INTERSECTIONALITY IN NETWORKS AND ORGANIZATION: WIDENING THE SCOPE OF INCLUSION AND DIVERSITY
Growing up, I remember my mother rising daily before the sun to make her way to work. After preparing herself for the day, she’d make a tiring journey into work, consisting primarily of easing slowly along the highway behind other workers headed in to start the day. From a young age, my mother’s commitment to her work stuck out to me, largely in part because it took so much out of her and rarely poured anything into her. Although I loved spending time with my mother at her Corporate America “office jobs,” raiding cabinets for fun supplies and spinning in spinny chairs, I resolved from a very young age that I would never work in an office.
Of course, in my limited eight year old scope, I could attribute all of her stress to the notion that what she did wasn’t very fun. Though, as I enter the workplace now so many years later, I realize that my mother’s stress would soon become my own, and was a seemingly shared stress amongst other Black working women. It had little to do with the type of industry, reports found that the same stress existed across varying levels of position and authority. It was a stress rooted in one-sided dedication, commitment and care.
Black women are more frequently the single head of household than any other demographic. Our appearance and hygiene are more often policed in the workplace. We are more likely to face unfair expectations and are statistically labeled amongst the lowest of expected specialized skills. However, Black women have been committed to working, presenting the highest labor force participation of all women for years.
Despite attempts on all fronts to create better conditions for working Americans (increased benefits, wages, and efforts targeting diversity, inclusion and equity) a lack of understanding of intersectionality has prevented a shift in opportunity from being available.
As our networks and organizations tepidly progress towards diversity and inclusion, the scope of complexity in this particular issue continues to widen. It would seem so far that inclusivity, and our understanding of it, have only begun to puncture the long-standing conservative barriers in our organizational cultures. Only through exploring intersectionality, and understanding it in the context of a network’s specific constituents, will we begin to progress in a more functional and cohesive manner.
Observing the past 60 years of US legislation regarding inclusion in the workplace, one could surmise that we have arrived at a precipice of sorts.
Between 1963 and 1990, multiple pieces of legislation were passed to protect against discrimination in the workplace including The Equal Pay and American with Disabilities Act.
How well do these protections hold up against an ever more precise ability to self-identify along social, sexual, and racial spectrums. Though these protected classes may seem well defined, our research and data collection methods have already outpaced our legislation. Using Equal Pay as an example, we’ve seen wage gaps narrowing between men and women in the decades following 1963. While women have managed to reduce the pay gap between white men’s wages and their own, black women currently earn 21% less than their white counterparts. It would seem that our efforts to empower women weren’t as precisely calculated, or executed, as we assumed they would be. And what about a black transgender women in the workplace?
Organizations are continually overhauling their processes in an effort to keep up with the times, and attract the best talent. We’ve seen companies implement robust recruitment programs, training modules and communication channels that are designed to protect, and even empower, their minority constituents. Unfortunately, reaping the benefits of these processes requires more nuanced thinking about the role of intersectionality, as it relates to race, gender, sexuality, culture and even the mission of your own organization.
Consider weaving more intersectionality informed diversity approaches into your networks by:
- Taking a Look at the Data:
- Get to know your members. Understand the social structures within your network. Observe the smaller networks that develop within your network. Spot the outliers. Use data to better serve your members by knowing who they are, and how they participate.
- Don’t Streamline:
- Cater to Your Organization. Streamlining will make your network more homogenous, but only on the surface. If you have rules and policies, barriers to entry, or specific expectations for your members, always be willing to append them on a case by case basis
- Be Continually Open to Improving Diversity and Inclusion Policies
- Implement an ongoing program designed to empower minorities in your organization. This should be led by minorities, and not just the most privileged or liked minority in the network. Give them the political power in your organization to make substantial changes. Without any power, they will quickly become disinterested. Create safe spaces, and safe communication channels for both suggestions and critiques.
- Lead the Way – Don’t Wait for Legislation
- I’ve worked in several organizations that seemed to be either in steep decline or stagnant. To avoid unknowingly plunging your organization into devastation, learn a lesson from each voice present.
About the Author
Ammie Kae Brooks is a Clinical Therapist, Writer, and Social Impact Consultant in the Chicagoland area. She is passionate about ending gender based violence within communities by cultivating digital and physical healing spaces for Black women, girls and families.
featured image found HERE
DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS PART II: THE REVOLUTION WILL BE BUILT ON TRUST
Read PART I: Decentralized Networks And The Black Radical Tradition: From Collective Organizing to Building Black Futures. HERE
In this month’s feature, Kei Williams shares their “activating moment,” touches on movement building tools and shares their admiration for structural networks that are not only principles-based but continue to grow and meet the needs of the community. Material for this blog was compiled and transcribed by Sadia Hassan from the Decentralized Networks and the Black Radical Tradition community of practice gathering in March, 2020. You can find the video of this presentation HERE.
Kei is a queer transmasculine identified designer, writer and public speaker. A founding member of Black Lives Matter Global Network, Kie’s work is to transform global culture towards the systemic analysis of structural racism. As Movement Net Lab’s StrategicNetwork Mobilizer, Kei creates powerful conceptual and practical tools that factor in the growth and effort of the most dynamic and emerging social movements of our time. Kei is also the Lead organizer for Safety Beyond Policing, Swipe it Forward, and Trans Liberation Tuesday.
Kei aims to use their platform to center communities who identify as queer, trans, gender non-conforming, and those living with mental illness. Before the lockdown, Kei was active in engaging communities in the Black Gotham Experience, an immersive visual project exploring the impact of the African Diaspora on New York City.
ACTIVATING MOMENT: HOT SUMMER OF 2014
Every organizer has an activating moment, a political event that pulls them out of the mundane rituals of everyday life into a political awakening. For Kei, it was the Ferguson Rebellion. A rebellion which spanned months and sparked protests in other cities. The rebellion, which resulted from the state sanctioned murder of Michael Brown, was the first time Kei saw America attacking its citizens in a hyper-militant way in response to young folks rebelling against police shootings.
LANGUAGE MATTERS: REBELLION VS RIOT
Ferguson is often called an uprising or a riot, reducing the well-organized and strategic collective actions of protestors to the haphazard and agent-less language of “violent unrest.” For Kei, the word rebellion honors the risk of organizers who choose to build community under surveillance as they continue to fight in the street against the state. Historically, the state has considered the rebellions of enslaved BIPOC people as disconnected from the systemic violence they endure in their everyday lives. One reason the Black Gotham Experience has been so important to Kei is precisely because it connects the struggles of enslaved folks who rebelled in 1712 and 1741 against the institution of slavery and Wall Street to the current collective struggle for Black liberation, what Marc Lamont Hill calls “a principled, righteous rebellion.”
COLLECTIVE ORGANIZING IS A BLACK RADICAL TRADITION
Ferguson benefitted so much from organizing that was already being done by local Black Lives Matter chapters operating loosely in various cities in response to police shootings in 2012/2013 (Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Shereese Francis). What Kei saw in the three to four years of organizing with the Black Lives Matter Global Network was that movements have to be guided by principles, strive to create cultural change, and bear a rallying cry (Black Lives Matter, 99% vs 1%) that appeals to communities under attack. As a young organizer, Kei has appreciated stepping into the radical traditions that were developed by Black Lives Matter and the lessons learned from the Occupy Movement, chiefly that it’s important to foreground what is being fought for as much as what is being fought against.
Questions to ask as you lean into organizing:
- What exists beyond the moment?
- What does it mean to be in solidarity with each other?
- What are we fighting for/towards that’s gonna be a transformative system?
THE FUTURE OF THE DECENTRALIZED NETWORK
BLM NYC Chapter helped create a lot of the structural webbing for the Global Network. People like Allen Frimpong, Arielle Newton, Monica Dennis had been working with June and other decentralized Network Organizers to determine what the structure of the Global Network was going to look like and what was power going to look like in all of these different places. We have a history of hierarchical structures in organizations but it takes radical imagination to have a decentralized network that is uniform but can grow to scale.
Questions to ask when building decentralized networks:
- What does a decentralized structure look like?
- What needs to be done differently?
- How can we grow it to scale?
- How will we know when to keep it localized?
- What is power going to look like?
- Where am I? Where am I going?
- Where do I/my skillsets fit in?
ORGANIZING HAPPENS THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS
You have to have trust and good relationships for any organizing effort to work.
In 2014, organizers learned that detainees in the Federal detention center (MDC) didn’t have heat and were being kept in their freezing cells in the middle of a polar vortex. Two close friends called Kie and asked them to come down. Kei felt compelled to show up as a movement organizer and friend because of the relationships they had built. Over fifty people joined the action and occupied the parking lot, staying for 3 weeks. People slept in tents with propane heaters. Medics signed up to wake folks up every thirty minutes.
What came out of that small occupation was a sense of solidarity and a network build-out of medics, emergency responders, family and friends who continued to organize for detainees at MDC. People were brought in based on how they fit, what skills they offered, who they were connected to and could support.
Some principles of Decentralized Networks that create cultural shifts and community action:
- Relationship & Culture of Trust
- Looks like: building a culture around trust and communication
- Self-Organizing:
- Looks like: a culture of empowerment, self-determined and innovative work flows
- Structure and support:
- Looks like: twitter hashtags, cultivating alternate/virtual convening spaces (slack, mighty networks, etc), liberating structures, learning pods
NO NEW JAILS NYC CAMPAIGN:
BLM NYC and a lot of other collectives came together and created a de-centralized, multiracial, intergenerational network. First order of business was to create a network mapping to map the people who were in the room and what they wanted to see.
One of the accomplishments of No New Jails NYC is the conversation about abolishing jails and releasing incarcerated people that have become amplified during the pandemic. The demand came from decades of organizing as black and brown people and is abolitionist in principle. The current campaign that brings them all together is the Free Them All for Public Health campaign. Culturally, there was already a framework and a cultural language that influenced the Free Them All for Public Health campaign which began with #CLOSErikers in response to Khalief Browder’s death and now in response to Covid19.
Free Them All is going global, to focus on incarcerated people worldwide. The first thing it did when the pandemic began was lead a soap drive with jail and prison abolition networks. They understood how covid19 was going to face huge risks because the state of the jails are inhumane. Decentralized organizing means trying to look at things as a hub of demands and circles of support. It’s important to get plugged into mutual aid but as network and movement builders we have to lean in and build other movements. We have to find the scaffolding where movements overlap and maximize impact.
KNOW YOURSELF, KNOW THE CYCLE
As “networked social movements” continue to transform the political landscape, Kei emphasizes that Movement Net Lab has grounded their language, curriculum, design sense, and style in how they approach decentralization. Here is a map they’ve provided that illustrates the flow of a movement cycle so we can better map our interventions alongside it’s ebbs and flows.
It’s important to know the constant flow of a movement cycle.
1. Urgency overlaps with a sense of history → Trigger moment: Eric Garner → Heroic Phase: we’re gonna win → Honey Moon: action, in the streets/protesting, sweet moment where anything feels possible→ Disillusionment: didn’t get the demand → Reflection: what we learned, who we worked with, shouldn’t work with → Regrowth: what now?
2. Movement cycles allows us to map and build off of legacies that have existed for a long time
3. Knowing the movement cycle helps clarify where our skills best fit and where interventions can be most effective
If you have any questions, concerns or corrections, or to pitch a blog post please email us at networkweaverblog.com.
watch the video of the session by downloading the free resource HERE.
About the author:
Sadia Hassan is a facilitator and network weaver who has enjoyed helping organizations use a human-centered design 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 is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Mississippi and has a Bachelor’s degree in African/African-American Studies from Dartmouth College.
HEALING MEANS JUSTICE MEANS HEALING
This article on systemic change and restorative justice was written and published by The Bramble Project on April, 19th, 2020 – prior to the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests.
WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO STAND IN THIS OPPORTUNITY FOR SYSTEMIC CHANGE?
Disclosure & disclaimer: Some projects mentioned here are partly funded through Seattle’s Equitable Development Initiative, where I work. Views expressed here are my own, not my employer’s.
The data trail of racial wealth and health disparities in the path of COVID-19 is a story of deep injustice. But not the complete story.
Just as high blood pressure lets us know something needs to change, but can’t show us how to be well, we need to look through our data with deep intuition in order to re-imagine the future we want.
Let me paint a story of a healed future. This story asks those with resources and institutional power to drop what we think we know. It asks those waiting for change to stop waiting. The change we yearn for won’t begin from above. This future is already being born, and it invites you to choose which story you’ll be a part of.
We must be clear: justice does not mean catching Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) up to a broken system. Injustice is only a symptom of deeper toxins that hurt us all. Long before COVID-19, communities deeply experienced with displacement, untimely death, social stigma, financial instability, and health disparities have also held wisdom in healing this toxic soil. Justice means supporting their leadership, and doing the work to catch up to them.
1. HEALING THROUGH RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
All life on Earth today, from bacteria to bananas to baboons, share a common ancestor in LUCA, a microbe that lived four billion years ago. Try strolling around town with that perspective, and you’ll see right away that we humans are close kin.
Maybe we manage to fuck each other up not because we’re so different, but rather because we’re family.
THE DISEASE OF US-AND-THEM
In My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem traces the brutalities that Europeans had inflicted upon each others’ bodies long before they landed, still unhealed, on this continent. (If the notion of trauma stored in bodies, and not in brains alone, is new to you, look here or here for more. White men putting down their own dancing is just a small example of how dominant-culture bodies can hold trauma through deep body armoring.)
Unhealed trauma spreads. My mom’s body, for example, carries the memory of Cultural Revolution shamings. Her shoulders bore household responsibility at age twelve. Her eyes have witnessed public mutilation. My dad’s belly remembers starvation. His spine still carries a commitment to leave and make a better life for his family.
My body learned their stories. My gut knows the pinch of not fitting in. My throat carries words gone unheard. My muscles hold a fear of lashing out. Somatic therapy has shown me that behaviors I’m often rewarded for—intellectualizing, refusing to surrender, disguising my needs—have been compensations for unprocessed trauma.
As Menakem writes:
“Unhealed trauma acts like a rock thrown into a pond; it causes ripples that move outward, affecting many other bodies over time. After months or years, unhealed trauma can appear to become part of someone’s personality…. And if it gets transmitted and compounded through multiple families and generations, it can start to look like culture. But it isn’t culture. It’s a traumatic retention that has lost its context over time.”
There is trauma in what we call oppressive power. Hoarding ownership and resources is not the behavior of healed, well-connected bodies. Escaping into intellectual strategy, and attempting to predict and control the unknown, is also a systemic trauma.
We can only heal by choosing what Menakem calls “clean pain” over the continuation of centuries of “dirty pain”:
“Clean pain is pain that mends and can build your capacity for growth. It’s the pain you experience when you know, exactly, what you need to say or do; when you really, really don’t want to say or do it; and when you do it anyway. It’s also the pain you experience when you have no idea what to do; when you’re scared or worried about what might happen; and when you step forward into the unknown anyway, with honesty and vulnerability….
“Dirty pain is the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. When people respond from their most wounded parts, become cruel or violent, or physically or emotionally run away, they experience dirty pain. They also create more of it for themselves and others.”
From this description, it’s easy to see that dirty pain criminalizes Black and brown bodies, and maps property values to land stolen in genocide. But there’s more.
It’s our own dirty pain that rewards political candidates for crushing their opponents onstage. Our dirty pain mutinies when leaders fail, even when failing is the only way to learn what comes next. Many institutions that can survive in this ocean of dirty pain are so well-defended under duress that, even in a catastrophe, they won’t admit to what they can’t know.
Sadly, many powerful institutions have learned to deliver authority without vulnerability. They are too well-protected to lead us in healing.
HEALING WITH VULNERABILITY
If you’ve grieved a loss, you know that healing is messy. It can feel like going backwards for a long time. It takes time for wisdom and insight to emerge. This is why adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism are such important works. We don’t know exactly how to heal collectively, but we can take it one step at a time, guided by the wisdom of nature’s bodies.
Trauma isn’t the only stone that ripples outward. Here are just a few examples of how healing is also rippling all around us.
The newly opened Restore Oakland building centers the wisdom of restorative belonging and agency, held against generations of unjust criminalization and economic injustice.
Locally in Seattle, Queer the Land is learning from the frequent displacement of queer, trans, and Two-Spirit BIPOC to take an emergent and adaptive approach to cooperative land stewardship—not ownership, they stress, because this is Duwamish land.
The 40+ partners at Black & Tan Hall pay critical attention to maintaining relationships, with white partners caucusing regularly to become better allies. The venue will be based in art and food, two experiences that remind us that our gifts have more value when they’re shared.
Nile’s Edge, a black-owned afro-centric healing arts center in the Central District, opened last year after one of its co-owners took a real estate training program and realized that development finance isn’t rocket science, and in fact often doesn’t make sense (more on that in the next section).
The Chief Seattle Club continues to care for homeless urban Natives during the COVID-19 crisis. As Executive Director Colleen Echohawk writes:
“Native people know what to do in these stressful and extreme situations. We take care of each other. We intentionally look for the most vulnerable in our community. We comfort them and lift them up.”
For more on the perspective and lineage of restorative justice, check out this podcast episode with Kazu Haga and Carlos Saavedra.
2. JUSTICE THROUGH RESTORATIVE ECONOMICS
Today, a few thatched roofs remain as tourist destinations in Iya Valley, Japan.
A newly thatched roof can last 25 years. Back in the day, the roughly 25 families in each hamlet gathered every November to harvest enough thatch for one roof, rotating to keep each roof thatched just in time.
In the 1970s, as more and more young people trickled out to Osaka, this economy of collective care began to fall apart. By the time I moved there in 2005, roofs had long been covered in metal. Nearly 40% of jobs were in public works construction. Truckloads of concrete entered the valley, and truckloads of timber left.
This is the paradox of what we call economic growth. Villagers harvesting thatch for each other doesn’t count towards GDP, but when fractured social bonds force the remaining families to cover their roofs with tin, that gets tallied as growth. Growing enough food to share with neighbors doesn’t show in our economic data, but working a construction job to buy food trucked in from a distribution center does. This numerical accounting is what Charles Eisenstein calls converting the gift into money, and what Just Transition movements such as the Green New Deal call an extractive economy.
THE DISEASE OF NOT-ENOUGH, PART 1: FRACTURE
As a toddler in China, I remember grown-ups telling me how fortunate I was that my parents had left for the US. After having lived through poverty and violent revolution, leaving to pursue opportunity must have been an inevitable choice for them, one I might never know in my own experience.
What I have observed from experience, though, is that uprooting from community seems to make hoarding more appealing. When collective care is not reliable, we suddenly need more than we actually need.
Social fracture can encourage worse than a little hoarding. Research finds that the more anonymous we are, the likelier we are to “defect”, choosing to take advantage, betray, or hoard rather than cooperate. Repeated exposure to this can establish a culture of defection—academic lingo, perhaps, for an extractive economy.
It’s clear how extraction has disproportionately harmed BIPOC communities. Student loan debt, private prisons, displacement, and the health impacts of industrial pollution are only subtler when compared with outright slavery and land theft, yet devastating nonetheless. During this pandemic, predatory buyers are already scouring for land deals.
Nobody truly wins in extraction. For the 76% of Americans who rent our homes from landlords or from banks with a mortgage, it’s often economically impossible to slow down, to take a health break, to use a crisis as an opportunity to reconnect with our wisdom and intuition. Even those with stable jobs don’t necessarily find them fulfilling. Meanwhile, the loneliness epidemic has intensified, hitting 61% of Americans last year before social distancing.
The thing is, most of what we accumulate doesn’t help us in a catastrophe. Properties and financial assets are mostly social constructs, buttressed by legal contracts and insurance policies. Our brains and talents are pretty useless alone. What sustains humanity in a crisis are the relationships that we nurture. Rich relationships are the fertile soil in which shared wealth and ideas can flourish.
THE DISEASE OF NOT-ENOUGH, PART 2: GROUPTHINK
As a landlord, I’m learning how easily our extractive culture can override a more intuitive approach to relationships.
In 2012, I bought a small condo right before the market upswing. I eventually moved in with my partner, but the condo had a piece of my heart.
Not ready to sell it, I decided to rent to people who could no longer afford to live in the neighborhood. I’m transparent about finances with tenants, and they agree on what they can pay. When their situation changes, as with COVID-19, we work it out month by month.
What I’m doing isn’t difficult, financially. I’m more than covering my costs. But being a landlord has tested my values.
Since the 1300s, “value” has meant both price (like the value of a house), and worth (like the value of having a place to live). The equivalent “价值” took on this double meaning in China by the 1700s, and in Japan by the 1800s.
This linguistic invention can be a trap when monetary value and emotional value pull in opposite directions. In a society that built high monetary value on land and labor that was stolen through murder, abuse, and betrayal, conflating the two into a single number can feel like systemic gaslighting.
I think this conflation, at a more subtle level, tricks good people into choosing transaction over relationship when they become landlords. When I go against market wisdom, I can feel doubtful and insecure. But if we can escape the trap of conflating monetary value with emotional value, we can then use the gap between costs and “market value” to value relationships and collective care.
Let me be clear: I’m not living cutting-edge non-extraction yet. I’m still claiming a condo built on stolen land, and I’m still collecting rent. What’s more, systems modeling predicts a ceiling to economic growth despite innovation. Factor in the restoration of over-extracted resources and communities, and many thinkers are joining what major religions and philosophers have said: non-extraction doesn’t only mean below-market returns. It can likely mean 0% or negative returns. I’m only just now, researching for this essay, letting this understanding sink in as a landlord.
My point here is exactly this: it’s difficult for institutional power—in my example here, a property deed and relative fluency in real estate finance—to implement justice well. We can think we’re doing well, but power often puts us too close to the assumptions of a failing system.
This is also why change is unlikely to begin in institutions, and why relationships matter. Working across different experiences of power helps us discern wisdom from groupthink.
HEALING WITH RELATIONSHIP
Fractured social bonds played a role in growing this extractive economy, and healed relationships must be on the path to restoring a just economy. Justice must be co-created from the ground up.
Thunder Valley CDC, a regenerative community in the Pine Ridge Reservation, is about reclaiming traditions. “Lakota Community Wealth Building,” writes Stephanie Gutierrez, “is about loyalty to place and to our people, with ownership held by the community, working with each other as one, considering each person and their ability to be part of the economy, and seeing our economy as circular where everything is connected— consciously recreating sustainable communities.”
To zoom in on how they work, consider the design of their chicken coop. Sometimes designs can look different on paper. After construction had already started, a community member noted that the building was looking a little bland, so they added colorful geometric patterns to it. Unremarkable, right? But in hot real estate markets, schedules and budgets have to be tightly accounted for. There’s rarely room for on-the-fly co-creation, so we sacrifice these simple opportunities for a sense of collective ownership.
Locally in Seattle, the Race & Social Equity Task Force began when community groups from Southeast Seattle, Chinatown-International District, and the Central District joined forces in response to displacement risk. One task force member says they’re standing on the shoulders of the Gang of Four, whose legacy of stewardship includes Daybreak Star Center, the Black Student Union of UW, El Centro de la Raza, and InterIm CDA. Larry Gossett, the surviving member of the Gang of Four, continues to uphold the power of cross-cultural solidarity.
As another example of solidarity, Real Rent Duwamish offers a small way for Seattleites to chip in on our impossible debt to the Duwamish Tribe and its ongoing stewardship of these lands, and to support whatever comes next for the tribe.
The Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition is implementing community-led Superfund cleanup that centers environmental stewardship and economic justice. Their work in building community resilience is based in a belief that collective ownership and decision-making is a critical component of resilient development.
Many organizations in Rainier Beach are working together, cross-generationally and systemically, to implement a neighborhood plan intended to fight displacement through a local food economy.
And a group is forming to adapt the Boston Ujima Project’s model locally, a way for communities to invest in collective planning through equitable investment tranches where high-wealth members contribute loan loss funds so that lower-wealth community members can earn higher (3%) returns at the lowest risk.
For more on restorative economics, see this talk by Nwamaka Agbo.
3. HEALING IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS
I’ve only scratched the surface of all that’s happening in BIPOC communities to build a just future. There are experiments in the arts, housing, small business, health, immigration, environment, and more. If you’re inspired, please reach out. I love learning and connecting people with one another.
There’s a lot to hope for. But to be honest, I think we’ll mostly squander the pain that has brought us this close to systemic reckoning.
Here’s what it would take, instead, to capture this moment of opportunity to build our system back stronger.
WITH OUR HEADS: STEER OUR IMAGINATIONS TOWARD A NEW NORMAL, NOT THE OLD NORMAL.
“Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.” —Sonya Renee Taylor
When we get a bad cold, we need to first recover, then carry on. When we get heart disease, we must not carry on, but rather reinvent our lives. Like the virus itself, this pandemic represents both: a crippling illness, made catastrophic when combined with our society’s underlying sickness.
If we speak only of the infection, and not of the heart disease, we will take wrong action. If we speak of racial justice only as righting the data, and not re-imagining the system, we will spend time and money resuscitating a dying system—energy better spent grieving, and imagining the new.
People with what we call privilege are often, in fact, a few generations behind in recognizing the gravity of our collective disease. This is why hierarchies of existing power are generally not the ones to know what to do right now. To capture this moment is to pour back resources to support BIPOC communities who best know the system’s failures and opportunities.
Will we seize this moment to admit to all that we don’t know?
WITH OUR HEARTS: SHARE POWER OUT OF GRATITUDE AND LONGING, NOT OUT OF GUILT OR GENEROSITY.
“How do we then use this crisis as an opportunity to figure out how to deeply invest in those communities, those community leaders, that are really trying to figure out how we create an economic model that is actually rooted in justice, equity, and care?” —Nwamaka Agbo
When racial justice work is motivated by guilt or generosity, it can take a backseat during a crisis. To sustain this work, we must see how connected our hurt is.
I’m typing these words as sunlight streams through leaded glass windows to my desk. Soon I’ll tap a button and the words will stream down a digital river to you, a possible stranger. This home was built on Duwamish land, this computer on a stock-market economy. Many of our gifts are tinged with extraction.
In this complexity, we can hold both gratitude and longing. Let’s long to share a sense of plenty, without extracting from each other and from future generations. Let’s long for security of shelter, without claiming ownership of blood land. Let’s long for belonging, without othering.
It’s long been time to share without charity. To capture this moment is to see that our gifts become our property only if we choose to hoard, and hoarding leaves us longing for a more connected way to be.
Will we seize this moment to open to all that we’d forgotten to value?
WITH OUR HANDS: ACT OUT OF INSIGHT, NOT INSTINCT.
“Fast action without sufficient analysis and reflection will lead to reactions to the immediate rather than long term transformation. We need to move fast slowly.” —Marcia Lee, 2017
As we rapidly respond to the bleeding from COVID-19, let’s also remember that our system has been bleeding for centuries. What must be different this time, if we are to succeed?
When we as individuals listen deeply to the parts of ourselves that are most hurt and unheard, we can become more whole. When we as a system surrender to the communities that have carried the heaviest of our collective pain, and let it be our collective pain, we might also finally find the grief, and then the insight, to heal.
But here’s the twist: that path is neither quick nor straight. Our well-worn systemic traumas have preferred to avoid grief, to refuse letting go and instead to clamp down. Institutions would write strategy papers rather than hold space for trying out the unknown. We’d choose, once again, dirty pain over clean pain.
Will we seize this moment to grieve all that we can’t predict and control?
There’s gold in this experience. Profound hunger can make way for authentic nourishment. Profound loss can make way for authentic connection. Many of our ancestors brought trauma to this continent, trauma that we now carry, and we’re here together to heal this for a reason.
As with any trauma, we have a choice. We can try to force the outcome that fear demands. Or, we can let the trauma break our hearts open and change us in ways we can’t imagine.
The Bramble Project : Joyful and conscientious urban development
Bramble consists of Brian & Bo, two Seattle residents in the real estate industry who met as dewy-eyed grad students at the University of Washington.
We are an inevitable part of growth and change, while remaining conflicted about the negative impacts that can come with it.
Friends we love have moved into formerly low-income communities while existing residents are socioeconomically replaced. Where boring new buildings indifferently puncture existing neighborhood fabric, we want to believe that translates to affordable rents, and yet the market compels a dimmer view.
BRAVE QUESTIONS: RECALCULATING PAY EQUITY
Asking Brave Questions
Perhaps it was a gutsy move. The four of us, a multi-racial team of independent consultants for social justice organizations, working with a local food justice nonprofit on values alignment, including pay equity. We sat in a circle in our client’s empty office to negotiate and decide how we wanted to distribute the contract.
A little more context might help you understand how we found ourselves at this conversation in the first place. Our team consists of Richael, Mala, Julia and Rebecca, the four of us are close friends who socialize with each other’s partners and families, we work together on other contracts and professional endeavors, and we support each other’s other vocational work and radical dreams from writing to workshops.
We, Richael and Mala, the authors of this blog, are queer people of color–Richael is a Black, trans-nonbinary folk healer, strategist, lawyer and former organizer who supports many parts of Black, Indigeous and People of Color (BIPOC) movement community; and Mala is South-Asian queer nonprofit strategist and human resources professional who has been thinking about, creating resources, and furthering racial justice lens, within organizational development work for decades.
Our other two friends and colleagues are white and (upper) middle-class folks (who have differences across religious backgrounds, parents immigration histories, regional identifications, and skill-sets) with backgrounds in prison abolition, Central American solidarity, food justice, resource redistribution, and who lead DC-area spaces for white folks to embody their own racial justice values. We each carry deep personal, political, and vocational commitments to racial justice, and we deeply respect one another’s experience and knowledge.
With our deep experience, comes an acute awareness that, especially with the world of organizational development and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) consulting, how much of a gap can exist between what consultants tell organizations to do, but don’t practice themselves. Namely, as our team was supporting a white-led, multi-racial organization with long-time grievances about titles, advancement, and unequal pay among staff of color, we needed to do our own work to ensure that there was pay equity within our own consultant team. Simply put, we didn’t want to be the hypocrites that we critiqued. We were working with a local food justice org to address pay equity, but we were also facing critical choices about directing money that we were earning that would allow us to feel in integrity–or not.
On one hand, we could have used a couple of standard ways to price projects. Based on our proposal, which estimated $150/hour rate for convenience, we could have calculated our estimated hours per month, assigned the hourly rate, and let our consideration end there. Honestly, this is how a lot of consultant work goes, it’s fairly simple and efficient, and doesn’t require a lot of precious energy or critical thinking.
And, on the other hand, we suspected this standard did not allow us to live our walk. Using a standard hourly rate without examining how we got here or what work we each were holding would simply mirror biased norms. At that singular moment, the convergence of our work came toan opportunity to make a bold decision. We called it out: What are the values we want reflected in this distribution?
Our conversation started, informed by our lives, research, and professional work. We named the factors that represented the values important to us:
- “Historical discrimination1.”
- “Net worth – wealth, not income2.” We ended up taking both wealth and income into account because the data shows both matter when looking at disparities in economic opportunities between black and white households.3 .
- “The number of people you support through this income4.”
- “Emotional labor5.”
- “Monthly expenses6,7.”
- And finally, “distributed and anticipated inheritance8,9,10,11.”
At the end of the conversation we were led to a much more complex set of factors than standard hourly billing could account for, and we recognized, at this stage, we needed to generate a tool to help us identify our individual rates. Our goal was to create a distribution structure that actually felt fair for all of our systemic realities which most compensation systems don’t consider (perhaps intentionally). We came up with a collective ranking and applied that to the total compensation.
To do that, we customized a pay equity process and calculator, developed by our human resources expert, Mala, which reflected each factor that we called out, along with a list of other factors based on basic needs (e.g. minimum and maximum acceptable pay rate). We each had to go through the uncommon process of collecting accurate financial data from our households, businesses, partners, and parents. Once we collected these data, and plugged them into the calculator that Mala developed, we began to use it for billing our client, which we refined with feedback and revisions.
What did we discover?
We found that our white team members significantly underestimated their own net worth and their parents’ net worth by millions, while Richael under-estimated their parents’ liabilities, which had dramatically changed in the last few years. Ultimately, we learned that despite our middle class appearances and racial justice commitments, we were the wealth gap statistics.12
We also found that alongside the statistics were: raw emotional reactions, values, tensions based on our beliefs and systemic locations, and open questions about the echo of meanings within these revelations. And yet, in our team reflection, the Black team member said this was the first time they didn’t feel resentful about their compensation within a group. We were getting closer to equity.
This real-life experiment has shaped how we think about our racial equity organization work, too. When we offered our pay equity process and calculator as an example of what was possible to our client’s staff members, we experienced a range of responses, from flowing tears of a Black program staff member (being recognized for the historical and present-day discrimination and bias she faced and had to overcome to just get a seat at the table), to polite defensiveness of a white director.
We knew immediately that we were tapping a racial equity vein not only at this organization, but within the sector and beyond. What could the life blood within our workplaces and movements feel like if we shifted the payscale and internally strengthened protections? Could social justice organizations be the source of a private reparations movement to make workplaces fairer and more effectively make market corrections?
Many people are under the impression that making public our salaries, our wealth, our access to resources is illegal. Far from it—in fact, labor regulations prohibit retaliation against workers from sharing their salaries with one another, which essentially bars policies that prohibit workers from having salary conversations. Still, many businesses have created personnel policies that prevent salary sharing, even though it’s against the law, because our modern work culture standards are set by corporate America. Income secrecy is a divisive cultural tool that fits Friedman’s free market capitalist logic, because it benefits the 1% and other mega-beneficiaries of the corporatized economy. Simply put, we don’t have to abide.
What we need to do is acknowledge that there is shame and hurt in how much racist policies have privileged some and oppressed others. Let’s not blame ourselves in the 99%. We’ve been pitted against each other long enough. But once we know the impact of these policies–including decision-makers who can make different choices, and those for whom decisions have been made and who are able to advocate and organize toward equity–let’s act.
If you have benefited from these policies, voluntarily redistribute. Voluntarily, because we are all stronger for it. When 25%13,14 of us who have been privileged voluntarily redistribute because it’s the right thing to do, the scales of justice and social pressure will turn people to do the right thing (not because of the law). The last vestige of holdouts will be moved when the law no longer hides their privilege or when their children who inherit their wealth, whose values are more justice-centered, can redistribute for them.
1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2915460/
2 http://www.lchc.org/wp-content/uploads/02_LCHC_EconJustice.pdf
3 https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroom-and-events/publications/economic-commentary/2019-economic-commentaries/ec-201903-what-is-behind-the-persistence-of-the-racial-wealth-gap.aspx
4 https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/01/the-number-of-people-in-the-average-u-s-household-is-going-up-for-the-first-time-in-over-160-years/
5 https://hbr.org/2010/09/why-is-it-that-we.html
6 https://results.org/wp-content/uploads/2019-RESULTS-US-Poverty-Racial-Wealth-Inequality-Briefing-Packet-Section-1-Final-2.pdf
7 https://s3.amazonaws.com/oxfam-us/www/static/media/files/bp-reward-work-not-wealth-220118-en.pdf
8 https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/96/4/1411/4735110
9 https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/31206/1001166-wealth-and-economic-mobility.pdf
10 https://equitablegrowth.org/race-and-the-lack-of-intergenerational-economic-mobility-in-the-united-states/
11 https://www.wilsonquarterly.com/stories/why-rich-kids-become-rich-adults-and-poor-kids-become-poor-adults/
12 We see our experiment as a form of inter-personal reparations. Learn more beyond our example. https://wellexaminedlife.com/2016/04/20/the-case-for-inter-personal-reparations/
13 Centola, Damon, et al. Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention. Science. Jun 08, 2018.
14 Centola, Damon. The 25 Percent Tipping Point for Social Change. Psychology Today. May 28, 2019.
Mala Nagarajan (she/he) is an HR consultant that works with small-to-midsize nonprofits in practicing values-based, people-centered, and movement-oriented human resources management. Mala is a systems thinker and strategist; a racial and disabilities justice advocate; and she thrives on working at the edge of innovation, developing custom client-centered tools like the Pay Scale Equity Process and Calculator(TM). As a member of the RoadMap consulting network, she has coordinated their HR/RJ working group, supported their My Healthy Organization and Our Healthy Alliance online assessments tools, and works with multiracial teams to untangle thorny equity issues embedded in organizational culture, structures, and systems.
Richael Faithful (they/them) is a multidisciplinary folk healer, facilitator, strategist, creative and lawyer. Part of their work supports groups that are developing healing culture and practices with analyses of power and systems. Learn more about Richael at: www.richaelfaithful.com
featured image by Micheile Henderson
Kevin Hiebert
Kevin Hiebert, Principal of Resonate Consulting, is a facilitator, trainer, leadership coach and strategy consultant who supports collaboration to create social and organizational change. Kevin is passionate about collaboration, participatory leadership and seeing collective wisdom and action emerge. For the past 20 years Kevin has been working with people, teams and organizations to take the next steps of growth, collaboration and action.
email: kevin@resonatenw.com
Thea LaGrou
By identifying story threads and patterns we weave the world around us. Not only do our stories connect us – they define our perceptions and shape our behavior. Stories frame our future.
Fascinated by systems architecture and the stories that network mapping conveys, Thea applies her experience as a cross-disciplinary “creative entrepreneur” to network communications, digital storytelling, systems analysis and sense-making. Weaving between diverse networks, she creates virtual learning journeys, presentations on the concept and value of social system mapping, and evaluates network weaving approaches, resources, and tools to enhance network cultures and the discovery of emerging trends. Driven by curiosity and imagination, she supports clients seeking creative opportunities to expand their network's potential.
MaryAnn Martinez
MaryAnn Martinez is a non-profit director and interdisciplinary food systems scholar, currently a PhD candidate at Antioch Graduate School of Leadership and Change. MaryAnn’s current academic research is focused on an emergent hunger prevention network during Covid-19. In addition, MaryAnn also brings years of expertise as a consultant for non-profit and local government around childhood nutrition, substance abuse prevention, and other social issues, as well as practical experience as a vegetable and livestock farmer, in both for-profit and social enterprises.
MaryAnn’s primary consultation focus is on network and social system mapping of people, communities and ideas to ignite discussion around issues of local and regional food systems, food insecurity, food justice and equity.
When MaryAnn is not engaged in growing food and networks she can usually be found running in the woods, playing scrabble, or hanging out with family, friends, and pets.
exdir@communityfoodinitiatives.org
CULTURAL RACISM – A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Dr. Froswa’ Booker-Drew is a Partnership Broker. Relational Leadership Junkie. Connector. Author/Speaker/Trainer. She graciously gave permission to Network Weaver to publish her recent facebook post (below) in response to the murder of George Floyd and the issue of police brutality – offering her personal experience with cultural racism and advice for white friends on how to show up in solidarity responsibly.
I’ve been silent for a reason. I needed some time to process my anger and pain. Those who are close to me know that I’ve been dealing with a daughter who feels helpless. She sent me a text a few days ago that she couldn’t stop crying. I’ve been processing this with my 72 year old mother who has had a lifetime of this insanity. She told me about the time she witnessed a Black man being beaten by the police as a young woman. She’s seen years of this and remarked that in her lifetime that with all the technological advances, racism and oppression haven’t changed. She said the only thing that has changed is the fact that cameras exist to prove it.
I’ll share my personal experience: In February, I was driving back from visiting my daughter in college and I jumped in front of a state trooper. I wasn’t speeding, just trying to get home. I was pulled over and I couldn’t understand why. He said I didn’t have a front license plate. I informed him it was a rental car I was returning the next day. He then accused me of drinking because he smelled alcohol in my car. I reached down to pick up the hand sanitizer that had fallen on the floor. I was then interrogated about why I rented a car and why I wasn’t driving my car. When I replied I don’t drive my car long distances because it’s older, he then asked me how old it was it. Questions that were in my opinion, intrusive. After running my tags, he found nothing.
I drove away shaking and angry. This was the same county Sandra Bland was killed in. All I wanted to do was go home safely, alive. I ultimately filed a report with the Inspector General’s office and spoke with some others in leadership about my experience. I was blessed to have the opportunity to use my voice. George, Breonna, Sandra, Eric, Philando, Trayvon, Aubrey, Tamir, Jordan and so many others did not have that opportunity. I could tell you stories about being stopped in Highland Park to go to meetings. Stopped in downtown Dallas. And it doesn’t matter that I have a PhD, say the right things, do the right things–because of the color of my skin, assumptions are made about me.
It’s been heartbreaking listening to friends as we share our fears for our loved ones. Terrified of them jogging, bird watching, leaving parties, listening to music in the car, going to the store, sitting in their homes. A friend said his 13 year old grandson asked if he could be taught how to deal with the police because he doesn’t want to die. It is painful to prepare your kids for the first time they’ll be called the ‘n’ word or stopped by authorities or mistreated because of their skin color and worry every time they are out, if that will be the last time you see them. Talk to your Black friends…we’ve either given that talk or had our parents do it with us.
For my white friends, many of you are stunned and saddened by what you’ve witnessed. For Black folks, it is a part of our experience and the crazy thing is that it has been normalized for us. The trauma isn’t new. You are reading now how it is generational. We deal with doctors who don’t take our illnesses seriously and say it is in our heads or don’t see us. We deal with being followed in stores. Jobs that we are paid less than our colleagues who have the same titles. Lack of representation in leadership roles. Being fired from jobs without cause. It’s exhausting and takes a toll on your health on so many levels.
To be on guard, afraid, anxious most of the time is overwhelming. It’s even more frustrating when folks diminish your experience because it isn’t their reality or feel because they have a few friends of color that they are now experts on your situation not realizing that at any moment, privilege allows them to go back to their lives at the end of the day.
So to my white friends who are privately inboxing me, I appreciate your concerns and desire to do something. Let me give you some tips:
1. I can’t sit down with you to process your pain. I’m grieving. I’m balancing my own stuff and it’s heavy. Instead of asking me to help you figure out what to do, can you just ask me how am I doing? (And for those who’ve done that, I’m grateful.) I can’t do your emotional labor.
2. Private confession is good but it can’t stop there. Sending notes to your Black friends is cool but you need to publicly say it. You need to start talking to your circles of influence and telling them how you feel and telling them the problem. Write Op-Eds, call your legislators locally, statewide and nationally and demand action.
3. Put your money where your mouth is. Start donating to causes like Faith in Texas and others that are working in social justice spaces led by people of color. Begin to demand that organizations you fund do the same.
4. Start questioning your organizations and workplaces. If there are only a few people of color (or none) who are employed, you need to demand change. You also need to examine your culture because just bringing folks in without a true change of beliefs, identity and operations, it is window dressing. Looks nice but underneath, it is still foul.This goes for senior leadership and board membership.
6. Question investment. Those groups you are supporting–where are they investing their dollars? If they are funding causes that hurt people of color, move your money. Banks that support mass incarceration and candidates who back policies that are detrimental to our communities need to be dismissed from your roster.
7. Educate yourself and read. Just because you know one or two black people that you eat lunch with does not mean you haven’t been impacted by white supremacy. You are so impacted in ways you don’t even realize. First, read White Fragility. Pick up Peggy McIntosh’s work. Learn. Watching Roots isn’t enough.
8. It isn’t Black folks responsibility to coach you through this stuff. Allies should be available and willing to listen but you must also do the work.
I’m tired. I’ve been doing this work since college. I won’t stop and you can’t either.
DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS AND THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION – PART 1
FROM COLLECTIVE ORGANIZING TO BUILDING BLACK FUTURES
Every second Thursday of the month, Network Weavers Yasmin Yonis, Kiara Nagel and Marie DeMange host a Community of Practice conversation on Zoom. The skill-building space is available for network weavers who want to create connections and to explore questions central to their roles as facilitators, consultants and movement builders.
In March, the Community of Practice session was dedicated to unearthing what the Black Radical Tradition can teach us about how communities are self-organizing under crisis. Digital Strategist, social entrepreneur, and faith-based organizer Jayme Wooten and former organizer and founding member of Black Lives Matter Global Kei Williams, led the session through a riveting presentation that highlighted how network weaving in movement building creates strong, sustainable, and participatory avenues of community engagement.
In this first installation, I’ll be exploring some of the ideas that resonated with me from Jamye Wooten’s presentation. Join us next week for a second blog post on Kei William’s reflections on the difference between a riot and a rebellion, identifying key moments in a movement and power mapping.
What Moves You to Organize?
One of my key takeaways from the conversation was a question Jamye offered up to the group early on: “How do we move beyond react-ivism to a framework that is more wholesome and holistic?” When I think of activism, I think of forward movement, critical response to urgent community needs. What Jamey’s question opened up for me was an opportunity re-examine the impulse to act. Activism often comes out of a reaction to a perceived injustice. That reaction while visceral and binding, while it galvanizes communities towards action also depends on the viscerality of a trauma response for endurance.
Some good questions to ask in community:
Where in our organizing have we mistaken “react-ivism” for “activism”?
What can we offer as a community in its stead?
Is there room in our reaction to great harm for quietude and spaciousness so that we can recover and organize alongside our comrades?
What Kind of Network Makes a Movement?
A robust and inter-related one.
Another great offering from Jamye was an invitation to look closer at the parallels between movement building and Network Weaving. While people might remember Martin Luther King or Phillip Randolph as leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, what made the movement successful were core members like Ella Baker who helped local leaders in southern communities activate talented and capable young folks to self-organize. [1]
At the core of every network is a relationship, Jamye offers, and crucial to that relationship is trust. We often overlook the importance of relationship and trust building in the health and longevity of networks in an effort to make sure more work gets done, and yet, a sustained, years-long trust-building effort is the only way Baker’s could have galvanized as large and loose a coalition throughout the South as she did.
To that end, it’s important to know what each network needs to be able to organize resources to ensure its success. For example, an Action Network is just a collection or clustering of people who are interested in executing similar tasks: fundraising for an event or creating a mutual aid pod. What an Action Network needs to thrive might be different from a Support Network which is likely the comms and evaluations core of any successful self-organizing pod. That being said, a good Action Network is nothing without a robust Support Network, a collection of folks willing to build out systems and stay on top of resources. And a robust Support Network relies on the trust building, collaboration and thoughtful strategies that come out of relationships in intentional networks. Networks are not so much separate pods with a shared core as they are a spider
Are you using a Centralized vs. Decentralized Models?
According to Jamye’s research, successful Networks are not so much spidery pods with a powerful core as they are a starfish with deeply interconnected and communicative limbs. Thinking of the limbs of the Starfish as replicable and healthy parts of a network allow us to see the importance of each part: Circles, The Catalyst, Ideology, Pre-existing Network, The Champion. A healthy network needs all of these parts to be aligned in vision, communication, interlocking values and principles so that they can adequately organize for power.
A great example of such a model in practice are the hashtag based campaigns such as #BMoreUnited in response to the spotlight on Baltimore in the aftermath of Freddie Grey’s shooting at the hands of Baltimore Police. What emerged was a coalition of citizens who operated as a network without any real leadership structure to demand justice and accountability for police shootings in their community. They were able to do so by prioritizing participatory democracy and building out a skills bank to utilize the human and financial resources that came pouring in after the media spotlight.
From Collective Organizing to Building Black Futures
The last and arguably coolest lessons from the session is that it’s possible to use digital spaces to ethically organize on behalf of communities in ways that are participatory and rigorously innovative. Take CLLCTIVLY “a place-based social change ecosystem using an asset-based framework to focus on racial equity, narrative change, and social connectedness.” The most remarkable aspects of CLLCTIVLY: its asset map/directory which aims to amplify and connect community members with multimedia projects, a strategic partnership/marketplace, a social impact institute, and a rotating Black Futures Micro-Grant . Using the seven principles of Kwanza, CLLCTIVELY aims to put old money in service of new values. COLLECTIVELY- create ecosystem to foster collaboration.
Resources:
- Old Money, New Money 2019: A Community of Practice in Three Parts
- Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby
[1]https://time.com/4633460/mlk-day-ella-baker/
Watch the video of the session by downloading the free resource HERE.
About the author:
Sadia Hassan is a facilitator and network weaver who has enjoyed helping organizations use a human-centered design 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 is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Mississippi and has a Bachelor’s degree in African/African-American Studies from Dartmouth College.
Kimberley Jutze
Kimberley Jutze is the founder of Shifting Patterns Consulting, a Certified B Corporation that helps changemaker leaders get their colleagues on the same page and put collaborative processes in place to achieve greater impact. Her company applies organizational and human systems processes that enable organizations collaborating at the intersection of social, economic, and environmental justice solve problems that prevent people from working well together in ways that stay solved. This involves pinpointing the underlying causes of poor performance and unhealthy conflict, building the commitment to take effective action, supporting people in coming up with their own solutions, and putting a support system in place to monitor improved performance.