- Jessica Care Moore

Feeling nostalgic, shaken, stirred, and inspired during my current trip to Michigan, and my first return visit to my hometown of Flint in 15 years.  So much here has changed: foreclosures – 2,000 last year alone, 40% of all property parcels in the city are vacant or abandoned, jobs have disappeared now to the point of 25% unemployment, 36% of all residents live in poverty, half of the student population in the public schools has left in the last 10 years resulting in numerous school closings including my high school, of those students that remain 81% qualify for free lunch.  And the flip side, there are anchor institutions, physical landmarks, and stalwart active citizens (thank you, Sylvester Jones and Harold Ford, among others!) that remain and provide some sense of backbone, continuity, and hope.

Like many other small industrial towns, Flint has had to come to grips with the reality of downsizing, along with a legacy of racial inequity.  The reality here feels particularly stark, and yet, people keep on keepin’ on.  After 30 years of recession (talk about the canary in the coal mine!), it is time for rebirth, “human scaled for a post-industrial world.”  The same holds true for Flint’s bigger and more popular sib-city, Detroit. Years of resilience may be leading to new opportunity, but perhaps not if we fail see their story as part of our own.

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?

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.

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.”

-Van Jones

Reporting in from Columbus, Ohio, where we spent Thursday helping to kick off the Transforming Race 2012 Conference, hosted by the Kirwan Institute.  This year’s theme is “Visions of Change,” and the tone was set by this evening’s keynote from Van Jones.  His call to was to embrace a “deeper patriotism” where “diversity is the solution to pretty much every problem we face in the new century.”

Melinda (pictured above on the left), Cynthia (right), and I (middle) made our first conference contribution by way of yesterday afternoon’s session on “Facilitation Skills for Racial Justice Work,” a fuller experience of which is available in our upcoming 2 day workshop in Boston in early May, Fundamentals of Facilitation for Racial Justice Work.  Follow more of the discussion today and tomorrow via Twitter through hashtag #TR2012 or #TransformingRace.

“ What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.”

-Excerpt from The New Jim Crow

Grace Lee Boggs: You Have a Chance To Change The System from Bhawin Suchak on Vimeo.

“We are the children of Martin and Malcolm. Black, white, brown, yellow. Our birthright is to be creators of history. Our right, our duty is to shape the world with a new dream… We have to begin to thinking of ourselves, we are the ones who are going to shape the world with a new dream. The old American Dream was based so much on exploitation of the earth and of other peoples. So our revolution can’t be the way that we thought of revolution to acquire more things; our revolution has to be one that grows our souls.”

“…It’s very hard for us to think of a system as a way of thinking, as a way of producing, as a way of relating to one another. And I think when we begin thinking of the system in terms of values and in terms of relationships and in human terms, we’ll begin changing these things among ourselves. We’ll begin relating to each other differently, and viewing reality very differently. We wont’ objectify everything. We’ll see ourselves much more in human terms, as capable of doing things, as capable of changing ourselves and each other and our neighborhoods.”

Grace Lee Boggs, philosopher, activist, author of The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century and Living For Change: An Autobiography.

Photo by cambodia4kids.org

A year ago I blogged about the critical role of convening in collaborative multi-stakeholder change work, particularly as it plays out through a funder.  Having been in Michigan last week working with a group of diverse foundations in a customized Facilitative Leadership session, I have additional thoughts to offer stemming from a very productive and provocative conversation about how to address and manage power dynamics when one attempts to initiate a partnership or collaborative effort and one is holding the purse strings or a significant portion thereof.  In a brainstorm exercise and subsequent conversation, participants prioritized the following considerations and “best practices” to ensure that there is appropriate and effective wielding of one’s power.

• Manage and be explicit about expectations regarding the desired outcomes and process of the convening
• Meet people where they are, both physically and in terms of their knowledge
• Make sure to co-create ground rules/working agreements for meetings
• Be mindful of language and reduce barriers by eliminating jargon and culturally-biased terminology
• Name the power dynamics – acknowledge that they exist
• Define “value” broadly in terms of what different stakeholders bring to the process
• Engage in “social leveling” by going beyond formal roles, being real, breaking bread together
• Be clear about who needs to be at the table and don’t default to titles and the usual suspects
• Allow for the expertise of people’s diverse experiences
• Explicitly define key words – “power,” “partnership,” “collaboration”
• Be present, physically and spiritually – exercise one’s right as a stakeholder

Certainly all of this will continue to be discussed during the upcoming convening hosted by the Council of Michigan Foundations on the current opportunity gap.  And curious to hear your thoughts of other ways to responsibly and effectively work with power in the fine art of convening.

“In the 1960s all hell broke loose… The media called it a “riot.” The black community called it a revolution… Rebellion was an explosion of anger. Revolution was a tremendous leap forward, a tremendous evolution of consciousness and responsibility; a whole new way of thinking…We have the opportunity to change our thinking and our philosophy by understanding what is really happening; what time it is on the clock of the world.”

Listen to how Grace Lee Boggs, philosopher and activist and members of the Detroit community are “Becoming Detriot” – redefining what it means to face up to the challenges confronting us as individuals, cities, states, a nation and even as a world community and figure out “how to use the negative to advance the positive.”

Last week I blogged from San Diego while co-delivering Engage for Results with my colleague Melinda Weekes to a group of grantmakers in partnership with Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. This session focused on engagement strategies to help foundations be more effective and accountable as funders and providers of other important resources to their grantees, surrounding communities, and other funders.  The end of our first day focused on power as an ever-present dynamic, not just in the foundation-grantee dynamic, but also in a number of other dimensions of difference within and beyond organizational walls.

The question of power also came up during a conversation with some of my IISC colleagues yesterday about a nascent network of social justice funders, and during our webinar on Tuesday through the Leadership Learning Community, as participants wondered how to address power when trying to cultivate collective leadership.  One of our responses was to not shy away from the conversation, to acknowledge that power is always present, takes on different forms, and figures prominently in the endeavor of identifying stakeholders and throughout any given social change process. 

An interesting point was made in San Diego that foundations do themselves a disservice when they refer to and think of themselves only as “grantmakers,” overlooking other critical resources they have at their disposal in terms of knowledge to be shared, critical connections to be facilitated, and convening power to be leveraged. The video above was created especially for our Engage for Results workshop, and it offers some interesting perspectives on power and how we might engage it.  Curious to get your take and thoughts.

And for further reflections on power, make sure to check out my colleague Linda Guinee’s posts on the topic:

What’s Power Got to Do With It?

What Is Power Anyway?

Where Does Power Come From?

Narrative and Power in Groups