Earlier this month, Kelly, Allen, and I had the opportunity to host a 3-day Art of Hosting (AoH) with the Impact Hub Baltimore.   It was really special because, even though we think together and write this shared blog, the three of us don’t actually get to work together all that often. 

So we were primed to have a great time of learning and friendship, and then we got an amazing addition to our team:  Bronagh Gallagher, who joined us from Scotland as part of her North American learning journey. 

We started with a design day with the team that had invited us, and we learned a great deal about Baltimore and the “why” of an AoH in this particular place. This day was when I began to feel these two distinct drivers for what was happening in Baltimore:  love and urgency.

On one hand, each person on the team identified deep systemic issues to be navigated including, corruption of leadership and rampant inequities in education, healthcare, and housing. And, of course, we were in the town where Freddie Gray was murdered followed by days of protest.  Everyone could identify a need for deep change, and the urgency to make that change was palpable.  And actually, Baltimore is in the midst of change, and folks felt urgently that we couldn’t miss the opportunity of this moment.  

This sense of urgency could not be separated from the obvious and abiding love of the city and its people.  In fact, the folks who talked about making change seemed to be the most in love with the city, whether they were Baltimore born and raised or not.  It was actually love that was underlying this desire for change.  

I think this can be unique in organizing/activist communities:  this urgent desire for change born out of great love.  While we who see what’s “wrong” can often seem negative, many times it is because we know there is so much good that is being unrealized.  It’s because of our love of people and place that we simply cannot tolerate change coming slowly or “more talk” instead of action.

But to be clear, it doesn’t always feel soft, this love-fueled urgency.  Often it feels fierce and prickly and cranky and full of dark humor.  

And so, as hosts, we stepped into three days of love and urgency.    We walked in with a fierceness in our commitment to action and a unyielding belief there was love in the room.  

I want to share four places in the training where this curious mix of love and urgency was present,  and how we worked with it explicitly.

Opening Circle:  Great Rising 
As one of our very first activities, Allen led us into circle.  He began by greeting us with “Great Rising!”  It felt different than “Good Morning” and you could feel people respond to even this small shift away from business as usual.  And then Allen began “Great Rising” as a call and response.  And he continued to call out to us “Great Rising” and expect a response well past what most folks were used to. There were nervous giggles.  Some folks stopped.  And Allen continued to call out to us, and we (most of us) continued to respond.  On the other side, we were all responding and beginning to sink into the realization  that we were beginning something important here that needed to be marked.  Allen was making sure we attended with reverence (love) to the work ahead of us as we were anxious to get it going (urgency).  It was amazing to feel the shift in the room. 

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Four Fold Practice: What does presence look like?
On the second day, Kelly did a teach on the Four-Fold Practice.  It’s one of my favorite teaches to watch her do because she brings it with such accessibility.  She’s just so clear that if we want to make change in the world (urgency) we have to attend to ourselves and our relationships (love).   Her teach led into a brilliant discussion as a participant asked, “I feel like I understand what you mean when you say ‘being present’, but what does it really mean?  What does it look like?”

I answered a bit and shared about my practices of running, meditation, and being in nature, and  people nodded kindly in response.  But then Kelly brought it to life when she shared that sometimes she really just needs to listen to really loud punk rock music to get herself centered.  

Ah!  People could then find themselves there.  They could soften out of “it should look like this” and find their own way.

Kelly’s assertion was that you have to do something (urgency) to bring yourself present but how you do that must work for you and reflect your own knowledge and care of yourself (love).   

Even when love looks like really loud punk rock music!
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Reflective Listening: Being Vulnerable

Also on the second day, we did a Reflective Listening exercise that asks folks to share stories of courage. Because we knew we were asking  folks whose careers were about stepping forward and advocating, we knew we needed to ask them to share their stories that were not only about their actions in making needed change (urgency) but also required them to speak differently about something they cared deeply about (love).  

Here Bronagh stepped in and gave a really beautiful invitation to the group.  She asked us to name when our stepping forward with courage required real vulnerability and risk.  She urged us all to tell a story of depth and care as well as action.  

Several folks mentioned that this reflective listening process was the point in the training where they began to “get it” or feel connected to what we were doing together. It was a real life example of inviting both love and urgency into the room as we shared stories of ourselves.

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Meeting Design:  Getting Shit Done
On our final day, we were firmly in the space of love but we couldn’t forget the urgent issues that we would be facing as we left the gathering.  As a team, we decided to do a simple, practical teach on meeting design and allow folks to design their very next meeting together.  

The teach was fine, but I had come into the training sick and after 3 days of nonstop talking and interaction, I was feeling pretty bad.  I was coughing throughout the teach and losing my voice and just kind of struggling through it because it was what needed to get done.  (urgency)

And of course, love and care came in at that point.  Several participants - in that moment - offered me tea and cough drops (and some other “medicinal” products - 😊) . But more importantly, this moment of folks stopping a moment that was all about practical action to show  complete generosity allowed me to reflect back to them how very well cared for I had been throughout the three days.  I took a moment just to thank the group for the amount of care, concern, and love I had received throughout our time together.  I think - in that moment - I mirrored back to them their love and that was important before we got  into the work of “what’s next”.  We could hold the love in the room with the urgency of getting good shit done together. 

​And so we did. 

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Activists and organizers have a specific understanding of how to do love and urgency, a special blend of fierceness.  As a team, we loved that and we learned from it.  

Thank you so much, Baltimore!

The family legacy in this piece is strongly influenced by a desire to pass the torch to my nephew Aidan who is starting his first year at SUNY@Buffalo in a Social Justice cohort. Much thanks to Allen and Tuesday, my writing group ~ Habiba Alcindor, Lex Schroeder, and C.V. Harquail ~ and thinking partner Willie Tolliver who all gave strong feedback and encouragement. It's subtle and mercurial this kind of thinking and learning together.  ~ Kelly McGowan



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The first time that I felt empathy for a white person losing his unconscious sense of accomplishment, I was a student leader in the university anti-apartheid divestment movement of the mid-80s. It was also the first time that I heard and declined joining the activist chant “SHAME SHAME SHAME,” which I would continue to hear from ACT-UP through recent #BlackLivesMatter (voiced mostly by white allies) protests.
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During the divestment protests, I searched for but never found an alternative chant or tactic for protesting the university’s middle managers, all white men who reminded me of my father. My peers called them Kapos. I called them the 'immigrants’ sons'. They had white ethnic last names and held some power, but all reported up. I recognized in them their generations’ particular sense of accomplishment that had been fostered by their parents’ pride and national policy designed to build America’s white middle class. Their struggle with shame was not as much about being implicit in the immoral treatment of Black South Africans as it was in the possibility of siding against white supremacy.
 
        "Shame is a tool of oppression, not change." Lindy West
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I participated in many years of activist strategy discussions before I gained new insight into my gut reaction against the “SHAME SHAME SHAME” chant and coinciding longing for more transformative tactics. There were over a hundred white people and two black women at my father's funeral in Buffalo, NY (which had recently been featured in a UN report as one of the US cities with the greatest economic disparity along racial lines). My sister and I raced to them at the end of the service eager to know their connection to us. They were both VPs at AT&T, formerly Bell Telephone where my father had been a middle manager for most of his working life.
 
They told us that they were the first black women telephone operators in the early 60s and that my father had hired them saying that he would stand by them if they “come early, stay late and keep perfect hair.” They expressed gratitude for his action and, at the same time, did not spare us the messiness of its execution. It was profoundly intimate. I felt a unique mix of shame about my father’s collusion with the white supremacy of hair and pride in their recognition of his bold hiring.
 
My father never told us this story. My mother had never heard it. We couldn’t imagine him bragging about it to any of his Irish or Italian male friends, many he had known since high school. There was no room in his lifetime for this small act to be an accomplishment. There was no shame in not doing what he ultimately chose to do. At that time and place, the people who had real power to shame him were those closest to him ~ colleagues, friends or family who might have called him out as a race traitor or, more simply if the women had not passed the test, in making a ‘dumb’ or ‘liberal’ decision.
 
In that moment, without a movement or anti-racist training, my father decided to act against the cushion of white supremacy that surrounded him and open ~ if only a crack and with conditions ~ one small gateway to the American Middleclass/Dream. I can only imagine that he was encouraged by Kennedy’s civil rights speeches with the implicit understory of an Irish Catholic who had overcome the legacy of prejudice and its structural barriers and Martin Luther King Jr.'s appeal to the higher morals of white Christians.
 
More than 40 years later in the days of the 1% and Donald Trump, to feel shame about the condition of the American Dream and the absence of leaders with moral authority sounds like a healthy reaction. For white people, to be in relationship with people of color and not feel some shame is impossible. The challenge for all of us in these times is to welcome shame as a condition of intimacy and a necessary experience when working for transformational change, rather than using it as a weapon.

De Blasio: City doesn’t need 1,000 new cops
April 28, 2015

NYPD to add over 1,000 cops in budget deal 
 June 22, 2015

So many of you may be asking from these two New York Post headlines – How did New York City’s local government go from its mayor saying that we don’t need 1000 new cops to adding 1,297 new cops to its force?

Political persuasion, bandwagoning, manipulation, coercion, convincing could be it…maybe? After all how could a mayor and a city council make such a decision? Was it the police union, the benevolent association, the police commissioner, chief advisers that applied pressure on the mayor and its city council to make this decision or all of the above? The mayor said it himself that we didn’t need the 1000 new cops with crime declining. Oh, by the way, the only city council member to oppose the bill was Inez Barron.   So what the in the world happened?!

Some argued that hiring more police would save the city money…sure. The reality is the mayor was going to reject a line item in the city budget that would have amounted to 97 million dollars for the next fiscal year. The budget line item is well over  100 million dollars now. There will be increased police activity in Washington Heights, East New York, and Far Rockaway for the first phase of the roll out. These are overwhelmingly black and brown neighborhoods with long histories of state sanctioned violence.

This is a part of the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD) new plan to promote community policing in the city especially in black and brown communities. Some may say what is wrong with that? Increased police presence equals safer neighborhoods, so what’s wrong with that?

Spending that went to the NYPD for the increase of more police presence in neighborhoods for the fiscal year could have gone towards funding:

• 62,500 low-income New Yorkers with free bus and train access
• 310,000 youth for a summer youth jobs program similar to the one in Chicago that resulted in a 51% drop in violent crime
• $281,437 increase in resident associations’ budgets in all 334 NYC Housing Authority buildings
• 2000 social workers or over 2000 special education teachers

These were just some of the alternative recommendations that a collective of organizers in the NYC metro area, including myself, identified that could support neighborhoods in being safe.  

This collective started the Safety Beyond Policing campaign. Although, we had a great narrative with a great case for why the city government should spend its funds directly into communities, our input as citizen went unheard and we lost this battle of our campaign.

As we approach the one year anniversary today of the death of Eric Garner , and the deaths within the past two days ofSandra Bland, Kindra Chapman, and Jonathan Sanders (all four died through asphyxiation) all under custody of the state, I want to share the role propaganda played in this campaign. The question I am holding is- What are the subversive tactics that can undermine the use of propaganda we saw through NYC government to benefit those most impacted by their decisions?

Dr. Brittney Cooper is someone who I admire as a scholar/educator within and outside the walls of academia, and most importantly a friend.  When I started writing this blog she suggested I read this book by Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works. This quote from the book establishes a foundation for the lessons and questions I want to share and ask from my experience.

“Democracy is a system of self-rule that is supposed to maximize liberty. Freedom of speech, especially public political speech, cannot be restricted in a democracy. But the unrestricted use of propaganda is a serious threat to democracy.”  

In this quote, Stanley identifies the dilemma in how the state and government uses propaganda to reinforce power over people as opposed to power among people that create space for us to self-rule.

The state (an institution/firm of individuals) holds sole control over how law and order is organized in a certain territory. Our government is the actual service that provides law and order to its people. Therefore, not only is the state the judge of us- the people inhabiting the territory, it is also the judge of itself through the use of its government.

We know our government promotes and advertises that the United States is a true democracy in the land of the free and the home of the brave. However, the way state and our government is set up creates this dilemma where the larger public holds some beliefs around what it means to be a citizen in this country versus how the state and our government truly operates. As a result, many of us keep limiting beliefs about our roles and leadership in relationship to the state and its government. Many of us choose to believe the stories about what our government represents without really getting involved in it to find out for ourselves to see if it really creates space for us as a people to self-rule, govern, and organize in our own communities.

 

Throughout the Safety Beyond Policing campaign we definitely moved within and through our limiting beliefs. We sat down deliberated strategies about who in city council we were going to target to align with our campaign declarations. We held conference calls, people held community meetings, and we held actions disrupting city hall meetings. We were even named “the reckless few” by the NYPD Commissioner. We were in a game where we were playing not to lose in our strategy. We were fighting against not having more police presence in neighborhoods while promoting an idea and a vision of what safety looks like in our communities beyond policing.

However, what we saw happening was that city council members who were for 1,000 new cops would take our talking points about the alternatives to policing and then say that our law enforcement could partner with community groups to provide better service if we put our money towards increasing the number of cops.  If we increase the number cops it will reduce the money we spend on overtime for cops. This would then allow for them to spend time building trust in communities that have experienced unlawful stop and frisk practices and police brutality.

After the announcement was made that New York City would see 1,297 cops in the city, they also communicated that about a couple hundred cops would be taken off administrative duty and trained up in skills like conflict mediation to support in community policing efforts. This is the story that the local government held and put out to media outlets.

According the NY Daily News, three days before the decision was made DeBlasio had no considerations about including 1,000 new cops in the city’s budget. However, NYPD leadership and the police union was armed to dominate the narrative that the government only had one of two choices, to either: a) not supporting 1,000 new cops as if there were no other alternatives to handle the spike in crime, or b) support the funding of more cops with the promise that crime would decrease and therefore quell the fears of New Yorkers about the city’s capacity to handle any potential upsurge in crime.   If that is how the decision is framed, then it is no decision at all. 

The NYPD is fully aware that the general public holds a belief that if we don’t have cops in our neighborhood then there will be no public safety. They can use whatever data they want to maintain that story. What does this belief then say about the communities that the police patrol and control? The NYPD commissioner and union used this belief to sway the opinion of the mayor to put more new cops into the budget and onto our streets with tax payer dollars.  They used fear with non-negotiables with an institution of elected officials chosen by the public to provide the service of law and order to its people.  The question becomes - Is the public fully aware that we could create the public safety that we need without funding more police? Without fear? Without non-negotiables?

The reality is that NYPD operates of the broken windows theory that uses fear as a driving force in exacerbating social disorder and trauma. This is in ways that leave people in our communities with the belief that many of them and our government are hopeless, disconnected, and untrustworthy. Our government continues to uproot our communities from well-being because our practices are not grounded in healing and growth.

If our government says it’s promoting community safety and yet engaging in practices based on a theory that believes our communities are in social disorder- we limit the possibilities of what our communities have the ability and capacity to do in order to maintain our safety and well-being.  Our government continues to facilitate propaganda in which its citizens are gaslighted about their role and participation to self-rule and govern amongst ourselves in our collective power.

The realities of our neighborhoods’ capacity to operate in the vision of a true democracy are erased when the government prioritizes funding to hire more cops training police up in conflict mediation. What would it look like instead, to work directly with residents to learn and witness what conflict mediation may look like in Washington Heights, East New York, or Far Rockaway through restorative justice practices?

In true Power & Privilege 2.0 fashion I leave y’all with more questions that I am left with that opens the flood gates. We are looking to explore what it mean to disrupt the oppressive power dynamics that we see in the state and our government that gets funneled through propaganda.

• What assumptions are we making about our government and its role as a facilitator of law and order in our communities?
• What are we seeing and understanding about people in our own communities when they trust our government to make the right decisions for us?  How are they being informed and engaged about how our government operates? What matters to them?
• When we feel wronged by our government, we want to acknowledge that we matter and are worthy of safety and protection. We do not want be judged and told that something is wrong with us. What support may we need from each other in discerning our relationship with our government?
• What if we acted from the belief that “we the people” = “the state” rather than “we the people”  vs. “the state”?

By Tuesday Ryan-Hart

We've all had those moments in groups when working on issues that we care about:  something is said or done that makes everyone catch their breath and wonder what will happen next.  A moment when we realize a hurt has been done or a mistake has been made. I think we have a key choice in those moments:  to spiral up into indignation and hurt (and maybe get stuck there) or to sink more deeply into understanding and grace (and maybe move forward together).  

Grace is the practice of allowing ourselves and others to be human and make mistakes. If we are to do this work - and stay together doing it - we must allow for mistakes and hurt to happen. It’s crucial if we are going to do systemic change work together.  And we must meet this hurt, not always with rejection or abandonment of each other or the work, but with clarity, courageousness, and forgiveness interlacing our accountability.

Grace doesn’t mean that we lay down and allow ourselves to be trampled on or let others continue to hurt us over and over.   It doesn’t mean that we don’t march in the streets and demand justice.  It doesn’t mean that we say that oppression of ourselves and others is okay.  Not for one minute.

 No.  I think of grace as one of our key practices of liberation. 

Grace in this way means that we don’t expect perfection from others - or ourselves.  That we agree to not “bail” out of the work or our relationships at the first, second, or even third failed attempt to figure out new ways of being together. That we remember that we, too, mess up and hurt others. 

 I believe in practicing grace in a way that allows us to feel freer and less burdened by the intensity of our work and move closer to each other as we do it.

When I talk about grace, people often talk about the need to trust each other before we extend grace. But I think this is in error.  We don’t give grace because it’s been earned or is deserved. We give grace because we deeply understand that we are all just human beings who haven’t figured out how to be together well yet.  We all are reeling from the impact of our histories, and we should expect each other to be imperfect.

Not to say that the practice of grace is easy.  In fact, it’s often not.  It’s often much harder to commit to witnessing another’s perspective, allowing their missteps, and remaining in relationship.  But we do it everyday.

I was in a training recently when someone talked about wanting to start a group for People of Color, and there was a lot of support for that idea.  But inevitably, someone issued a sort of challenge - they wanted to start a group for “people who were transparent or non-color”.  You could feel the tension in the room.  Everyone paused.  Collectively, we were at the choice point.  We could have started a conversation about the need for POC-only spaces and given a history lesson on why this is important.  And that would have been good. Maybe.  But almost certainly, it would have led to someone being right and someone being wrong.  And someone feeling self-righteous and others feeling wronged. 

 As a facilitator, I took a deep breath and wondered how we’d go forward.  But it was solved almost before it began as the person who was starting the group for POC lightly said, “That’s great!  You do that.  I’m going to start here with this!” Everyone in the room laughed.  The laughter released tension and was also an acknowledgement that we didn’t have to take it all so seriously. Her grace, in that moment, liberated all of us.  He didn’t have to understand her work or approve of it, and we didn’t have to spend time convincing or teaching him.  She could do it. Those of us who agreed could join her and get on with the work.

Grace is a practice of mutuality: mutual forgiveness and mutual learning.  Yes, we must forgive each other, and we also must learn from each other.  If I am not allowed to make mistakes with you, we will never be able to do the hard work of systemic change.

 And grace is also a deeply personal practice. Because we are imperfect human beings, often the person we need to forgive is ourselves.  We cannot be smart enough, work hard enough, or “do it right” all the time. Many times, practicing grace starts with forgiving ourselves for mistakes.

Where are you seeing grace practiced in big and small ways?  And, maybe more importantly, how are you practicing grace with yourself?

By Kelly McGowan
It’s international day of loving on my people. And Guinness and the color green, sometimes in the same glass unfortunately. This blog honors the other Irish Saints ~ the radical Bernadette Devlin and rascal Oscar Wilde ~ by shamelessly using my given voice, which requires an abundance of the words saint, angel, devil and god (once with a Cap!). I did resist using good and people in the same sentence more than once.

What’s all this love talk about lately? And how are we really supposed to pull this off? I mean truly integrating love and responsibility (or caring and urgency, heart and mind, people and planet…) as the way of creating this better world?

Or to put it more concretely, what needs to be blown up so that love could transform something as entrenched as institutional racism in the American Criminal Justice System?

It’s becoming more possible for dominant social sector leaders to drop the L word in ways that are more than talk. This year, the World Health Organization attracted press attention for adding “boosting a child’s chance of surviving Ebola may be as simple as providing extra attention and love along with medical care” to their guidelines for treating the disease. This is potent medicine with backing to scale.

Around the same time, Philanthropists Jennifer and Peter Buffet dropped their Valentine’s day opinion piece Philanthropy Must Lead With Its Heart where they challenge the limits of “address[ing] the root causes of big global challenges” in a world where “nonprofit leaders are advised to avoid words like “love” or “caring” for fear of being seen as “not strategic.””

Both examples create possibility for sure. I hear my 92 year old godmother’s voice saying “God bless’em” when reading these articles. Her way of encouraging the good in people comes through whenever I witness bold acts of leading from the heart.

It’s moving to read a love-leading challenge to the commodity-based (inputs equal outputs) philanthropy model that has been directing so much of our good intentions and hard work for decades. But only moments after the warm after-glow has surged through my veins, another voice ~ wizened from decades of building and working in the not-for-profit industrial complex ~ intervenes and says show me.

The Buffets never use the words poverty, disparity nor, god forbid, capitalism. Bottomline, they are promoting a new philanthropy where the people who are “lucky enough to become financially independent” lead more from their hearts than from metrics. This is awesome and I would like very much to spend their money to good effect. It’s an irresistible invitation to partner with a self-reflective funder who values relationships over outcomes and investing in people over products.

That said, let’s be clear that this is a call for a new philanthropy that could advance things like integrating love into medical interventions, not an invitation to blow up or even question our current economic system where, to quote the Buffets, “all we see is symptom after symptom of a poisoned root.”

And this is where we end up again and again. When our human capacity for cruelty and retribution covers the front pages, we remember that love is the answer to everything. If only the solution was as simple as adding it to a proven medical intervention.

When someone with structural power says that love is the answer to a global issue (think institutional racism in our justice system) the angel on my shoulder (inner godmother) blesses the bold one who has open heartedly called us to love each other and the devil on the other reminds me that love is anemic without the power to blow things up.

By Allen Kwabena Frimpong 

There is something about being a part of an organization such as the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), a movement moment such as Occupy Wall Street, and an emergent network and movement - #BlackLivesMatter that has me showing up in my leadership as a Black man to be powerful, authentic and urgent about my life and the lives of my people in ways that I have never been before. Inspired by my friends who are also organizing in this moment, I want to share some key learnings to our movement that have come out of conversations with them, and folks who are concerned with the issue of public safety in our communities. These discussions are reflective of what I have been experiencing in my participation in this emergent network since the time Mike Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, August 9th 2014. Here are some common threads in the conversations I have been that has been affirmed for me in where we have gone and where we need to go in our movement work together.

• Accountability: What does accountability look like within movement building that is reflective of our values?  We could give our folks ground rules to not be homophobic,  transphobic, misogynistic, and antagonistic, but the naming of how we need to be and how we support shared practice where all of our people cultivate an awareness of when they may show up as controlling, guarded, resentful, divisive; as opposed to being loving, gracious, and forgiving- these are ways of being that are part of the work that liberates people to live authentically. If I were to go back to when I was involved in Occupy I would ask then and now -What are the shared practices for how we want ourselves to be, what we want us to do, and to have accomplished that will get us to the restoration of safety that we want to create in our communities? 
• Proactive vs. Reactive Organizing: This was one of the first things I learned when organizing with MXGM. While we understand the rapid response approach of our organizing in this moment, our communities have been experiencing crisis for a long time, and many in our movement continue to choose to handle our responses to crisis from a place of desperation. We should ask at this juncture what is at stake for us if we continue to operate from a place of desperation. Acting from a place of desperation is an indication that we hold the belief that we are not enough and are hold a conversation in our minds about scarcity and poverty that we can’t somehow live our lives abundantly as a people without stepping on each other’s necks.  We must embrace crisis through creating spaces to address trauma in our movement work and our communities. Healing has always been a part of a longer legacy in community organizing in marginalized communities that have been over-policed from law enforcement to school systems.                                      

• Structures for Feedback: What is our drum speak? What are the channels of communication, and how are decisions made at a national to local level and vice versa? Looking at the current movement for Black lives, as a de-centralized network the online and on-the-ground rapid response organizing that has been happening is in direct tension with the relationship building, the on the ground community outreach, and political education that is yearning to happen.  We need to create space to hold both to build a foundation for movement work that gives greater accessibility to more people who are looking to connect to an organization and develop their leadership. Much of this is lost because the container has yet to have been created to hold this tension and support the connection between the two even at national levels of mobilizing and organizing.

Without creating a framework to hold both the questions becomes, how we will be able to address federal systems and policies that do not hold local governments accountable for the wrongful killings, shootings, arrests, incarcerations of our people in a way that is transformative? What are the limiting beliefs and behaviors that we are holding that are getting in the way of us being urgent about aligning our efforts towards the demands we want met?

When smart phones were first introduced texting was foreign and the network connections were mad slow. Then we got the 2nd Generation (2G) data networks which had the capability to transfer and get information, slower than those annoying screechy modems that would disconnect and were shoddy when internet first came out. Now we got self-organized 3G & 4G data networks that configure, organize, and optimize the function of networks, while also providing self-healing practices when faults occur. We say we want to make systems that are hurting our communities obsolete like I talked about in my first blog. What will it take to let go of old ways of networking and organizing that do not serve us - that have us in reaction to systems in ways that get us stuck like the shoddy modem?

Our networks in our movement are the invisible threads of critical connections as my fellow friend and blogger Kelly says as the title of her prior blog. The functionality of self-organized networks is where our movement needs to be NOW!  We can rapidly respond with agility and adaptability while also building practices for sustainability in our local neighborhoods where we organize against the violent waves of practices, policies, and systems that cause harm to us. I am inviting all of us to really dedicate time and energy in building our momentum here in asking ourselves, what it will take imagine and create the framework for self-organized networks with the communities in which we organize?

A culture of love and responsibility has to be present in how we work together. That is what I choose to be committed to. My loving, caring, and trusting friend and fellow blogger Tuesday, inspired me in her last blog - I am committed to activism as a practice not as an occupation.  My activism creates community where my children yet to born live courageously- where they are not bought into the belief that they are not worthy or not enough. I want them to overcome the fear of being killed by a chokehold or a gun – in the same way young people were courageous in the face of rifles and tanks in the streets of Ferguson. They are vessels of change that removes the kind of violent oppression that stifles us from being able to breathe fully in our humanity.  They are prepared and ready socially, emotionally, and physically for a world transformed for and by them. 

At times it seems like there is a disconnect among us as a collective of what it means to even communicate among each other and our awareness about how we are relating to each other. What I learned from my loved ones in our conversations is that this actually goes back to what our beliefs are, and the essence of our beliefs are simply that we matter. When we fully get that we matter as a movement, we get access to be unapologetically open, connected and vulnerable in ways that transcend our current status beyond being a de-centralized network.  Just like how the 3G/4G data networks made the shoddy modem obsolete, our movement evolves in a way that takes the place of some beliefs about traditional models of organizing that don’t serve us anymore.  So let’s be the creators of our future NOW!

#Powerbeyondprivilege #BlackFutureMonth 

by Tuesday Ryan-Hart

Various colleagues and I have recently spent time talking about the ways our thinking and acting is shifting related to our activism. For many of us, this is a direct result of spending time in deep personal reflection and knowing that as we shift inside, so must our actions.

In the past, this has caused me quite a bit of anxiety, like when I left the domestic violence field and the skills built over years working with, training, and writing about the intersection of race, gender, and violence were not easily translatable into the hierarchical, academic environment that I was moving into.  But these days, I’m pretty comfortable with the idea that my activism is also a practice - something I can build skill in but never perfect.  Something that constantly evolves.  

Because of this, I try not to identify as an activist anymore.  I try to practice activism.  (Or even simply practice being just. Though there is nothing simple about that.) 

• Activism as practice means my analysis is not static.  I try to hold lightly what I think is true because I know that the way I understand something today has to shift as I learn more.  That I will never have enough understanding to act perfectly.  
• Activism as practice means I’m never going to get there.  I will not work hard enough, push through enough, develop the perfect 5-step model or checklist to know how to act or support others in acting in response to every situation of inequity.
• Activism as practice means that the way I’m choosing to act in seeking justice and equity today may look radically different than it does next year.  And it probably should look radically different than it did 5 years ago.
• Activism as practice means that I prioritize learning, not perfection. That if I learn something - even if it’s painful- it contributes to, and must be integrated into, my practice.  
  

There is huge liberation for me in this.  I don’t have to fool myself, or anyone else, that I have the answers.  I can truly “practice” creating the world I want and learn with others how to do it.

I’m learning.  I’m growing.  I’m changing.  My activism practice needs to as well.

How about you other practitioners out there…what’s shifting in your activism practice?

My friends Tuesday, Kelly, and Nancy, and I hosted a two day practice-based theory and skill-sharing training, “Creating Impact through Engagement” at the Center for Social Innovation in New York City last week.  The day prior to the training I had checked in with the group sharing that I had been a little unsettled going into the design and preparation for the two day training, because I had administrative, and advisory tasks that I needed to take care of that were hanging over my head going into this training, and an informational webinar that I had to do for a philanthropy client actually during our time designing the training. The check-in definitely helped me, because I really wanted to put my energy towards being fully present for the two days acknowledging that probably everyone has work responsibilities hanging over their head. More importantly, we along with the active participants of the two day training were coming together because we all want to create space to explore what it takes to be more strategic and intentional about how we are making transformational change happen within our organizations and communities.

It was after the check-in that I decided that I wanted to place an expiration date on my fears going into the training. I wanted to be vulnerable and share a story about me personally that could be connected to some of the practices and frameworks that we were sharing with the group. I usually find myself during training or workshop explaining ideas, theory, practice, and directions. I wanted to allow myself to have the courage to share a personal story that I thought could ground myself and participants in my lived experience that could frame the importance of the theory being taught rather than explaining it away. I saw it as an opportunity to practice what it meant for me to use lived experience as a teachable moment. In addition, my first blog on Power & Privilege 2.0 was also based on this teach I was about to frame.  The following day, I actually set up the framing for the 2 loops theory teach and exercise that Tuesday facilitated. I chose the law enforcement system as the backdrop to my personal story and began to share with participants my understanding of the history of law enforcement and how the beginnings of law enforcement in America have direct and close ties to slavery in this country through slave patrols.

Continuing my story, I fast forward in history to talk about my family’s encounter with police when my father attempted to attack my mother with a knife. It was not my parent’s first encounter with domestic violence. The difference this time was that it was their last incident, because several months after, it led to my parents’ divorce. I shared with participants what happened when the police came to the house, and charges processed against my father for aggravated assault against my mother. I talked about how my parents couldn't afford the lawyer and court fees associated with the charges, and how the charges were eventually were dropped. I then asked participants how they might think my parents, the police, and their children- my sister and I were affected and impacted by what took place? Did we get an opportunity to reconcile with what had happened? Did anyone get the opportunity to heal or even forgive? What role did my parents and the law enforcement system play in all of this? Lastly, how do I deal with this past lived experience as someone who is now in the role of figuring out how to address issues of violence in communities all across the nation? Once I framed this for participants I then transitioned Tuesday into the 2 loops teach and exercise.

Reflecting back on the  framing that went into the exercise, I could have:

a) Talked about and named how my father was being paternalistic towards my mother and how patriarchy, class dynamics, and race showed up and law enforcement’s reaction to them, but I didn’t. 

b) Talked about the issues my mom had in trying to engage my father in healthy dialogue around their relationship and the kind of relationship she wanted with him and what got in the way of that, but I didn’t.

c) Talked about how the incidents of domestic violence impacted the relationship I had with my father, and how I felt like I was never enough in his eyes, but I didn't, and actually that is okay.

It’s okay, because I didn't want to share my story while also giving you my political analysis to my story. My narrative is a part of me and I know what it means for me to share that publicly to a larger audience. I shared my story because I had an intention behind why I wanted to share it. I shared it because I felt it was important for me to acknowledge and practice being vulnerable and seeing my vulnerability as strength. How can any of us cultivate our own analysis if we continue to place our own onto others? Where is our agency in that? I wanted to host myself and participants in my experience rather than providing analysis and recommendations about my experience. My experience of violence can’t be solved in a policy memo, nor a cereal box, cookie cutter, behavioral intervention. It’s not enough.

We spend time studying other people, collecting evidence of what is wrong with them or us as a means to justify why we need to approach situations, and people in a way that makes our problems into commodities. This limits the opportunity for people to practice building critical and compassionate connections within ourselves and each other. We need to seize the time and spend it building our own awareness of ourselves, others, and our environment, so that we can truly show up to be who we are past, present, and future instead of hiding behind our analysis of what we think ought to be or should be, when we may not even be showing up in that way ourselves.

So friends at this juncture I have decided to commit myself to abandon the practice of diagnosing oppression with its authoritative recommendations on how to be less racist, sexist, heterosexist, and instead practice discernment with how people are showing up by being inquiry about the following:

When was a time that I faced adversity in my life and what did I do to overcome it? What was challenging about that adversity? What was at stake for me?

What have I done to contribute to the very thing I complain about or want to change?

When did I hold a belief about someone or something that I found out was not true? How did it affect or impact me? How did I react once it was revealed to me? What did it take for me to make my revelation a new possibility that was more just for all?

I am sure I will be experiencing some loss in practicing letting go, and I will always remember that I am not just my analysis. I am also made up of stories and experiences too that I want to share with friends and loved ones, and I don’t owe anyone an explanation of my story. Trust me, I wouldn't want anyone to study me through a 12 step how-to book on how to figure out to make sense of and understand my complex life.

P.S: Here are Power and Privilege 2.0’s hash-tags. Spread your love for us widely with style and grace: #powerbeyondprivilege #beyondtolerance #poweramongus #equalityisnotequity

A few weeks ago at a training, I was in the middle of teaching about power - a new teach for me, and one that I am, at times, quite nervous about giving -  when my colleague, Tim, interrupted me.  Things quickly moved into a typical pattern with white folks in the room talking about their experiences with power, a white woman expressing painful feelings about her level of hurt, and me - the person of color trying to share my expertise -  sitting there quietly, really unsettled and a little bit stunned.  

It happens.

And I knew it would be okay.  

And it was. Not because this story has a happy ending. There actually is no ending, no particular resolution.  No, I knew it would be okay because Tim and I are in relationship.

We didn’t have a chance to talk about what had happened that day.  Or rather, we didn’t take the chance.  I was trying to figure out what had happened and how I was feeling about it, and Tim - after checking in with me -  was giving me some space and trying to figure it out for himself, too. (And we had a training to conduct!)  

Fortunately, Tim and I share a practice of running, and the next morning, we took a run together.  We talked about my experience of the teach and how I saw historical patterns playing out, his experience of what happened and the impact it had, what we thought we were learning, and how it might be important to the group we were facilitating together. 

And then we took it back into the training room.  We sat in circle together and we shared our experiences both in the teach the previous day and during the run that morning. We shared that these issues will arise again and again when working with teams of people and how we, as practitioners, were moving through it together. 

In the circle, questions were asked around, “What did you decide?” or “How will you act going forward?”  And in the ensuing weeks, there have been questions about “What did you guys do?” and  “How did it resolve?”

Ideally, in the moment of the interruption, we would have named it and decided how to go forward together.  But that didn’t happen.  It often doesn’t.  

So then…what? 

Tim and I working together and figuring something else out!

Tim and I have talked a great deal about the expectation that we would come up with the way of doing things in the future that would keep it from happening ever again.

That’s not what we did.  We didn’t problem solve.  We didn’t come up with a resolution to avoid future occurrences.  Instead, we attended to our relationship.  We shared our understanding of the situation and our reactions, made apologies where needed, saw and heard each other well, and decided a next step together.  We decided to stay together.

And so this is what we’ve shared with folks, “We continue to work together and be in conversation about our learning,”  but somehow this doesn’t seem to be enough for some folks.  

But that is what is happening.

I get that this is disappointing.  The desire for more “resolution” is completely understandable.  

• I also want us to know exactly what to do next.
• I want us to solve the problem.
• I want us to have so much certainty about what to do that we know how to avoid the problem in the first place.  
• I want us to know what agreements to make so that we don’t interrupt, disrupt, and hurt each other ever again.

Race and racism is so painful and challenging, that all of us would love for there to be a way of fix it.  We want someone to have the answers. We want an experts to show us what to do and how to do it. We want something we can point to that says we have figured this out and that we know what to do in the future.  

But I don’t believe that resolution was - or is - the goal.  

In fact, I think there are a few real risks to forcing resolution in situations like this:

• We have resolution, but it isn’t real, or it is superficial.  It might address the current circumstance but it doesn’t give us any capacity to deal with future occurrences.
• Forcing resolution can lead to short-term alleviation of feelings and discomfort but may have no real meaningful impact beyond making us feel better in the moment.
• Our relationships are not rooted in reality as we move from our lived experiences of each other to a set of “should” or “shouldn’ts”. 
• Our relationships become more vulnerable to future disruption.   We aren’t able to build the resilience  - we don't get the practice necessary - to face future challenges.  
• As process facilitators we undermine the work of the group because we don’t allow the discomfort or learning that comes from it. 

I don’t believe that there is any “finish line” about race and that we can just make agreements, rules, policies, or models that will get us there.  The resolution is in our relationship, in our ability to stay in discomfort together, to be humble in the face of not knowing what to do, and to not pretend that we know how to solve this intractable issue.  For Tim and I, the resolution is in our practicing relationship with each other, day in and day out, with its inevitable hurts and with a commitment to learning from each other. 

This resolution in relationship is not neat and tidy, but more real, deep, and entirely based in practicing together. 

The relationship is our resolution.