photo by partie traumatic

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.  Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This often quoted comment by Dr. King forms the foundation of Adam Kahane’s new book,  Love and Power: A theory and practice of social change. Melinda Weekes and I attended a recent book talk by Adam, attracted to the topic because, at IISC we’ve been thinking through and practicing the connections among power, love, networks and collaboration for years now.  Much of what Adam shared resonates with our thinking. The book builds on the thinking of theologian Paul Tillich.   His definitions are worth taking a closer look:

• “Power: the drive of everything living to realize itself with increasing intensity and extensity.”  The focus is on development, growth, and self-determination.

• “Love: the drive towards the unity of the separated.” The focus here implies an underlying unity that has been lost or broken.

Adam argues, and we agree, that joining love and power holds a key to powerful social transformation.  And, he reminds us, as Dr. King did, of that both love and power have positive/generative dimensions, and negative/degenerative dimensions.

Where have you seen loveless exercises of power at in social change work?  Where have you seen powerless expressions of love?  And, most intriguingly, where have you see a powerful combination of power and love in their most positive, generative manifestations, help to change the world?

Photo by eqqman

Based on the recent conversation we’ve been having here, I thought I’d re-post from last April.

For a while, I’ve been fairly unsuccessfully trying to create a space in my apartment that works both for my heart and for my head. My meditation cushion is there as well as my altar and poetry and spiritual books. It also has my desk, computer and bookshelves overstuffed with books and journals about power, white privilege, race, class, genocide, conflict and social issues. If I’m honest, it’s the most chaotic room in my apartment.

My recent post on the limits of policy elicited a very good conversation.  One of the things that became evident is that in some settings people are so focused on their personal development and their community life that they pay little attention to the issues of the day.  In other settings people are so focused on the fight for justice through policy change that they pay little attention to their own well being or to the hard work of building community.

While I have no data at my fingertips, I would venture to hypothesize that many of the people that are focused on structural change share an analysis that pays lots of attention to issues of equity, power and inclusion.  I also suspect that many of the people focused on personal development and community life come into their focus from a well meaning but privileged perspective.

The answer seems easy on the surface – we need to focus on both – and it’s absolutely true.  But it is so much easier said than done!  One side might be so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problems our society faces and so stumped by the intractability of our political system that an inward and small scale focus might seem like the only possibility.  The structural side might have little patience for it might label as indulgent, it might prefer the measurability of a policy victory and it might keep a historical lens that upholds the forward motion of progressive public policy in our context.

Personally, I have little faith in the capacity of the state to make real change happen – even if it has made significant change possible during some of the most important moments in our history.  However, I do believe we have to pay attention to policy.  I don’t think self-development and a focus on community in the Northeast will do much to affect the policy of apartheid that has been put forward in Arizona.  But I still think the state follows, I think it is most important to actually change the hearts and minds of people in such a way that popular sentiment actually shifts and that it shifts in such a way that the state will not dare to ignore it.

This type of transformation, the social transformation that makes good policy possible and bad policy impossible, is itself rooted in a transformative (as opposed to self-indulgent) experience of community.  Solid human connections among people who dare to have the difficult conversations – the conversations that change us – are at the root of the sort of change that does not ignore the state, but wields it.

One of the blessings I’ve experienced in our social change work as process experts and professional facilitators is the exposure we get to have to various fields of social change work. Since last October, my colleague Andrea and I have had the pleasure of consulting with an amazing collaborative of stakeholders, the Springfield Health Equity Initiative, who have determined to build a plan to reduce the incidence of diabetes in the black and brown neighborhoods in the city of Springfield, MA. Even more boldly, these dedicated and thoughtful leaders have also chosen to take up an analysis for their work that incorporates how systemic, government sanctioned, racial discrimination has  played a direct role in creating the egregious disparities in health outcomes we see today among black and brown folk in the U.S., and regardless of class.

I have learned so much. About diabetes. About social determinants of health. About the inextricable link between personal wealth and personal health.  Its made me, personally, look with more intentionality to my own family history,  health maintenance, and sadly, about how it is that  I too carry in my own mind, body and spirit the affects of stress, strain, pain and struggle that is due to reacting to and surviving though racism, racist practices and its ugly remnants. Whats bad is that I don’t know what its like to not live in this reality. What’s worse is that while I am conscious of occasions and scenarios that make for my racism-stress, there is that which does not even register with my head or heart, yet still takes up residence in my body in some way, shape or form.  Such reflection has made for a poignant and sobering personal subtext to the inspiring and pioneering work of the fine and committed souls we’ve met who refuse to relent to daunting statistics and blatant injustices that plague their — our — families, neighbors, children, and communities. And, of course, there is also the context of the national political conversation around finally get universal health care, and the recent activity in our own state that jeopardizes healthcare coverage for low-income legal immigrants.

In graduate school, I took a class, Vocal Performance for the Stage, with a dynamo of an instructor, who also taught us that our bodies really do store every single emotion and psychological bruise of our past. I recalled how amazed I was at that idea when I heard the similar statement made by one of the expert in this video: “Our bodies carry our history with us”.  She was making the same point my instructor was making in voice class, but  emphasizing the social-histories we also carry within us.

So, I ask, in the context of considering processes for social transformation, while we often engage in processes to re-imagine and re-vision the future, what might be the healing, revolutionary, psycho-social justice work of re-membering our bodies? Of  deconstructing or defeating past hurts, injustices, infractions…if that is even possible?

What do you think? How best do you perform your body work?  Your body work related to social justice? Your body work related to undoing racism? What does/might it entail?  How do you assess what parts need tending? What is the mind-body-spirit connection strategy that is directly target to combat injustice? Is this work for all, or work for some?

DISCLAIMER:  Dear Progressive friends, I have not sold out!  I still believe in economic justice and I remain painfully aware of the racialized outcomes of poverty.

I feel like part of my mission in life is to expand the lens with which we look at our quest for social transformation.  One of the points I keep harping on is the point that happiness matters.  And this is why a recent David Brooks column caught my attention.

In “The Sandra Bullock Trade,” Brooks refers to recent research on happiness to remind us that “the relationship between happiness and income is complicated, and after a point, tenuous.”  Most of us probably understand this at some guttural level, deep in a place we often forget.  But what I found powerfully affirming was the list of activities that do produce happiness:

• Sex
• Socializing after work, and
• Having dinner with others

Most interesting of all, for those of us who believe in the power of community, is that:

If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors. Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).

When I say let’s expand our lens, I’m not suggesting that we forget about struggle and a real fight for economic justice, but I do mean “to expand,” to do what we do and enlarge our focus.  Couldn’t we bring relationship support groups to our communities?  Research shows that “being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year,” and this would help with the “sex” objective wouldn’t it?

What if we created spaces, projects and organizations that made it significantly easier for the people that we serve to “socialize after work?”  What if we stopped working long enough to do some of that ourselves?  And what if our organizing projects always included our authentically “having dinner with others?”  (Here I’m not talking about eating cold pizza in a stuffy meeting room!)  How do we concern ourselves with the acts that build community?  How do we begin to understand that a movement concerned with economic justice must also concern itself with bringing people together in ways that truly matter?  How do we create, nurture and hold the spaces where we can truly come together?

Public Domain

Haiti. I’m sure I’m not the only one who watches with profound sadness at the loss of life and devastation by way of natural disaster and makes direct comparisons to the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and its blow to the precious people of New Orleans.

Its the haunting similarities of the man-made and disastrous pre-existing conditions of extreme poverty and lack of infrastructure that vex and perplex me the most.  In a few days, those of us who consider ourselves  spiritual and vocational heirs of  Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. will focus our attentions on considering his life and legacy.  In all honesty, I’m feeling guilt:  How in the world is it that we (the international community, the U.S., black folk, Haitian governments over time, fill in the blank…) tolerate the abject poverty of peoples and nations right beside us, while so many (or is it “so little”?) of us have (much too) much (money, education, privilege, information, doggone stuff, etc.)?

I declare: something’s wrong with us — and its at the level of our values. On a very fundamental level, friends, we got issues.

In twitter parlance: #ValuesFail.

Yesterday, Curtis and I facilitated a  meeting of community leaders, activists and funders in CT who are contemplating no less than a total re-vamp of all systems and structures that comprise early childhood education and care in that state.  In assessing the status quo, they confessed: “We need a values shift.”   In searing self-critique, they admitted that when it comes to how we treat children, our actual policies speak louder than our words, and woefully contradict.

Speaking to another time and context, Dr. King spoke to a need for a values shift:

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.  On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”

So, then,  on the eve of King Day and in the wake of this tragedy in Haiti,  I ask:  What will it take for a values revolution of any sort? Where are opportunities to turn tides and sustain change? Is crisis such an opportunity?

L’s dad was a shoe salesman during The Great Depression. Things were so bad that the store owner decided to have a Going Out of Business Sale. To help with the burst in customer load, L’s dad asked L, a youngster, to assist at the store.  Excited by the bustle of heavy customer traffic, L’s dad was quick to dampen the mood by pointing out: “If these people had just come beforehand, the store would not be going out of business.”

Soon thereafter, Dad lost his job, and was unable to get work for some time. He “turned in on himself”, becoming bitter and abusive, even blaming L’s mom for things that were not her fault. Their household, and L’s childhood, was never the same.

What Dad was unaware of, however, was a prior decision of the “City Fathers”, as L referred to them, to build a wall around the perimeter of the city to pave the way for national franchises. L’s dad’s lack of awareness and understanding of the broader context for the shoe store closing perhaps fueled his focus of frustration and anger  inward, and upon his loved ones.  L believes that if their dad had an appreciation of the external, systemic conditions that played a part in their family’s personal calamity, things might have been very different.

L shared that it is for this reason that L spends their own life working towards structural change and alongside workers,  like his dad, to help them fight social injustice in constructive, systemic ways.

Imagine how life might be different if the story Dad told himself were another one. Imagine if Dad had encountered storytellers who put a different spin on The Story of the Shoe Store Pink Slip. Imagine how L’s life today might be different if the narrative  lived out before L’s young eyes were of a different content and scope?

Can you attest to the power of story in your own life? How can stories serve purpose as agents of change? How might we wield stories with wisdom?

This proposition appeals to my own commitment to the evolutionary paradigm, and to an idea of social movement that demands our conscious engagement with our own evolution.  Angel’s in an excellent articulation, and so I would rather you give your time to reading her piece than to anything else I could say about it.

However, while we are on the topic of transformation and evolution, I will once again invite us to consider the distinction between adaptive change and technical change.  Ron Heifetz tells us that while technical problems can be solved by an authority or expert because they have a known solution, adaptive problems demand a shift at the level of values, beliefs and assumptions – they demand our transformation.

As I’ve often implied in this space, the social sector is still caught trying to make technical change, the world of social change is still full of experts.  But our historical moment is demanding adaptive change, we are being called to transform, not just change – to define new ways of being and being-with.  This poses a direct challenge to our daily practices and habitual patterns, to the ways structure our work, our organizations and collaborations – this affects how we think of time and how we design our shared spaces.  We can no longer afford to tinker around the edges.

Like Angel says:  “Right now, we must actively, generatively, take rigorous, intentional action towards wholly being that which we envision, and surrender to what we cannot. We must be so that we can become… Let’s do the darkness so that we can all fly together.” I accept her challenge, do you?

Part of the problem with the normalization of this often subtle dishonesty is that it actually keeps organizations from staring their own reality in the face.  As a consultant to all kinds of organizations, from foundations to the grassroots, I experience this insidious state of non-truth as a serious obstacle to my own work.  We can’t help an organization move if the organization can not be honest about where it is.  The situation forces us to spend a lot energy surfacing the truth, but if we were starting from truth then we would be able to use that energy to hit the ground running.

There are many systemic reasons for this problem, and one of them is our habit of seeing failure as failure rather than seeing failure as learning.  When I think about my own life, I look back at the most important and transformative lessons I have learned and I realize I learned them through the painful process of failing.  And I mean real failing, not just coming up short on a project, but coming up short as a human being.  As I ponder what it would take to bring back honesty, I think that it would mean increasing our capacity to see failure as learning, and to do so as both foundations and funded organizations.

There certainly is more here, and as is often the case, there is a lot more than could be covered in a single blog post.  But if I had to offer a teaser for yet another way to bring honesty back, I think it would imply taking a harder look at what is measurable and what isn’t measurable and to find a way to come to terms with the fact that a lot of the highest leverage acts of transformation are not easily measurable with our current tools.  We need to measure.  Let us get our heads together in order to find the measuring tools that would bring honesty back.

• 8:46 am – AA Flight 11 hits the North Tower of the WTC 
• 9:03 am – UA Flight 175 hits the South Tower
• 9:37 am – AA Flight 77 hits the Pentagon
• 9:59 am – South Tower falls
• 10:03 am – UA Flight 93 crashes in Shanksville, PA  
• 10:28 am – North Tower falls

As a nation of families, neighborhoods, communities and citizens, let’s pause to remember the lives and courage of the nearly 3,000 who lost their lives 8 years ago today, on September 11, 2001.

To remember and reflect,  what follows are the words of  President Obama, who this year declared September 11th for the first time as a federally recognized National Day of Service and Remembrance.

They were daughters and sons, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, spouses and partners, family and friends, colleagues and strangers. They hailed from cities and towns across our Nation and world. On September 11, 2001, thousands of innocent women and men were taken from us, and their loss leaves an emptiness in our hearts.

Hundreds perished as planes struck the skyline of New York City, the structure of the Pentagon, and the grass of Pennsylvania. In the immediate aftermath of these tragedies, many victims died as they sought safety. Selflessly placing themselves in danger, first responders, members of the Armed Forces, and private citizens made the ultimate sacrifice working to assist others. During the National Days of Prayer, Service and Remembrance, Americans across the country cherish the memory of all those who passed and honor and pray for their families and friends.

We also remember and pray for the safety and success of the members of the United States Armed Forces, who work every day to keep our Nation safe from terrorism and other threats to our security. Military members assisted those in need on September 11, 2001, and serve now in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world. They have left the safety of home so that our Nation might be more secure. They have endured great sacrifice so that we might enjoy the blessings of liberty. Our service members represent the best of America, and they deserve our deepest respect and gratitude.

…As we work to build a more hopeful future for our children and young people across the world, we seek humility and strength. We reflect upon the lessons drawn from our national tragedy, seek God’s guidance and wisdom, and, never forgetting the lost, commit to working in common cause with our friends and allies to create a safer and brighter world for current and future generations.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim Friday, September 4, through Sunday, September 6, as National Days of Prayer and Remembrance. I ask that the people of the United States, each in their own way, honor the victims of September 11, 2001, and their families through prayer, memorial services, the ringing of bells, and evening candlelight remembrance vigils.

Friends, I ask: what are your reflections on this Day, and its significance, eight years later?

Also,  its become a rite of passage question I tend to ask someone I am deeply interested in building a relationship with: What is your 911 story? Where were you on the Day and time the Towers were hit? How did the Day unfold from where you were?

With open heart and ears, I listen for your words.