It’s the days after the November 3rd presidential election in the United States. What’s a leader to do in this post-election moment? We believe the most fundamental principle that grounds Facilitative Leadership for Social Change, a transformative learning experience we teach and share with social and racial justice leaders, may shed some light.
The fundamental principle of Facilitative Leadership for Social Change, IISC’s flagship workshop, is that decisions are best made when we tap into the power of participation by involving every person who is a stakeholder in the decisions that impact their lives. Facilitative leaders create a safe environment for participation and collaboration. Those who are still counting ballots – and may soon be recounting ballots – will serve us best by being mindful of this and ensuring that every single vote is counted, as objectively as is humanly possible, and with an eye toward complete transparency. The integrity of the next steps of the election process and the outcome of any legal challenges depend on this.
In our organizations and communities, Facilitative Leadership invites us – now more than ever – to be collaborative, strategic, receptive, and adaptable. In this moment, linking arms with others safely in the streets or metaphorically in Zoom rooms, to connect deeply to strategize and engage in the work of racial and social justice with everyone at the table, truly matters. Generating and facilitating authentic conversations that help us to better understand ourselves and our country, and to adapt in peaceful and nonviolent ways to what’s happening now, is deeply needed. Greeting each decision with openness to the ideas and challenges of others without defense and ego can set our communities and leadership on the path to deep transformation.
We can tap the power of participation by applying the seven practices of Facilitative Leadership:
As we make decisions in the coming hours, days, and weeks about the shape of our country or the work in our offices, seek maximum appropriate involvement. This doesn’t mean that every person must be involved every time you have a decision to make, but it does mean considering who will be impacted by that decision and how best to ensure their voices influence the outcomes of the decision, including making them more equitable.
Discover Shared Meaning
Now is an especially important time for people to engage in conversations, transformative listening, and deep thinking about what is holding us together and what is separating us. What can we learn from this election and the values, behaviors, and interactions that came from it? What assumptions and conclusions have we been making? What new insights do we have about our future?
See Systems
How can we help others understand the ways in which systemic injustice and racism are playing out in our political process, in our work, and in our communities? How can we make more visible the different parts of our system – whether it is institutions like government, education, or health care – so that we can organize for change?
Inspire a Shared Vision
Even if you’re uncertain about the future, what do you understand about humankind and those you work with? What are the possibilities? How can we create and live into more equitable and resilient futures?
Focus on Results, Process, & Relationship
Whether we are with our families watching the election process and legal battles unfold or bringing together managers in our organizations, focus first on how people are doing and the strength of their relationships. And then go about things in a way that honors their human fragility while pointing them towards the results we are working to achieve.
Design Pathways to Action
Now is the time for us to start thinking about how we can design a pathway for getting what we need and want. The election has revealed once again the depth and level of racism in our cities, towns, and communities. What can we uniquely design to root out racism in ways that will bring along even those we think are not with us?
Facilitate Agreement
How can we work with others and with our government officials to facilitate a peaceful transition and build agreements that allow our nation to heal through the reckonings of COVID, racial violence, and election divisions? The wounds are deep and require challenging conversations that can be harnessed into agreements, concrete actions, and more repaired relationships.
Let’s be our most facilitative selves in this critical moment.
In these unsettled and challenging times, many of us at IISC are finding ourselves inspired to actively share our reflections. We welcome your comments and reactions. And we wish you all so much love and good health. Together, we will make it through to the other side.
What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath— the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Center down.
And when your body has become still, reach out with your heart. Know that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. (You could hardly deny it now.) Know that our lives are in one another’s hands. (Surely, that has come clear.) Do not reach out your hands. Reach out your heart. Reach out your words. Reach out all the tendrils of compassion that move, invisibly, where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love– for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, so long as we all shall live.
Lynn Ungar is a minister for the Church of the Larger Fellowship, an online congregation for Unitarian Universalists and other religious liberals.
As IISC Senior Associate Curtis Ogden was scrolling through Twitter, he came across a post from Adam Kahane of Reos Partners who shared five practices for breakthrough facilitation. IISC enjoys teaching the tools of facilitation through our signature workshops. We offered additional ideas using our lens of equity to build on his ideas.
See
how our team responded:
@adamkahane tweeted on Jan 7, 2020
Five simple (but not easy) practices for Breakthrough Facilitation from Adam Kahane
Unmasking – shining a light on
power, inequity, and dynamics in the room
Reframing – challenging
unnamed assumptions, insisting on a systems analysis of the issues being
discussed rather than blaming individuals
Centering – putting the
experiences, wisdom, needs, and aspirations of people suffering the effects of
racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression first
This is a repost of a third in a series of posts on power, facilitation and collaborative process that former IISC Senior Associate Linda Guinee wrote back in 2010. Last week we reposted Linda’s piece “What is Power Anyway?,” which followed a new post by a few of us on power and meetings. Enjoy!
More about power and group processes. There have been a mountain of books written about the “bases of power” and the “types of power”. I’ve done some work to try to boil it down – and find thinking about this very useful in moving forward the conversation about how to address power issues in group processes.
In the 1950s, French and Raven put out a proposal about five “bases” of power, which others added to. Bases of power are what gives a person or group power. French and Raven came up with these five:
Reward Power – power that comes from the ability to reward the other party for complying
Coercive Power – power that comes from the ability to punish the other party if they do not comply
Legitimate or Normative Power – power that comes from accepted group, community or societal norms or values which are generally viewed as “legitimate”
Referent Power – power that comes from being identified with a person or group (for example, so and so gains power by being friends with X or being a member of Y group)
Expert Power – power that comes from the perception that the person or group has knowledge
Ecological Power – power that comes from being able to control one’s social or physical environmental in such a way that the modified environment induces a desired behavior or prevents an undesired behavior.
IISC is pleased to offer the following three opportunities.
Senior Associate
People Operations Coordinator
Training Coordinator
This search is being led by Imagine Consulting, a talent and recruitment firm specializing in supporting nonprofit organizations in securing an equitable and antiracist future for our world. Interested candidates should click here to apply. If you have questions or need support completing the application, please reach out to our team at careers@imagineimpactllc.com.
IISC’s Values
Our values are as important as the skills you will provide to our organization. These values guide IISC in our work internally and externally:
We believe that social change is possible when three key elements are attended to: shared power and equity, network building, and love as a force for social change
We believe that transformative leadership is the kind of leadership we need in the 21st century
We believe in people’s right to be involved in the decisions that affect them so that they have influence over the quality of their lives
We believe in the dignity of all human beings and in taking care of our planet so that we can all live healthy lives and our communities can thrive
Senior Associate
The Senior Associate works with organizations, networks, government agencies and communities to produce and deliver services that are committed to transformational, long-term change for racial equity. The Senior Associate also contributes to our evolving methodology and strategy, committed to peer learning, and contributes to IISC’s staff goals as we strengthen our equitable workplace. We currently have two openings for this role, with one of the positions will be focused on training and developing new curriculum and innovations.
The People Operations Coordinator is responsible for overseeing the administrative tasks related to the HR, benefits, and operations functions of an organization. The position serves as a project manager for hiring coordination and preparation, manages the onboarding and offboarding processes, maintains employee records, tracks employee training, and ensures compliance with legal and regulatory agencies. The ideal candidate will be motivated by supporting staff of a mission-driven organization in advancing racial equity and social justice, while maintaining internal processes that align with the organization’s values and culture.
The Training Coordinator is responsible for providing logistical support for public offerings and training sessions, ensuring successful, high-quality experiences for clients, staff, and participants. Their duties include assisting before and during sessions, answering questions, managing registration through an event ticketing system, and organizing data for reporting. They should be confident in providing support for both online training sessions using Zoom features as well as in-person public workshops. The ideal candidate is a well-rounded individual who can coordinate with all stakeholders to handle the finer details of training experiences, ensuring the successful completion of workshops for all involved.
Increasingly, social sector organizations are applying collaborative change frameworks and tools to engage in racial equity transformation. In a pattern reflective of the broader movement for racial justice, employees, often women of color in particular, are challenging organizational commitment to racial equity internally and programmatically. Often people who are ready to take action want to know what they can do to create space for the conversations needed to catalyze racial equity transformation.
The list of strategies below was generated by Marlon Williams, Ratna Gill, Madeline Burke and Kimberly Dumont, during our Fundamentals of Facilitation for Racial Justice Work workshop held in NYC earlier this month.
Data: Use data to identify and initiate a conversation about inequities
Training: Invest resources in training to staff to learn about racial equity and create the space for them to bring insights back to the organization
Elevate Voices: Look for expertise throughout the organization’s hierarchy and give power to those with the capacity to lead, regardless of position.
Personal Capital: Leadership and those with significant person capital can use if in service of prioritizing conversations about equity.
Crisis: Incidents in the news that highlight the impact of our racial disparities can serve as a call to action.
Personal Ownership: A commitment to racial equity should be owned by specific individuals throughout the organization’s structure.
Outside Voices: Bring in outside voices to validate the need and urgency for having a focus on racial equity.
Highlight the Loss: Identify the the risks or potential loss of not having a focus on racial equity.
Have you tried any of these strategies? Is your organization embarking on a journey of racial equity transformation? We can help.
Vice President, Community Relations & Public Health, Baystate Health
On behalf of the Board of Directors of IISC, I am delighted to announce that Kelly Frances Bates has been appointed president of the Interaction Institute for Social Change effective June 15, 2017.
Since assuming the role of interim president in October 2016, Kelly has successfully led IISC with a sure hand through a time of significant organizational change, working effectively with the Board and staff to strengthen our organization. More recently, Kelly has pivoted to addressing IISC’s future direction and vision, launching and leading a joint Board-Staff strategy team and coordinating this with a comprehensive re-examination of IISC’s business model.
For those of you who do not yet know Kelly well, her appointment as our permanent president will draw on her 20+ years leading advocacy, racial justice, and women’s organizations. Prior to IISC, Kelly was the founding executive director of the Elma Lewis Center for Civic Engagement, Learning, and Research at Emerson College. She also served as the executive director of Access Strategies Fund, a social justice foundation funding organizations to expand democracy in communities of color and low-income communities. For ten years, Kelly led a consulting and training practice specializing in working with social change organizations and other institutions in the United States around issues of power, diversity, and organizational development. Read Kelly’s full bio here.
As we approach our twenty-fifth anniversary under Kelly’s leadership, the Board looks forward with great excitement to further strengthening IISC and – along with IISC’s talented and committed staff and our valued partners and affiliates – to shaping the next chapter in IISC’s future. Please visit our website to learn about our current work and services. And stay tuned as we roll out our new racial justice organizational training and announce plans for the celebration of our 25th anniversary!
We were heartened to see and hear the many conversations about racial equity during the main conference proceedings, and noted good and challenging questions and exploration about the fit between the Collective Impact model, such as it has been formally presented and understood, and community organizing and power building work. These conversations continued in some form or fashion during our session. Read More
In this final segment of our three part interview, Dr. Ceasar McDowell introduces some early experiences that have inspired his work in community development. He also discusses the evolution of how we organize ourselves as human beings in community. He comments that while in the past we were born into specific communities or chose communities that were local and familiar, now “all of that has changed.” He adds that “we often find ourselves in places where we can’t then build an integrated community, so we look at how do we then take care of that other part of ourselves, which we can say is spiritual, relational, whatever it may be…For some people, they start to do it around work, or they do it around their habits, or they do it around church…All of that still keeps us separate, because now you’re holding this multiplicity of the places where you’re finding your identity and yourself and your connection, and it ends up being fragmented in some ways.” Dr. McDowell continues by exploring this new space that we find ourselves in, one of transition and change.
In the second of this three part interview, Dr. Ceasar McDowell details his vision for democracy as an ongoing process of interaction and engagement. He shares that the work of democracy is “how people come to know and understand both each other, the issues that are important to them, and how they want to make meaning together.” He adds that his current work is focused on the idea of Big democracy which he describes as, “an aspiration. And at the core of this aspiration is the belief that the public is fully capable of working together to create sustainable, just, and equitable communities. But to do so the public must have ongoing, peaceful ways to interact around traditions that bind them, and interests that separate them, so they can realize a future that is an equitable improvement on the past.”
Since the origins of this country we have been embedded in a belief about the hierarchy of human value, a belief that some lives are more important than others. Two examples of this clearly expressed are racism and sexism. As long as this belief system persists, it will undermine democracy. One way it shows up is as microaggressions, those little bitty acts that say to someone, “you don’t belong, you can’t be trusted, you’re less-than”. It’s a message a black man gets crossing the street in front of a car when people lock their doors. Or the catcalls a woman gets walking down the street. Brain scientists are teaching us that these types of aggressions are deeply wired in our brain and to change them we actually have to change the experiences that people have.
An antidote to microaggressions are micro-inclusions. These are little symbolic actions that force us to recall our humanity. They’re acts of humanity that signal to those at the margins they are included.
