Posted in Love

October 24, 2013

Net Work Does Not Justice Make

“Wealth and income distribution no longer resemble a familiar ‘bell curve’ in which the bulk of the wealth accrue to a large middle class. Instead, the networked economy seems to be producing a ‘power-curve’ distribution, sometimes known as a ‘winner-take-all’ economy.” 

 – David Bollier, from “The Power Curve Society”

As is no doubt evident from past posts on this blog, we at IISC are enthusiastic about networks and their potential to create more equitable, healthy, thriving and sustainable communities.  We do not, however, subscribe to the belief that network approaches in and of themselves guarantee the kinds of just and humanizing opportunities and outcomes we seek.  We do encounter people who hold up networks as a sort of panacea, hoping that in an age of more distributed technology and open source approaches to problems and solutions, we will achieve some kind of democratic ideal that has to this point eluded us.  That there is promise is evident in many stories that we have heard, witnessed, and shared on this site.  That there is reason to be vigilant is also illustrated in the many signs of an ever-growing and highly racialized gap between rich and poor in this country and a continued reluctance on the part of many to look at these glaring inequities or the systems that perpetuate them. Read More

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October 8, 2013

Love

“Love” is now a category on the IISC Blog.  How appropriate!  Love is one of the three lenses that give shape to our work.  And love is at the very heart of this project of social transformation.  Love is path and goal.  Love is how we get there and it is where we want to go.

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October 4, 2013

Hospitality as Facilitation

The origins of hospitality as a sacred and esteemed practice are rooted in providing shelter and safety to the stranger.  It is the ancient art and practice of offering your very best to another, with no expectation of reward. Whether you learned this practice in your grandmother’s parlor or at an Art of Hosting workshop, you know that hospitality is the essence of facilitative leadership.

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July 22, 2013

#WhatBlackMenDo

A world that loves, honors and respects young black men must first SEE them.  This seeing is a political act.

I am consciously seeing black men more clearly since my friend Victor Lewis hashtagged the Charles Ramsey story #WhatBlackMenDo.  Ramsey, who acknowledges that he battered his former partner, stepped up without hesitation to rescue the women held prisoner for a decade in a basement in Cleveland, OH. He assumed that he was witnessing a domestic violence situation and intervened because this is #WhatBlackMenDo.

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December 7, 2012

Searching for Decolonial Love

What is decolonial love, why must we cultivate it, and how can we practice it? These are a few of the questions that have been turning over and over in my mind since I heard Junot Díaz speak so brilliantly at ARC’s Facing Race conference in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago – decolonial love is a term I had not heard before Díaz used it and now I will surely be bringing it up a lot. Building on Cynthia Silva Parker’s previous post about the conference, I want to share a bit of what Díaz had to say and ask YOU, what would look like if we really really good at practicing decolonial love? I think the implications are profound and exciting!

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July 9, 2012

Love: Simple and Practical

We spend a lot of time at IISC thinking about how to talk about and practice love as a force for social change. Mike Edwards claimed in 2003 that “that the future of our world depends on how successful we are in developing and applying a new social science of love… applied in and through the systems that are essential to the functioning of all successful societies…[This kind of love is best illuminated by Rev. Dr.] Martin Luther King’s philosophy of the “love that does justice”, signifying the deliberate cultivation of mutually-reinforcing cycles of personal and systemic change…

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October 17, 2011

Love

An emergent collaborative spoken word poem by IISC staff.

You find yourself walking

there’s focus and intention

in appreciation of each soul’s journey

an openness to what we don’t know

and ever surrendering to the confusion of conviction

unfolding, becoming, self-giving

you notice the beauty of all that’s connected

and then you think about love

it flows forth and around

and through play

you can hear it, you can see it

supports justice whether its for you or against you

binding us and guiding us

and suddenly your heart opens wide

so that you can listen fully, be present fully- right where you are

so that what is unimaginable is possible.

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January 13, 2011

What Love Looks Like in Action

power-love-justice

Picking up from my post the other day (“Pauses for the Cause”) about the process learnings of our recent IISC retreat, I wanted to focus a bit on the content take-aways.  As I previously mentioned, the reason for our coming together as a staff was to revisit and dive into the roots of our collaborative practice: networks, equity/power/inclusion, and “the love that does justice.” It wasn’t long before we were wondering whether these are not more appropriately called the lenses through which we look as we go about our collaborative capacity building and change work.  And it did not take long after that for us to question whether the labels we have selected for these lenses are the appropriate ones.  I want to spend the rest of this post looking at where our conversation took us with respect to love, in particular.

What’s love got to do with it?  That was not exactly our guiding question, but we got there eventually through some of our struggles to reach shared understanding and agreement about what we mean when we say “the love that does justice.”  Our facilitator engaged us in writing on stickies short phrases and sentences that explained what it means to integrate this into our practice.  The activity yielded a plethora of multi-colored squares that we then organized into themes.  Here is what emerged, categorically speaking: Read More

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August 4, 2010

Are You Being Lazy Enough?

IronRodArt

|Photo by IronRodArt|http://www.flickr.com/photos/ironrodart/4290027967/sizes/o/|

This is a re-post of a post from last summer, just as I returned from a sabbatical – seemed appropriate in the beginning of the lazy days of August… in hopes that we will all have some Lazy Days …

About ten years ago, I spent three weeks at Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery in Southern France. The time there was primarily spent in silence – with long periods of sitting meditation, walking meditation, and even working meditation. (No surprise, I struggled with over-working during working meditation!)  One of the practices at Plum Village is that each week, everyone takes a “Lazy Day”.

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April 14, 2010

Overworking

Over the years, those of us at IISC have had great conversations about busyness – the ways in which we, as social change activists, process designers and facilitators, find ourselves sometimes being overly busy, taking on too many responsibilities and running from one thing to the next. Some of us mentioned noticing that our ability to do things well sometimes seems impaired by this overly busy approach. (I would add that this is not something confined to those of us working for social justice and social change – but has a special twist when it’s combined with this work, which so requires us to bring forth our best selves.)

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November 25, 2009

Stay! Stay! Stay!

I’ve recently been reading Bernie Mayer‘s new and game-changing book, Staying With Conflict.? A frequent leader in the world of conflict engagement, Bernie Mayer has spent many years working on large scale collaborative change and conflict processes, many of them in the environmental field.  He is also a strong proponent of the need to be clear and transparent about the assumptions behind practice.  With John Paul Lederach and Leah Wing, Bernie Mayer is one of my favorite practitioners and thought leaders in the “conflict resolution” world.? A couple of years ago, Bernie came out with a book called Beyond Neutrality that loudly and strongly asked for those in the conflict engagement field and those facilitating collaborative processes to cease and desist with the concept that we practice as “third party neutrals.”? In this new book, Bernie is pushing forward, changing the basic understanding of “conflict resolution.” He calls us to understand that, in fact, much of what is needed is not resolution, is not decision-making, agreement-building to overcome deep seated conflicts, but rather approaches that help people build the adaptive capacity and platforms from which to act – to stay with the tensions and conflicts that are an essential part of the human experience, to engage in a way that brings human dignity and that allows us to really stay in the difference. Read More

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