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

This is the 26^th official celebration of the national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I remember the struggle to establish the holiday and wonder what Dr. King himself might think of what it has become.

At today’s MLK Day celebration in Newton, MA, Representative Barney Frank cautioned against making two equal errors as we assess our current reality. The first is to look at the progress we’ve made and forget that there is more work to do. Clearly racism has not been thoroughly eliminated and the principles of human dignity and justice are not fully realized in our society. The second is to look at the work before us and declare the gains we’ve made unimportant. Just as clearly, life in the U.S. is different in 2012 and better in some important ways than it was in 1968. A third way acknowledges the real achievements and the struggle and sacrifice through which they were achieved, and also acknowledges that the struggle against racism, violence and poverty continues.

Dr.  King lost his life working for dignity and equality for working people—sanitation workers in Memphis. In the his last speech, he encouraged the people to work together for justice. “When we have our march, if it means leaving work, if it means leaving school, be there. Be concerned about your brothers … Either we go up together or we go down together. Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness … The question is not ‘If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?’ … The question is not ‘If I stop to help this man in need what will happen to me?’ The question is ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?’ That is the question.”

Representative Frank also reminded us that while Dr, King will be honored rhetorically all across the country today, both he and the movement and principles for which he lived and died will likely be dishonored in practice when Congress opens for business tomorrow. How are we bringing our annual remembrance of Dr. King and the Freedom Movement into our daily practice?

Let’s heed Dr. King’s exhortation in that same speech. “Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination and let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.”

We’ve been having a good conversation at IISC about ways to challenge and re-frame race discourse in ways that are truthful, loving, compelling, welcoming and so much more. Last week, I posted a video from Jay Smooth about shifting from a discussion about “being” to a discussion about “doing.” Let’s keep the conversation going.

In response Jen Willsea wrote, in part, “I recently learned to say that a person HAS bipolar, rather than IS bipolar…Racism is not inherent to our beings, just as bipolar does not define a person who suffers from it; it’s not their fault that they have it and it doesn’t make them a bad person. Likewise, bipolar isn’t something you can completely get rid of if you have it, and neither is racism. Living with it and being a productive member of society with love and compassion for yourself and others requires careful attention, being really self aware, and rigorous about healthy habits. Maybe it’s not that we ARE racist, but that we HAVE racism??… So, if all white people have racism then, it just doesn’t let us off the hook… [W]e need to remember we got it (racism), it’s not our fault, and to contribute to the liberation of all of us, we gotta do a lifetime of learning and growing.”

What difference would it make to the way we think about racism at any level—internalized,  interpersonal, institutional or structural—to think of it as a condition (like having bi-polar) and to think about discourse and action focused on racism like getting at something that’s stuck in someone’s teeth?

Video blogger and hip-hop radio host Jay Smooth makes an eloquent case for understanding that being good does not require us to be perfect, and that learning to live with our imperfections is a way forward in contemporary race discourse. I’d share a few of his comments, hoping this will inspire you to find the time to listen to the whole talk.

“Are you saying that I am racist? How can you say that. I am a good person! Why would you say I am a racist?”

And you try to respond “I’m talking about a particular thing you said.”

“No, I am not a racist.”

And what started out as a “what you said” conversation turns into a “what you are conversation,” which is a dead end that produces nothing but mutual frustration and you never end up seeing eye to eye or finding any common ground…

“We tend to deal with this conversation about race in the all or nothing binary, either you are or you are not racist. … We’re striving to meet an impossible standard. If anything less than perfection means that you are a racist, that means any suggestion that you’ve made a mistake, any suggestion that you’ve been less than perfect is a suggestion that you are a bad person. And so we become averse to any suggestion that we should consider our thoughts and actions. And it makes it harder for us to work on our imperfections. When you believe that you must be perfect in order to be good, it makes you averse to recognizing you own inevitable imperfections and that lets them stagnate and grow. So, the belief that you must be perfect in order to be good is an obstacle to being as good as you can be… It would make us better at being good if we could recognize that we’re not perfect and embrace that…

Race is “a social construct that was not designed to make sense… it was designed to justify indefensible acts, so when we grapple with race issues, we’re grappling with something that was designed for centuries to make us circumvent our best instincts. It’s a dance partner that’s designed to trip us up! Based on that alone, you’ll never bat a thousand when it comes to race issues…

“As we are all imperfect humans… we all have unconscious thought processes and psychosocial mechanisms that pop up, there are many things in our day to day lives that lead to developing little pockets of prejudice or to be unkind to others without any conscious intention to do so…just like plaque develops up on our teeth… We need to move away from the tonsils paradigm of race discourse [we’ve had it removed once and for all] to the dental hygiene paradigm of race discourse.

“And in general, I think we need to move away from the premise that being a good person is a fix, immutable characteristic, and shift towards seeing being good as a practice. It is a practice that we carry out by engaging with our imperfections. We need to shift towards thinking of being a good person the way we think of being a clean person. Being a clean person is something you maintain and work on every day. We don’t assume that because I’m a clean person I don’t need to brush my teeth. And when someone suggests to us that we’ve got something stuck in my teeth we don’t say “What do you mean, ‘I’ve got something stuck I my teeth.’ I’m a clean person!…”

“Beyond the persistent conversational awkwardness of race, there are persistent systemic and institutional issues around race that are not caused by conversations and they can’t be entirely solved by conversation—you can’t talk them away—but we need people to work together and coordinate and communicate to find strategies to work on these systemic issues… there are so many disparities … that is worthwhile to iron out these conversational issues, if for nothing else so that we can get a little bit closer to working together on those issues…

“If I could have one wish, it would be that we would reconsider how we conceptualize being a good person. And, keep in mind that we are not good despite our imperfections. It is the connection we maintain with our imperfections that allows us to be good. Our connection with our personal and collective imperfections—being mindful of those personal and common imperfections—is what allows us to be good to each other and be good to ourselves.”

“This is no easy task and race may be the most difficult place to apply this … I’m hoping we can shift away from taking it as an indictment of our goodness, and move towards taking it as a gesture of respect and an act of kindness, when someone tells us we’ve got something racist stuck in our teeth!

“In any given situation, what you are determines what you see; what you see determines what you do.” Haddon Robinson

Given how much we are different, how much we see differently, and how that leads us to act differently, I am constantly amazed that humans get anything at all done together! This quick video about “colorblindness” reminds me of the connection between being, seeing and doing. I see and want to be seen as a black woman, not have my blackness or womanness overlooked as though overlooking them were somehow a virtue.

How does what/who you are inform what you see and what you do?

I’ve thought a lot about how either/or thinking reinforces hierarchies of oppression. As Tema Okun recounts in The Emperor Has no Clothes, “Inherent in western culture is the very act of defining ‘us’ in ways that claim superiority over an opposite and increasingly threatening ‘them.’”

Listening to a recent news story about the Penn State scandal, I was struck by how this same kind of thinking keeps sexual and human rights abuses under wraps. Townspeople were struggling to make sense of the alleged cover up or ignoring by Coach Paterno and President Graham Spanier of alleged crimes against children. Could these men – whom they thought to be good men – actually have looked the other way? And if so, could they be thought of as ever having been good men at all? People have rushed to redefine these former icons as “bad men,” and by implication, to continue to define themselves as “good people” who would certainly have behaved differently.

Sadly, history teaches us that “good people” do sometimes stand by and do nothing while others are abused or worse. Individuals and groups have great capacity for good, evil, indifference and more. Whether we’re confronting racism, abuse of children or other forms of oppression, we would do well to get beyond the binary that keeps us simply blaming and labeling individuals as good or bad. If we don’t examine and dismantle the systems and norms that enable these behaviors to persist, along with the ways that some folks benefit from leaving the status quo intact, we risk the lives of future generations and guarantee that we will simply repeat the exercise of “finding the bad guys” ad infinitum.

What are your ideas about how to get from here to there?

Ida B. Wells was an African American journalist, newspaper editor and, with her husband, newspaper owner Ferdinand L. Barnett, an early leader in the civil rights movement. She documented lynching in the United States, showing how it was often a way to control or punish blacks who competed with whites. She was active in the women’s rights and the women’s suffrage movement, establishing several notable women’s organizations. Wells was a skilled and persuasive rhetorician, and traveled internationally on lecture tours.

Last week, Tema Okun of the dismantling RacismWorks, spoke about her new book, The Emperor Has no Clothes-Teaching about Race and Racism to People who Don’t want to Know at an event hosted by Community Change (see their website for a video of the talk) in Boston.

She talked about her own journey to understand race and confront racism, beginning as a high school student in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Since then, she has worked to understand how race works in the U.S. and how racism confers advantages on her as a white woman. She has been working in multiracial settings and teaching others not to resist understanding racism and their role in it. What’s at the root of resistance to seeing white privilege?, She said “We’re afraid that we’re going to find out that we’re deeply bad, in a culture that doesn’t want privileged people to feel bad…”

How to get around this resistance? She offers a few fundamentals (more or less quotes from her talk):

1. Provide the larger context, a historical understanding of racism and the ways that every institution participated in constructing race, so that people see it’s not personal.
2. Build relationships; it’s about people working together to interrupt the dynamics of racism
3. Teach people to answer the question with “What are we going to do about it?” rather than “What am I going to do about it?”
4. Build a shared language (definition of racism) and shared analysis (understanding that racism is more than personal) so that people can collaboratively interrupt white supremacy when you see it happening.
5. Avoid demonizing others and us/them dynamics.
6. Offer positive alternatives. It’s not enough to tell people what to stop. We have to offer them what to do instead.

Have you tried these strategies in your work? What do they offer? What would you add?