You’ve heard that “it takes a village to raise a child.” It also takes a village to make an IISC engagement happen. I want to raise up a shout out and express my grateful for the excellence with which our colleagues do the detailed behind-the-scenes work that makes IISC’s practice possible.

Here is a short, illustrative list of processes that move projects from idea or inquiry to a finished process and product: answering phones, scheduling meetings, matching consultants with projects, registering workshop participants, ordering materials, working with caterers, setting up and cleaning up after meals, tracking down expense reports, sending invoices, managing our website, logging information in our database, handling assorted technology problems. The list goes on and on.

Who are the unsung heroes in your work? When’s the last time you gave them a shout out?!

Two things reminded me of the power of design and physical space this week. First, in a workshop for Juvenile Justice leaders, the 12 participants were seated at three tables. It was a cozy arrangement and the tables were useful for handling the volume of materials they were using. After a morning focused on race, class and culture dialogue skills, we brought the chairs together in a circle in the front of the room to close a segment of the conversation. I asked folks how that arrangement felt and they say “Good!!” There’s nothing like removing physical barriers and enabling everyone to see everyone else easily to foster relational and conversational intimacy!

This weekend, I was sitting on my front porch with my laptop doing my IISC “homework.” Our four year old neighbor across the street saw me and her mother later told me that she wanted to sit outside because she saw me sitting outside. Eventually, she came over and offered me one of her cookies and sat on the bench with me. Her mom was not far behind and her dad came over eventually too. We had a brief neighborly chat. During this conversation, one of our next door neighbors came home—mom, dad and two kids. They all went inside and a few minutes later, mom came back out to talk with me. I was delighted and energized by these brief conversations, none of which would have happened if I had been doing my work indoors. There’s nothing like a porch with a bench to create space for neighborly conversations!

How are you being intentional about the physical spaces you use and create for conversations and relationships that are important in your life and your work?

Racial justice work can be soul depleting or soul enriching. A lot depends on how we do the work and who we do it with.

Last week, six of us from the Boston area gathered to reflect on our experiences at Transforming Race.  Sponsored by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Transforming Race brought together academics, students, advocates and leaders of a wide range of nonprofit organizations to explore Visions of Change. We were challenged to consider: What would a generation or two of racial progress look like?  What seeds of change are in place right now?  How do we get from here to there? The theme was inspiring all by itself, and the many speakers, workshops and activities engaged our hearts as well as our and minds. All of that was very good.

Still, I was struck by one simple, common thread among our reflections. We were delighted simply to be together in “resonant company.” We recalled the fun, love and sense of community we experienced; we relished the sense of belonging. We had found “our tribe” – a community of people who care about what we care about, struggle with things we struggle with, and work for kind of future we are working for. It was great to be reminded how much human connections matter in this work. They renew and refresh us. They remind us of what’s important and guide us in times of confusion or discouragement.

As you work toward a more just world, how are you building community? How are you building relationships that can strengthen you and help you find the courage to persevere? How are you building the future that you want to live into?

 We often focus on the understanding of power as a process and as a social construct. As Beth Roy says, “power is not something you have; it’s something you do.” I was struck by a contrast as I listened to a brief story this morning about Lyndon B. Johnson.

Biographer Robert Caro described Johnson as having “no power” as Vice President because the Kennedy’s didn’t want him to have any. When President Kennedy was assassinated, he suddenly had all the power conferred by that office.

It’s tempting to see power on this level as somewhat objective, as a thing to be granted or wielded. But Johnson’s power as President was a socially constructed as his powerlessness as VP. (If you have doubts, consider how difficult it has been for our current President to get things done!)

Caro spoke admiringly of Johnson’s swift clarity about what to do with that newfound power–almost as if he had a list he’d been sitting on all the while. Johnson used his power as President to ensure, among other things, passage of the Civil Rights Act.

That got me wondering – what’s on my/our collective list of things we would do “if we had the power to do it?” And, how do we build that power, so we’re not waiting for power to be conferred from outside ourselves?

Wonder why I’m passionate about collaborative process and strong, creative process design?

Join us at Fundamentals of Facilitation for Racial Justice Work on May 8-9 in Boston to explore these ideas and more!

You can’t have peace or justice without it. Consider the following:

“Peace comes from being able to contribute the best that we have, and all that we are, toward creating a world that supports everyone. But it is also securing the space for others to contribute the best that they have and all that they are.” So says Nigerian human rights and democracy activist, Hafsat Abiola. Her words echo those of John Paul Lederach , who wrote in The Moral Imagination that peace is not a condition—a process through which people can build relationships conflicting parties and continually engage to create a reality where “the other” continues to exist.

“Justice is the ultimate social good. The just social system would be one which power (control of decisions) is diffused, decision making is participatory, accountability for decisions is visible, and resources are adequate and equitably distributed. Justice can only result from continuous interplay of individuals and groups adequately empowered to represent their own interests, with a minimum of superordinate umpiring to prevent power concentrations and, therefore, abuses. Given human fallibility, a system of justice … must emerge from the interplay of empowered, meaning-seeking individuals and groups.”  James Laue, Gerald Cormick in The Ethics of Intervention in Community Disputes

 “Power is not a thing—something you have. It’s an action—something you do.” Beth Roy

These statements form a kind of gyroscope for my work. They cause me to ask myself: Am I designing and facilitating collaborative processes that create conditions where improbable groups of people can build authentic relationships? Where they can create deep, shared meaning? Where power is constructed together and exercised responsibly? Where solid, fair and meaningful agreements lead to lasting change? How do these statements influence your thinking and practice?

Periodically, we lift up the work of organizations working at the grassroots. Project HIP HOP (Highways Into the Past – History, Organizing and Power) is a youth-led organization that works at the intersection of arts and organizing.

Their mission is to “teach the hip hop generation how to use hip hop as a cultural tool to educate and motivate our community.” Check out one of their most recent projects. And, if you’re inclined, you could vote for them to help them to help their attempts to win a trip to the Earth Summit in Rio this summer.

I picked this up from a Facebook Friend this morning. Apt description of too much of our national (un)civil discourse. At IISC, we have the privilege of working every day with folks who are crafting alternatives to these dangers. What alternatives are you working on?

Last week, I had the privilege of spending a few hours with a delegation from Egypt—four young men who were involved in the April 6^th revolution and continue to work for democracy in Egypt. They were at the end of a three week tour of the U.S. focused on the role of social media in politics and elections.They were frankly surprised that here, in the country that gave birth to Facebook, Twitter and Google, we not doing more with social media to advance our democracy. Their visit with IISC was to focus on some of the social technology that fuels social change work. Still, I thought to myself, “No pressure!”

We worked through Framing the Big Picture—a framework for describing current reality and a desired future state, as well as exploring the context and stakeholders. The scope of their desired futures was sobering: establishing a media free from control by politicians and business people; counteracting rumors propagated by state media; getting the military out of politics and back into their barracks; building political awareness in rural areas where democracy seems most unfamiliar.

I have to confess to a moment of insecurity. Would the tools that I was offering seem equal to the task? Just as I was thinking this, one of the participants expressed impatience with planning processes in general. But then we got into Designing Pathways to Action—a framework for sequencing discussions during a planning process. We were on our feet moving from space to space within the pathway and the group was more engaged. The participant who expressed impatience with planning shared a story. Four days before the revolution in Egypt, a friend of his share with him plans to launch the revolution. He didn’t think it was possible. He said he had to apologize!

I still wasn’t sure about whether the tools seemed up to the enormity of the tasks before this group. But, in the end, they found great value in these simple tools and even asked if we could come to Egypt to bring these and other tools to their colleagues and communities. What an affirmation!

These visitors reaffirmed something I’ve experienced repeatedly over the past 18 years. The tools and frameworks on which we have built our practice are scalable: they work for small projects in tiny volunteer organizations and for efforts that take place on a national or even international stage. They are flexible and transportable across lines of culture, language and other differences. And, they reflect the kind of elegant simplicity that results from working through complexity.

“We are all called to be warriors of love for transformation.” That’s how Billy Wimsatt closed the Transforming Race conference. “If we’re transforming race, gender, America, we’re doing it from the place of fiercest love.” This is a love for one’s community, oneself, one’s planet and all people that can’t stand idle while people are suffering. A love that won’t tolerate the exclusion or marginalization or degradation of others.

A love that produces an infectious joy as well as righteous indignation. A love that builds power within and among people in pursuit of justice. Lest we forget what Dr. King said so many years ago, quoting theologian Paul Tillich, love without power is anemic, power without love is destructive. He reminded us of the power of bringing people together on a neighborhood level to make change, and not to overlook the power of the ballot. Most importantly, though, Billy reminded us that “the heart is the place we have to work from if anyone is going to care.”

At Transforming Race, Dr. Vandana Shiva started her talk with a provocative comment. “I don’t know why the love for monoculture and the love for power are so intimately connected.” She went on to detail the calculated efforts of the British to subjugate the Indian people, in part by imposing the production of cash crops, destroying their ability to produce food and destroying their markets.

The more details I hear about the colonial era, the more dumbfounded I am that the transformation of people into non-people in order to satisfy a lust for power and wealth were thought to be reasonable and allowed to happen. It is even more striking how the legacy from that era persists.

Dr. Shiva made a powerful case for connecting the sovereignty of seeds, food production and people. Quoting Gandhi, she reminded us that “There’s  nothing like political freedom without economic freedom.” And economic freedom requires freedom from the imposition of intellectual property rights in seed. Farmers in India are prohibited from saving seed from one harvest to the next, and instead must purchase genetically modified seed that has been patented by Monsanto. She pointed out the absurdity of giving a patent—acknowledgement of creation—for a form of life that a company has not created, but only modified—and that not necessarily in a good way.

She also stated plainly that “A billion people are not getting enough food. It’s not about no rain. It’s a structural system of exclusion.” And that is the critical connection between Dr. Shiva’s work around seed sovereignty and healthy food systems and the work of the Transforming Race conference.

Again quoting Gandhi, she said “’As long as the superstition exists that bad and unjust laws should be obeyed, so long with slavery exist’…If slavery was wrong and it took a movement to say you can’t own people,  we need a movement to say that you can’t own life on earth.”