situations risk reinforcing the very power dynamics I want to escape: the gatekeeper model of elite access to funding, or volunteer networks that end up becoming becoming playgrounds for the privileged.
And there’s more: I had a sense that money is one of the most transformative realms of practice available to us; as Orland Bishop reminds us, it is humanity’s largest unconscious agreement.
I love this entire interview with Gopal Dayaneni, where he explains:
The primary reason people pay their rent is because they have no alternative ways to meet their housing needs… It’s not primarily the coercive power of the state or corporations. Rather, we are forced to comply without consent because we have no meaningful alternative.
So even as we focus on developing more liberatory ways of working with money (gotta pay rent!), that’s only half the work: we also have to be devoting energy to meeting our individual and collective needs outside of that system. If we are to transition to a post-capitalist world where everyone belongs, here’s what feels clear to me.
- We have to find ways to meet our needs outside of the money/exchange paradigm (see e.g. this recent post from Mike Strode, exploring some creative ways of flowing value and meeting needs outside the bounded system of money)
- We have to use money to meet our needs in the interim while we remain tethered to that paradigm (see e.g. this discussion of challenges and experiments from Francesca Pick)
- We have to be proactively engaged in both levels at the same time (I love this example from the DisCO cooperative: finding ways to honor the value not only of traditionally remunerative work but also of care work and pro bono contributions)
I’d love to see more examples like DisCO intentionally exploring this space, anchored in indigenous and intersectional feminist principles.
3. Navigating conflict and impact
On this point Kazu Haga is blunt:
The greatest barrier to living and building beloved community is how we navigate conflict.
He may be right: everything else is navigable if we have the skills to transform conflict; not much is possible if we don’t. This has been my consistent lesson from all my work understanding and trying to transform oppressive systems: they depend on separation. Oppressive systems cannot sustain themselves if we have the ability to repair ruptures and reconnect what has been severed. Indeed, I love this definition of leadership from Marcella Bremer, channeling Otto Scharmer:
Leadership is connecting what was separated.
How can we embed accountability and conflict transformation in our structures, when these are fundamentally relational capacities? As Sean, Louise, and Anna remind us:
The nature and quality of our relationships is the foundation of any governance.
I don’t have great answers here. It feels clear to me that a big piece of the work is re-wiring how we understand and relate to conflict: from something bad to be avoided, to Malidoma Somé’s beautiful definition:
Conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking itself to deepen.
My own evolving sense is at minimum every organization/network/collective needs two things:
- The structural equivalent of a help line: where do you go when you find yourself in conflict and unsure how to proceed? I love Alyson Ewald’s idea (from this podcast) of creating a “conflict celebration team.”
- A community-wide commitment to building capacity to navigate conflict, individually, interpersonally, and collectively. This includes trainings and practice, drawing on a growing range of methodologies (I like the framework offered by Deep Democracy, and the skillsets named in Nonviolent Communication, e.g.)
And of course, to name the elephant in the room here: upstream of everything we’re working on is trauma. If we want to come into right relationship with power and agency, hold the tension of navigating money as we transition toward post-capitalism, and transform conflict… we need to find ways individually and collectively to heal from trauma.
Structure is not a panacea. We are still human beings inside of whatever structure we create, with all of our foibles, unhealed trauma, and limited capacity. I’ve written elsewhere about trauma, but need to name it here.
An invitation to practice
If you made it this far, I want to close with an invitation to action, and to feedback: what resonates? What doesn’t? What are you seeing? This work is incredibly difficult… and incredibly liberating, when we find ourselves in structures of belonging.
The WeGovern Community reminds us:
Governance begins with each of us: in practice, in relationship, every day.
I like the way Kim Tallbear expresses our humble aspiration:
We are not trying to get it right, we are trying to get it less wrong, through practice.
Brian Stout is a systems convener, network weaver, and initiator of the Building Belonging collaborative. His background is in international conflict mediation, serving as a diplomat with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington and overseas. He also worked in philanthropy with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, before leaving in early 2016 to organize in response to the global rise of authoritarianism and far-right nationalism. He recently returned to his hometown in rural southern Oregon, where he lives with his wife and two children.
originally published at building belonging
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Being in the humanity of governance, with all its messiness and joy
Reflections from the WeGovern Learning Community
How do we build ways of being that uplift the collective dignity, wholeness, and thriving of one another and the lands we inhabit?
How do we build ways of being where our collective wellbeing is carried by community?
How do we create opportunities to live a happy life? To find joy?
WeGovern Learning Community participants are exploring these questions together–discovering what it takes to live into the WeGovern principles today, in our current realities and communities.
This is collective governance, and it takes practice.
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In phase two of the WeGovern Learning Community, a cohort of new and returning participants came together with a shared commitment to collective governance–in practice, embodiment, and reflection. In their first gathering, cohort members delved into what governance means to them, and how it shows up in their lives. Here are some highlights from that conversation:
“I am a movement within myself.” ~ Monique Tú Nguyen
- I used to think there wasn’t a clear rhythm to the way I make choices–that it just sort of happened as things came up. But when I reflected on it, I realized I have a methodical way of making decisions–with myself, choosing who I spend time with and what I spend time doing, and how I care for myself and use my resources emotionally, physically, spiritually, and financially. That’s governance, and there is power in that clarity.
- At work, we have to be clear about documentation; there are clear pathways and decision making protocols–but how are we clarifying, for ourselves, the pathways toward decision making in our own lives, and in our interpersonal relationships?
We are stepping into the sacred responsibility of tending to our own being-ness
- If we are going to be in relationship and connection with others, we have a responsibility to tend to our own being–our own healing, our own growth. Everything else comes from that place–our practices, our placemaking, how we cultivate belonging, and how we become aware of our needs–and make choices to make sure those needs are met.
- It is the values and choices that I practice every day, in all the unfolding moments. I am choosing wholeness and listening and vulnerability
“When I think about the ways I engage with governance the most, it’s in the relationships I touch every day–my relationship with myself, my relationship with my dog, my relationship with my partner, and in my caregiving relationship with my mom, who has dementia.”
-Alexis Flanagan
There is power in visibilizing our governance practice(s)
- And it’s important to name governance as governance — to visibilize our practice, so we can bring people along
- We are cultivating a sense of responsibility for the way we move through the world. From the moment we get out of bed in the morning, how are we living our values? It’s so easy to let that process be invisible, but so important to bring it to light.
Governance is the gas pedal on the tractor
- If I imagine my life as driving a tractor, what’s accelerating me forward is my own choices. I want to move forward in alignment and with integrity, so that my thoughts and feelings and actions are all in harmony with each other. And I feel right with myself.
- Meanwhile, it’s important to make sure that I am being transparent about my choices in the world–because it’s not enough for me personally to just do the thing. If I don’t voice the value I’m living into, people may see what I’m doing but not understand why. We have a responsibility to bring people along.
“We are scootin’ toward the interdependent stewardship of wellness” -Aaron Spriggs
- Governance is about the big ‘we’. When we understand we as ‘all of us together,’ we consider the moves we make–and the way we impact each other–differently
- Governance is stewardship; it’s caring for the collective navigation of our beingness.
- Our decision making together brings in every part of us, and all of the ecosystems around us into how we’re making every single choice, how we’re moving through our days.
“I am honoring and orienting towards wellness and nourishment–and I practice that in how I speak internally to myself, how I choose to speak in a shared place, how I choose to navigate things like making food in my kitchen–all the choices I make that are interconnected with other people, that impact me and the people around me are all part of that building out into the world we want to live in.”
-Reese Hart
Collective governance is a discipline we choose, so that all people may experience dignity
- We are building strategies to prevent future harm while also taking time to imagine what governance looks like outside of the current structure we live in, that continues to cause harm
- To govern, you need to think about what breaks your heart. And also what you love–and that’s going to help you be who you are in the world. — Rose Elizondo
Governance is a lifelong journey
- Just as in nature’s rhythm of seasons, we are renewing ourselves constantly–our needs are not the same, moment to moment; our bodies are not asking for the same things
- Being able to be open and responsive in the natural ebbs and flows is part of governance practice–it is an ongoing journey of renewal and growth
Governance is the restoration of birthright
- All of us are part of a lineage–we are coming back into ourselves and our humanity, choosing and creating the life we want to live, with the people and beings we want to be with. Almost like we are revisiting our childhoods and getting to raise ourselves–we are deciding who we are, who we want to be, and how we want to relate to (and with) others. How we want to be seen.
- And the capacity for this is something we’re all born with–we don’t have to achieve or acquire; our capacity for governance is already within us. And the more we can see that, the less alone we feel.
“This enormous world I’m part of is always going to be big enough for whatever I evolve into.” -Yesenia Veamatahau
The stance, self care, investment, and spaciousness to be present to what’s happening around us. To step into the choices, in each moment, that enable us to live our values, we need to be present to connections, community, and portals–like the land. Land connects us to today, tomorrow, yesterday. We need to breathe into compassion, boundaries, and love.
We are learning to really be with ourselves–and witnessing the ripple effect that has on others.
Collective governance is rooted in Indigenous peacemaking and restorative justice practices, incorporating laws of nature and spirit.
Forrest Landry says that love is that which enables choice. And perhaps the same is true for governance that Dr. Cornel West says about justice–that it’s what love looks like in public. Governance is ultimately a collective practice–one we are delving into in times of deep uncertainty, isolation, and struggle. We are building when we need to most, the kind of governance we know is possible. Beginning with the choices we make today.
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The reflections in this post were shared during the first gathering of the WeGovern Learning Community Phase 2. Just as the governance we practice, this discussion was a collective endeavor. Deep gratitude to all participants for their presence and contributions: Benjamin Carr, Reese Hart, Monique Tu Ngúyen, Crystal Harris, Ed Heisler, Sarah Curtiss, Leta Harris Neustaedter, Aaron Spriggs, Judith LeBlanc, Lonnie Provost, Brittany Eltringham, Heidi Notario, David Hsu, Adriana Contreras, Estefania Mondragon, Jenni Rangel, Ruby Mendez-Mota, Jovida Ross, Shizue Roche Adachi, Alexis Flanagan, Aparna Shah, Doris Dupuy, Kassamira Carter-Howard, Megan Shimbiro, Yesenia Veamatahau, Karen Tronsgard-Scott, Anne Smith, and LaToria White.
originally published at The Reverb
Resonance Network is a national network of people building a world beyond violence.
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Reclaiming Care Beyond Roe v. Wade
When the state cannot guarantee our safety, we turn to community as our ancestors did
On June 24, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court after nearly 50 years as precedent.
Weeks before, in response to the leaked decision, Resonance Network hosted ‘We Are Our Own Medicine,’ a gathering grounded in community, storytelling, and ancestral wisdom. Alongside Black and Indigenous healers of various traditions, we came together knowing what our ancestors have known for generations: the state cannot guarantee our safety — it never has.
In the US, incarcerated, disabled, undocumented, poor, queer and trans folks, and survivors have been denied reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and care for decades. Because this violence lives in our history — and shared reality — we gathered to learn from and share stories from ancestors — past and present — who’ve lived this experience.
In short, when the state cannot guarantee our safety, we turn to community as our ancestors did.
Below is a constellation of wisdom from ‘We Are Our Own Medicine.’
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Deoné Newell — Women’s Empowerment Coach
Deoné is a Navajo/Black entrepreneur, Breathwork Facilitator and Women’s Life Coach. As a woman who hails from the Navajo Reservation (Window Rock, AZ), and has seen the effects of systemic oppression and generational trauma firsthand, Deoné has dedicated herself to making ancestral healing, and its forgotten wisdom accessible to as many BIPOC women as possible.
Karen Culpepper—Clinical Herbalist/Educator
Karen has been a practitioner and bodyworker for over 14 years, focusing her work on intergenerational trauma and its impact on physiology and womb restoration. Her study of cotton root bark as an abortifacient and source of sovereignty for descendants of captured Africans in the US and beyond offers insight into the role of plant spirit healing in the context of political changes.
Qiddist Ashé—Founder, The Womb Room
Qiddist is a medicine woman and female health educator. Informed by her maternal lineage of Ethiopian midwives and her own work in authentic midwifery, functional health, herbalism, somatics, and spiritual sovereignty, Qiddist merges the science and the spirit of female health, orienting to all the ways we can reclaim agency and responsibility for our bodies and our lives.
Camila Barrera Salcedo—Doula/Midwife/Educator
Camila is a mother of 3, doula, midwife, sexuality therapist, and holotropic breathing and fertility therapist. She delves into the unconscious via the physical body to identify blocks that disrupt the evolution and transformation of individuals. She develops workshops to re-establish the feminine consciousness through acceptance and knowledge about the body and its processes.
originally published at The Reverb
Resonance Network is a national network of people building a world beyond violence.
Network Weaver is dedicated to offering free content to all – in support of equity, justice and transformation for all.
We appreciate your support!
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What do we mean by “community”?
Since the inception of Building Belonging, we’ve wrestled internally with this question: what are we? On our homepage we say we are:
A home for people committed to building a world where everyone belongs… We are a community of people working toward transformation and liberation: of ourselves, our societies, and the world.
And yet our gathering place is on Mighty Networks; so clearly we see ourselves at some level as a network as well.
So we’re a home. And a community. And a network. What does that mean, exactly? How do we organize ourselves? How do we make decisions? And as money flows through the system and we face the legal/financial imperative to adopt a structure… are we also an organization?
I don’t want to speak for Building Belonging here; we are in the middle of our second interim Stewardship Process, precisely to take a collective perspective on questions like this. But I did want to share my own intentions in case it’s helpful to others wrestling with these questions in their own communities/networks/organizations; I see this question as a key point of differentiation in the social change ecosystem that feels important to name.
1. I am interested in building a community, not an organization. I love this definition from
Aaron Goggans and team at Wildseed Society (which I see as a kindred initiative to BB):
We define community as a group of people with such important or valuable interrelationships that it is easier to have the difficult conversations than walk away. It’s a space where we agree to labor together to root out domination from our praxis and replace it with more liberatory ways of meeting our needs.
2. The kind of community I’m interested in co-creating is synonymous with the concept of “political home.” That is, it must contain two components. A “home”: a space of nourishment, resilience, support, safety, deep commitment to each other, and comfort. And it must also be “political,” meaning we are gathering in order to transform: ourselves, each other, and the world. It’s a space of stretch, of intentionally pushing ourselves to change material conditions in our community (as a fractal) and in the world.
There are other communities that are only or primarily about “home,” and communities that are only or primarily about “political.” Building Belonging — for me — is an effort to co-create a political home. Both things are essential. I resonate with how adrienne maree brown describes it:
Political home…is a place where we ideate, practice and build futures we believe in, finding alignment with those we are in accountable relationships with, and growing that alignment through organizing and education.
Yes! This is what I mean when I talk about Building Belonging as a “future dojo”: it’s a place to practice in the present… the future we long for. It’s prefigurative.
3. Communities require shared cultural norms. Absent direct deep relationships among all the members (which becomes impossible with growth beyond a certain point), structure is what codifies those norms: structure provides guidance on how we “be” together. It is the walls and furniture and doors that help people know how to navigate the community, where to sit, how we cook and clean together, etc. This is the space around “liberatory governance” that I find so compelling. And if we want to have any hope of co-creating the self-organizing future we long for… liberating structures are essential.
4. Communities require active leadership (I prefer the term stewardship). I love
Vanessa C. Mason’s reflections here:
Communities don’t just happen. They are intentionally built and stewarded by official and unofficial community weavers.
Yes: weavers inside and across communities. This echoes the core insights that
Fabian Pfortmüller has so beautifully captured in his work. Which means we will need people (in dynamic roles!) who are taking responsibility for stewardship. If we see Building Belonging as a commons, a fractal of the whole, than stewarding the commons is both a collective/universal responsibility, and a specific defined responsibility.
We aspire to self-organization, but it’s a long way from here to there. Humans aren’t yet a murmuration of starlings; we have to remember those skills, cultivate the capacity that’s been stolen from us. Until then, we depend on the contributions of stewards to create the conditions for everyone to step fully into community.
Alanna Irving is blunt on this point. She says:
There’s no such thing as self-organization. There’s only unseen, unacknowledged, and unaccountable leadership.
I love Parker Palmer’s 13 ways of looking at community (hat tip to Building Belonging member Sara Huang for pointing me to them):
Community requires leadership, and it requires more leadership, not less, than bureaucracies.
5. The kind of communities I’m interested in are also networks: people connected in diverse ways around a shared purpose. In this I’m drawn to the insights emerging from the network weaving community around how we cultivate connections;
David Ehrlichman’s new book on Impact Networks is a great overview of the field.
6. Community is a place to share gifts and needs; to thrive, everyone has to contribute. We all make community real in different ways. My gift might be for synthesis, for distilling and naming patterns amid complexity. Someone else’s gift might be holding space for conflict or big emotions; someone else might have a gift for art, music, or film: these are all equally welcome. Part of my hope for Building Belonging is to be able to create the conditions (norms, structures, culture, ways of relating) to enable people to step fully into their gifts; we aren’t there yet. I love
Deepa Iyer’s work here naming different roles in social change.
7. Community is the only sustainable form of support. I love this line from Esther Perel, commenting on this global moment of polycrisis and accelerated change, when our dominant systems are collapsing and we find ourselves unmoored:
Community is the only thing we have at this point… real life embodied experiences where people come together.
I’ve been thinking about this provocative line from Tyson Yunkaporta:
The only sustainable way to store [information] long term is within relationships.
I might expand that sentiment: it’s the only sustainable way to do anything. Buildings will crumble; the power grid will fail; the supply chain will break. The only thing we have to turn to, reliably… is each other.
Anyway, obviously lots more to say here, but wanted to put out some initial thoughts. I’d love to hear what resonates for others, what doesn’t, and how you’re making sense of this in your own lives and work.
In community (political home :-),
Brian
Brian Stout is a systems convener, network weaver, and initiator of the Building Belonging collaborative. His background is in international conflict mediation, serving as a diplomat with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington and overseas. He also worked in philanthropy with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, before leaving in early 2016 to organize in response to the global rise of authoritarianism and far-right nationalism. He recently returned to his hometown in rural southern Oregon, where he lives with his wife and two children.
originally published at medium.com
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Coaching for Awareness-Based Systems Change
In the fall of 2019, a few of the founders of the Illuminate network (including CoCreative, Garfield Foundation, McConnell Foundation, and Academy for Systems Change) collaboratively hosted a gathering of systems change “capacity-builders” who work as independent consultants or in small collectives as facilitators and advisors, from the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, EU, and First Nations. This was the first time these practitioners had been invited to meet together with peers to share their perspectives on the state of the field. The North American contingent of the group continued on through the upheavals of the pandemic, meeting virtually in 2020 and 2021 to explore themes of equity and integrating health and healing into systems change practice, as well as launching a pilot pairing senior and emerging practitioners to explore what systems-centric approach to leadership coaching might look like.
CLICK HERE to learn more about this unique systems coaching pilot or visit the Network Weaver resource page to download the full article.
Check out the infographic below for some of the key insights from their COVID-era dialogues on the state of the field of systems change.
Learn more about the wisdom pearls HERE
You can also download a pdf with a link to this information to save to your personal library by visiting the Network Weaver Resource Page.
Katy Mamen is passionate about participatory change-making approaches that account for the complexity of multiple, interconnectedness crises and diverse lived experiences. She brings thoughtful and committed partnership to social sector clients advancing transformative systems change, drawing on expertise in social change strategy, facilitation and group process, systems theory, collaborative networks, and organizational development. In addition to process expertise, her work is informed by a strong background in economic justice, food & farming, water issues, and rural equity.
Brooking Gatewood helps leaders and groups clarify and enact the change they want in themselves, in their workplace, and in our shared world. At heart, her work is about co-liberation from systems of ‘power over’ and moving toward systems of ‘power with’ that honor individual agency as well as collective interests and wisdom. In practice, her coaching and consulting focuses on transformation across levels - from individual and team mindsets and behaviors to large-scale policy and systems change.
Originally published at IlluminateSystems.org
Network Weaver is dedicated to offering free content to all – in support of equity, justice and transformation for all.
We appreciate your support!
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On Collective Liberation and Natural Networks: an Interview with LLC’s Nikki Dinh and Ericka Stallings
I was able to meet with the Co-Executive Directors of the Learning Leadership Community, an organization I’ve long admired for their commitment to a community-focused transformative leadership practice. This past year, LLC was able to return to a co-Executive Director model which has freed up both Nikki Dinh and Ericka Stallings to focus on shifting LLC towards a more liberatory transformative leadership model. Part of this shift involves supporting the ongoing work of Network Weaver as it provides tools and resources to scale up access to weaver spaces and serve as a platform that amplifies the impact of BIPOC weavers and leadership practitioners on their communities. More deep-rooted shifts involve the difficult work of making even more room for thinking about and practicing liberatory frameworks that make equity work within this system sustainable for people who come from othering backgrounds.
“We look at leadership as a tool for transformation. To say that we are “equitable” within this current system, which is in and of itself inequitable is not necessarily our goal. Racial Equity being a path towards liberation, that's the change that we're trying to seek.”
– Ericka Stallings
In this interview, we talk a little bit about both Nikki and Ericka’s vision for LLC, liberatory processes, how community is the first network we come into, and why the work LLC is doing matters right now. Nikki and Ericka’s responses have been edited for clarity, but all effort has been made to maintain the integrity and spirit of their words.
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Can you talk to us a bit about liberatory processes?
Nikki: “Liberatory” is a why, but it's also a how for me, because it's not a destination. It’s not like race equity, where you can measure your way to a certain point in the data and then it switches over to being more equitable for certain communities. Liberation, collective liberation, co-liberation, however you want to see it, is going to be a forever journey. We’ve seen what it does to our community members when non-profits focus only on getting the data or policy right—there’s a disconnect. And so how we do it really matters to people. Ericka and I always talk about what it takes to make a movement or network whole. How do we get to just work in just ways? It's not the technical titles like executive director and weaver, though we need those too, but what we know from our experiences is that we need everybody--we need somebody like Ericka’s mom who will nurture you, and we need an aunt who is always keeping an eye out for all the resources and trying to connect people to them. The “how” stems from a deep love for people. We’re trying to bring some of that back, some of that love and care for each other while we're doing this really difficult work.
What's one thing that that Network Weaver, or even LLC is doing differently, to transform the field of leadership?
Ericka: We are shifting towards a different lens that asks: what does a collective liberation look like? What does it mean when we free ourselves and each other? That’s one change. We are also getting clear about what these questions around equity, liberation and transformation mean in different contexts. LLC is mostly domestic, whereas Network Weaver is international and therefore has a broader reach. Networks are not just interesting tools, but they actually result in change. How can we explore what a change ecosystem looks like and the role leadership plays in that? How can really thinking about the needs of varying stakeholders, and not just being focused on terms and buzzwords that are exciting, help us capture all the work that goes into the change process? How do we support the leadership of all of those other folks who are in that ecosystem? Holding space for those questions and others is one way I think we’re committed to doing things differently.
What is your vision for Network Weaver?
Nikki: Network Weaver is a tool and resource. Ericka and I have this analogy about pollination. In areas where bees and butterflies and all the natural super pollinators are dying off, there are efforts to self-pollinate or find other ways to pollinate. And that's why Network Weaver is so valuable to me. It's like an artificial butterfly. It’s trying to help solve a crucial short-term problem until we can get that butterfly population back up. It’s a useful tool to scale when we need to scale, but how can we also pay attention to what makes bees and butterflies thrive in the natural habitats because the goal always is to have natural networks. Growing up in a refugee community, we had a large cultural network and within that so many alternate systems to meet the needs of the community. You need to borrow money? You need prescription pills? There were people doing that for each other! I envision us also zooming out to see and appreciate a natural network of weavers that continue to connect and build alongside the Network Weaver space.
What's your vision for LLC?
Ericka: Oh, we have lots of ideas and hopes and dreams for LLC! Something that I hope doesn't change is that LLC is very relational. LLC is very people-focused, we care about people. It’s also a space that welcomes joy. And that's something we want to grow into. A vision that I have for LLC is that it is a space where people who want to lead in liberatory ways, and folks who want to support leadership that is transformational and liberatory, can collaborate. We are a space of experimentation, innovation, and community. I hope as a consequence of our work, that there are stronger movements for justice.
One of the things that I appreciate about LLC is that we are eco-centric rather than egocentric, which is something that our founder, my predecessor, used to say frequently, and I really value not having to make sure everyone knows that “it's us.” It’s more important that the work happened, rather than the credit be attributed to us. That focus on the communal, the collective, the ecosystem is something that remains part of the vision that I have for LLC. Our work has not just been about products and deliverables, but liberatory processes, and that has made the work fulfilling and joyful.
What’s a commitment you made to yourself during the pandemic that you intend to keep?
Nikki: I have made a commitment to root for me. It’s still a journey. I am surrounded by people like my sisters, my partner and my children, my collaborator Ericka, who think I'm so great. And I want to take on some of that energy and be like, I'm going to do it for me. And that's what has really emboldened me to be like, alright, look, we're doing liberatory work, we're gonna go there, because, you know, I was a lawyer—I know you can’t undo that kind of systems thinking overnight. I’ve had to work on this and believe in valuing this. And I've also known, because of my upbringing, that we can do better. So rooting for me is rooting for all folx entrenched in systems, for us to be a bit freer.
Ericka: One, I mean I have one commitment that I've made that is unexpected. And it's a group of women that I have coffee with, like virtual check ins with weekly.. We've been doing it since the beginning of the pandemic. The funny thing is we were not intimate friends before. We started this gathering to have regular conversations with agendas and learning goals and things like that, and they evolved or de-volved, depending on how you think about it, into very, very rich, deep emotional connections. I'm very proud and happy that I've continued to commit to these weekly check ins and also to those relationships.
Is there anything that you're like most excited for this year?
Nikki: We're doing some longer-term strategy work. In the next three to five years we will go bold with liberatory programming. Our lens for Network Weaver, for example, will be situated under the liberatory program side of the house. Everything we do will have to bring a kind of outside-the-system thinking which includes bringing in the perspectives and interests of people who are typically excluded from our systems. That said, I'm really excited to work with more people who are from other backgrounds, like refugees and trans folks, and queer folks, and people with disabilities. I have learned so much from people outside of our systems that I'm really excited for others to get that wisdom too.
Why LLC? Why Donate Now?
Ericka: One of my favorite quotes is: “if you give me a fish, you have fed me for a day. If you teach me to fish, you have fed me until the river is contaminated or the shoreline seized for development. But if you teach me to organize, then whatever the challenge, I can join together with my peers and we will fashion our own solution.”
With that in my mind, my hopes for the ongoing work of LLC and Network Weaver are in that vein; of prioritizing the people who are addressing issues in their communities and how folks in this space are supporting them. I'm hoping that the blog series we hope to launch soon will address how people are affirmatively and explicitly stepping back so that the people directly impacted come to the forefront. And I'm hoping these stories about the material, communal, and spiritual transformation that's happening help us see the real impact people are having on the communities they care about.
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Ericka Stallings is the Co-Executive Director of the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) a learning network of people who run, fund and study leadership development. LLC challenges traditional thinking about leadership and supports the development of models that are more inclusive, networked and collective. Prior to LLC, Ericka was the Deputy Director for Capacity Building and Strategic Initiatives at the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD), supporting organizing and advocacy and leading ANHD’s community organizing capacity building work. Ericka also directed ANHD’s Center for Community Leadership (CCL) which provides comprehensive support for neighborhood-based organizing in New York City. At ANHD she formerly directed the Initiative for Neighborhood and Citywide Organizing (INCO), a program designed to strengthen community organizing in the local neighborhoods. Before working at ANHD she served as the Housing Advocacy Coordinator at the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), managing its Immigrant Housing Collaborative. In addition, Ericka co-coordinated the NYIC’s Immigrant Advocacy Fellowship Program, an initiative for emerging leaders in immigrant communities. She received her undergraduate degree from Smith College, studied International and Intercultural Communications at the University of Denver and Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University.
Nikki Dinh is the daughter of boat people refugees who instilled in her the importance of being in community. Though she grew up in a California county that was founded by the KKK, her family’s home was in an immigrant enclave. Her neighborhood taught her about resistance, resilience, joy and love.
Her lived experiences led her to a career in social justice and advocacy. As a legal aid attorney, she learned from and represented families in cases involving immigration, domestic violence, human trafficking, and elder abuse. Later, she joined the philanthropic sector where she learned from and invested in local leaders, networks and organizations throughout California. At Leadership Learning Community, she is excited that her work will continue to be guided by the belief that the people in communities we seek to serve are best positioned to identify and create solutions for their community.
About the Author
Sadia Hassan is a writer, organizational consultant and network weaver who enjoys using a human-centered approach to think through inclusive, equitable, and participatory processes for capacity building. She is especially adept at facilitating conversations around race, power, and sexual violence using storytelling practice as a means of community engagement and strategy building. She has received a Masters in Fine Arts, Poetry at the University of Mississippi and a Bachelor of Arts in African/African-American Studies from Dartmouth College. You can read more of her work at Longreads, American Academy of Poets, and The Boston Review. https://sadiahassan.com
feature photo by Lee 琴 on Unsplash
Reclaiming Choice and Agency in a Networked World
Welcome! We are happy you chose to open this blog post! In this article we will explore:
- The difference between choice and decision; and why awareness of choice matters - as a (fundamental) way to engage with life.
- Different levels of networks & systems and how to navigate the levels with agency.
- How to choose with your whole being - as a means to align your deeper values and actions.
- Exercises and prompts to practice choice as a capacity.
We believe that it can be of use to change agents, social innovators, system entrepreneurs, and curious minds. Most importantly: We invite you to choose to fully engage with the article and share your reflections with us. We have laid out some opportunities to do so on the way :)
So let’s dive right in!
Choosing to Decide
Each day we make numerous decisions, from what we consume, such as food and media, to how we respond to others and to our environments, and beneath all of these decisions are choices. Yet, what is the difference between a choice and a decision? A decision often implies reaching a conclusion you can act upon, in this process something is determined. While a choice implies an act of choosing between two or more possibilities. In this way, ‘choosing’ is a practice of continually aligning toward various decisions. If we zoom out we may see that choices are how we navigate through life and how we arrive at decisions. Let’s take a moment to ponder this.
What was the most important decision you made today?
And what was the underlying choice you made that led you to that decision?
Choosing and deciding are related processes, yes, but they are fundamentally different in their nature. Choosing is relational, it is a process of orienting ourselves towards something of importance, such as our personal values, and what we hold dear. Choices lay out possible paths and open up fields of opportunities. While, deciding is directional; decisions are the concrete steps we take on that path.
If we shift from considering the individual level of choice to the collective level, we can see that human actions are a dominant driving force for what’s happening, and going to happen, on this planet. From this perspective our actions may look insignificant at a larger scale.
But an easily overlooked perspective is that we are not passive consumers or bystanders in the course of history. There is choice and agency everywhere, in the seemingly small moments of our daily lives, in the conversations we have with loved ones, or in choosing, or changing, our careers. Each moment holds an underlying choice we can engage if we choose to.
Now, a common argument is that the challenges we are facing are so grand and complex - that it doesn’t really matter what I intend, do or think.
In this article we will flip this argument around: In a networked world, there is nothing that matters more than what you do. Not only for you and your immediate environment, but also for the world at large. What you do, in turn, is deeply embedded in the choices you make, as your choices shape your orientation toward life.
Engaging with choice can also foster your sense of agency. Agency refers to the ability to direct your own actions in a meaningful way. In the field of systems impact, agency is often the precursor to creating change within our immediate environment or the larger social context we exist within and care about. As we reclaim our sense of choice, we inhabit more of our agency, which in turn enables us to have a greater impact.
Before we unpack this more and dive deeper into the exploration on how to reclaim choice and agency, we invite you to do a little exercise with us, to connect with what supports your sense of choice and agency.
You can follow the steps below or use this mentimeter survey for guidance: https://www.menti.com/txm61jx7f7
(if you use the survey, we will anonymously keep track of the responses - and you can also read through the results of others for inspiration)
- Think of a current situation that frustrates you - where you feel you don’t have choice or agency. This can be something in your immediate environment - or a larger social issue. How would you describe that situation? What emotions are present for you? What is the root cause of your frustration?
- Now, think of a moment in the past where you felt similar, but then experienced some sort of breakthrough - a moment where new opportunities emerged. Enter that moment now. Take a few deep breaths and observe what shows up for you - in terms of images, emotions or intuitions.
- Now consider, what made that breakthrough, that shift, possible? Note down a few words, lines or images.
We will return to this exercise at a later stage in this article.
Agency in a Networked World
We all exist in webs of relationships, which are the most basic form of networks. Networks exist within and around us. In nature we see networks of mycelium, mushrooms and fungi; the internet is a network of networks consisting of computers, routers and webpages. If we consider our bodies we can see that even our brain is made up of neural networks and synapses. Networks show us that it is important to focus on the individual elements as well as the relationships between them.
In essence, referring to our world as “networked” mainly means four things:
(1) We are part of more networks than ever before. Just count the number of initiatives, groups and organisations you are connected to - and compare it to the generation before you.
(2) the networks we are part of are larger in scope than they have ever been. Technology, mainly the internet, has made it possible to decouple social connections from physical proximity, at least to a certain degree.
(3) The networks themselves are connected. what happens within one network impacts others, for example a traffic jam or delayed trains in a transport system can lead to people being late to work.
(4) The networks we are part of, or deliberately not part of, shape our identity and actions. In turn, we also shape the identity and possible actions of these networks, yet usually to a lesser degree.
Let’s explore one aspect further: having agency within a networked world. To distill things a bit, we can say that there are three major levels of networks. For simplicity's sake, moving forward, we will use the terms “network” and “system” interchangeably.
- Individuals: Human beings in their full complexity and wholeness
- Intermediary institutions: Systems we can belong to and that we can shape, e.g. a family, sports club, impact network, or organisation.
- Societal systems / institutions: governments, the financial sector, etc.
Now, there are connections within each system, e.g. between coworkers of an organisation; between systems of the same level, e.g. organisations within an alliance; and between systems of different levels, e.g. an activist group trying to influence a policy.
We each will have varying degrees of agency in relation to the three levels of networks mentioned above. For example, personally fighting financial injustice, individual level, by ignoring letters from the financial department, societal level, is not the most promising strategy. As individuals, we usually have very little leverage over societal institutions and matters. However, joining an organisation, an intermediary institution, that creates financial literacy among disadvantaged groups and lobbies for policy changes, might actually work.
With an awareness of each level it becomes easier to choose which level and interaction you say yes to and no to. Choices are an opportunity to lean in and engage with the networks within and around us. Yet we may often jump to decisions without being aware of the choices that are available to us. This awareness, from our perspective, is the first step towards reclaiming choice and agency.
Choice for Impact
In engaging choice for creating systemic impact, a key question is: What’s the issue or vision I want to contribute to? To achieve that, what is the relevant system that I want to change, and in which direction do I want to change it? Let’s apply what we’ve learned so far, by drawing on the concepts of choice and agency as well as the three levels of systems. To make this more tanglible, you can bring to mind the situation that frustrates you from the initial exercise, and take a moment to think about the societal issues that underlies it.
To move from inertia to agency, we see four levels of choice.
The first choice is about living into your values and allowing yourself to take your inner compass and drive for social change seriously. This can be in relation to a social issue or external “trigger”, such as observing environmental destruction or diversity loss in your area.
The second choice is to think systemically and be strategic, asking the question: what is the relevant societal system I can engage with in relation to this topic? This choice is context dependent and will vary depending on where you live, the resources you have access to, and which systems may be standing in the way of it becoming a reality. For example, there may be a larger societal system that needs to be shifted, such as the energy supply system with its given sources of energy and the extraction of these resources.
The third choice is to engage my agency and seek intermediary institutions to engage in. It’s a choice to be proactive about changing the status quo with an attitude of both realism, “we should do something or else..”, and optimism, “there is something I / we can do”. Taking the example of climate justice, this might result in joining an energy coop or an activist group to influence politics.
Lastly, the fourth choice is to remember the choices above and embody them with joy and a sense of optimism. We can only be effective change agents if, to paraphrase Gandhi, “our lives are our message”.
Our modern day and age provide us with the unique opportunity to use network effects on a global level to contribute to causes we care about. The Four Levels of Choice can serve as a general orientation, acknowledging that it’s rather circular and interdependent than linear in its application.
Another way we can understand the levels of choice is through imagining an iceberg. Part of the iceberg is above water yet the majority of the iceberg exists beneath the water's surface. The part below the surface represents our values, beliefs and mental models, while the part above the surface represents our behavior and actions. Choice is how we align what is beneath the surface, with what is above the surface, therefore aligning our values with our behavior and actions.
We invite you to go back to your personal situation and example, either for yourself or in the mentimeter survey: How can you relate differently to move from frustration to agency? What are the underlying choices you have?
To give the topic more depth, there are two additional perspectives we’d like to explore, starting with ourselves and the choices we have within.
Choices within
Choice is in essence a process of alignment. At the deepest level choice can be seen as aligning with life, both in a general sense and in the present moment. Through choice we can also engage the intelligence of our body, our senses, organs and our imagination, in noticing what arises in response to a particular direction. Upon waking up in the morning, you can ask yourself ‘what am I choosing today?’ and then notice what arises, not only in the realm of thought, but also through sensations, images, textures, sounds and other experiences. Over time, by cultivating an awareness of how we respond to a given direction, we become able to choose more fully from our whole being and find greater alignment in our subsequent decisions.
At one level these choices within are momentary. They can arise through what we give our attention to, how much we open ourselves to experience something, and how much context to bring in and share with another. Choices can also span time and serve as a north star. For example, choice can manifest through a sense of calling, something we choose again and again that moves us closer to a dream we have for the world. As such, choice becomes the fuel for moving forward. Choice in that sense is an ongoing journey. As we pursue our calling we can reflect on the values we are choosing to enact and the principles we are choosing to embody in service of those values.
Here are some guiding questions to work with choice as an ongoing journey and a calling:
- What is so dear to you that you are willing to choose it over and over again?
- What is choosing you? What are themes you repeatedly run into?
As stated earlier on, our choices reveal our basic attitudes, beliefs and feelings toward life.
Choices underlie our decisions; they move us from thought into action.
Choices in Impact Networks
Yet there is still another dimension of choice, namely within networks or intermediary institutions. We can see these choices through the levels we outlined above as well as in any context where we exist in relation to other beings. An example of this kind of intermediary institution is an impact network, a network that is intentionally created...
Here we can see that there are two fundamental dynamics at play.
In the first dimension such a network coordinates and synergizes individual actions around shared principles and a collective purpose that individuals have chosen to participate in. The purpose of the network may not mirror the individuals’ purpose, however there is usually a synergy between the individuals’ purpose and the purpose of the network.
In the second dimension, impact networks support and carry out collaborative action and learning for deliberative change on social and environmental issues.
Choice shows up in each of the two dimensions within an impact network:
Dimension 1 is about choosing how to create the best possible conditions to engage network members. This requires the network to provide incentives to individuals to actively engage, and at the same time recognise the overall purpose and strategy of the network. For example, establishing rules around membership and criteria for internal decision making.
Dimension 2 is about choosing how to relate proactively to the societal issue and its related system(s). Impact networks, therefore, are an ideal testing ground to practise agency and choice in an intentional way.
Practicing Choice
We’ve seen that the decisions we make are often preceded by an underlying choice we’ve made at a conscious or subconscious level. When we connect with the dimensions of choice we can connect with a greater sense of agency in our immediate context and within the larger systems we are a part of. This awareness, in turn, supports us to become more intentional and impactful in the decisions we make and actions we take.
Choosing is also a capacity that we can cultivate through practice. Throughout each day we can notice the choices available to us and choose to engage our choices consciously. Awareness is the first step. We can practice recognizing the choices we have in the moment as well as the different dimensions that we can engage our choice in. Choosing deliberately increases our agency - the ability to direct our own actions in a meaningful way.
Choices help us to orient ourselves towards the world we wish to create- with all its complex challenges.
It’s a practice, like building a muscle or learning a new skill.
With this article we hope to provide an accessible framework to rethink and reclaim choice & agency, to invite each of us to begin to practice engaging the choices we have, from the large, to the seemingly mundane or small.
The following worksheets are designed to support you in that practice:
- Choosing for impact (4 steps)
- Choosing with my whole being
- Choosing and being chosen: exploring our north star
Download all 3 worksheets in one package HERE
Happy choosing! All worksheets are under a creative commons license, so feel encouraged to invite friends, colleagues and whoever comes to mind into the practice.
About Elsa & Jannik - the authors
This article is a co-creation in the truest sense. We noticed early on in our explorative conversations that we share interests and perspectives on many topics, such as impact networks, creating and evaluating systemic change, and capacity development. We also recognised our complementary backgrounds.
Elsa Henderson is a practitioner at the Converge Network and faculty at the Metavision Institute. She moves between the roles of network consultant, facilitator and educator supporting individuals and groups to deepen their capacity to collaborate for systems impact and find meaning even in the midst of uncertainty. Her background is in process-oriented psychology and anthropology, with an interest in phenomenology, systems thinking and consciousness studies.
Jannik Kaiser is co-founder of Unity Effect, where he leads the area of Systemic Impact Evaluation, grounded in the knowledge that evaluation can be participatory, meaningful and energising. His background is in sociology, with a continuous passion for complexity science, phenomenology and asking fundamental big questions about life.
In our conversations, we also allowed our minds to wander and our intuition to speak. In the end, it felt more like the topic of choice ‘chose’ us. And we could feel the depth and richness in it that is calling for further explorations.
To give one example: The image of the iceberg and choice as a process to align our values and principles and translate them into action. This aligns with the three levels of reality process-oriented psychology, namely (1) consensus reality, (2) Dreamland (inner worlds & imaginations) and the (3) Essence level (the non-dual pre-manifest field of ‘implicate order' as coined by Bohm. It also fits with Ken Wilber’s AQAL model, according to which each system has an interior (invisible) and exterior (visible) dimension.
An interesting exploration could be how individual and collective choices are connected. The iceberg is swimming in a vast ocean of water. Similarly, our individual choices are embedded in what we could call consensus reality or culture. Yet this consensus reality is currently being questioned, and the topic of choice could inform how we transition between such collective realities.
So stay tuned, there might be more coming up.
originally published at Unity Effect
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