Note to readers: This blog is based on IISC’s internal exploration of shared leadership in our organization, our work with clients, and conversations with leadership practitioners in the Knowledge Share Group, a partnership of capacity and infrastructure building organizations around the country. I particularly want to thank Cynthia Silva Parker and Miriam Messinger of IISC and Shannon Ellis of CompassPoint for their ideas which sharpened this blog.
What is shared leadership in nonprofits and philanthropy? And why are some organizations turning to different leadership models to sustain their organization’s work, forge transformative collaboration, and generate powerful intergenerational models of running organizations? IISC and many of our peers in the Knowledge Share Group (1) believe that shared leadership is a better model for the future of the nonprofit sector.
Why Shared Leadership?
Leadership and organizational models that rely on the one executive leader or the senior leadership team for success are not serving our organizations and communities. Leadership concentrated in the hands of a few leaves an organization vulnerable to a number of pitfalls: uninformed decision-making, deep inequities, limited perspectives in strategic direction setting, underutilized and disempowered staff, disruptive executive transitions, and exhaustion for leaders who hold too much responsibility.
We believe executive directors and other senior staff have a choice. They can continue to hold concentrated power and make decisions independently, or they can embrace shared leadership for collective action and responsibility. It is the latter that enables us to most fully live our missions and expand democracy. We must do everything we can to support leadership in all the places it exists in our organizations.
What is Shared Leadership?
Shared leadership is an evolving concept and practice. It’s one of the most compelling options social justice communities are experimenting with to heal our relationships with traditional manifestations of power, authority, and dominance. Based on IISC’s experience and learnings from the Knowledge Share Group, I define shared leadership as the ethos, structures, processes, practices, and behaviors that promote the equitable distribution and decentralization of information, roles, authority, decision-making, and labor.
What are the Key Features of Shared Leadership?
Nonprofits are essentially a network of people, programs, and ideas working together for transformative social outcomes. Shared leadership fuels that network, with more people generating and carrying out ideas for greater impact, and doing so in more equitable ways.
There are are five key features of shared leadership:
All people in the organization are viewed and operate as leaders, mutually accountable to a set of values and practices that are in service of collective goals. They make major decisions together and trust others for the rest.
They are mindful of and attend to the needs of the whole organization and how their work impacts the whole. And they take note of critical organizational gaps and see to it that they are filled. They build redundancies in roles and create back-up plans in the event someone is unavailable to work.
Shared leadership moves away from the notion that the solo leader or executive team has carte blanche to develop and implement solutions to problems in an organization. And instead moves toward a model that centers decentralization and multiracial and multigenerational leadership, with decision-making and problem-solving shared across the organization. It fosters what we teach at IISC –Facilitative Leadership, which is an intentional practice of creating the conditions for transformational collaboration in which people do their best work together to achieve optimal results.
Shared leadership assumes that power (2) is not finite and can be meaningfully shared. It requires a shift in heartset and mindset from “it’s about me” to “it’s about us,” and from “power over” to “power with.” It dismantles concentrations of power and dominance, and prevents extraction, while creating environments where trust-building, transparency, and creative autonomy are cultivated and can flourish.
Shared leadership doesn’t necessarily mean an end to executive roles or hierarchy or even the creation of a completely flat organizational structure. Organizations can implement the values and practices of shared leadership within a myriad of different organizational models and structures. The key is that senior leaders and managers are not in a dominant position where they control the fate of the organization or its employees. They are instead part of the ecosystem with information and decision-making flowing across the organization.
What is IISC’s Evolving Shared Leadership Model?
At IISC, we are about to implement a network-based team model, and we are experimenting along the way, building off of our longstanding commitment and internal practices of collaboration and distributed leadership. We believe it will enable us to harness the leadership, creativity, and ideas of all of us who work for IISC.
In our model, we are experimenting with what we call shared and equitable leadership. We will have a single president and multiple teams convened by hosts and supported by facilitators that will make decisions for their areas, while other teams will provide cross-functional input and expertise to ensure the teams are connected around strategy. Ad hoc teams – each with a unique and time-bound task – are also part of this model.
A center-holding group with membership from the various teams will weave the domains of activity and ensure people have what they need and are empowered to make change in their domains. This group will also have a host and facilitator and will include the president of IISC, and it will shift in membership as the organization’s needs change and members rotate. The group will include people with different roles and tenures in the organization, not based on their seniority or executive functions.
BIPOC and next generation leaders will be prioritized to ensure that we don’t replicate the negative attributes of white dominant culture or rely on time in the organization as a proxy for knowledge and influence. The model assumes healthy redundancies so if people shift in and out of the organization, take on different roles, or attend to health or personal crises, we will be resilient and not fall off course from our goals. The distinction between part-time and full-time staff will only be the hours they work, not how much influence they have over the organization.
This model will initially take time to implement and decision-making may be slower at the start as people learn to trust each other and move into formation. Most people are accustomed to traditional hierarchy and know instinctively how to operate in that kind of system. It can be hard for people familiar with holding positional power to adjust to letting go of making decisions, especially when they may disagree with those decisions. And for people newer to decision-making, it takes time to build confidence and skills, and to accept accountability for the impacts of those decisions. Patience is needed and power struggles and mistakes will invariably happen. Staff need information, tools, and experience to get their feet planted and take initiative. And once they do, we expect creativity and problem solving to expand and positively impact the organization.
In my case, as president of IISC, I am already experiencing the benefits of this new approach as we pilot some aspects of it. Fewer people are coming to me for answers or expecting me to make decisions. Generative conflict is surfaced and negotiated at individual and team levels and rarely comes through to me to resolve. I’m less fatigued and more inspired. I can more fully focus on what I believe are my essential roles of strategy, partnership-building, board development, fundraising, and program work. I am now more of a coach, offering questions for people to explore and occasional wisdom for those who are really stuck.
But there are tough realities to face as we experiment with parts of the model. We cannot always keep up with the flow of decisions that are needed or handle the bigger ones quickly. In the end, though, I am already finding that the quality of our decisions are better. And when we face tougher times, either organizationally or financially, we tend to find ourselves reverting to old habits of command and control. We have to remember to snap ourselves out of old practice and reprioritize our values and return to our new model. And in the end, we’re becoming a more dynamic and responsible organization because of shared and equitable leadership.
Do You Want to Try on Shared Leadership?
Shared leadership can lead to more effective organizations as diverse minds and expertise are applied to solving problems. It can achieve more balance in the lives of people as decision-making, responsibilities, and burdens are shared across the organization.
Shared leadership rocks the boat. For many of us, it’s not what we’re used to. And it liberates people to act on their visions and solutions which improves organizational performance and cracks impenetrable systems of oppression that we live and work under.
What would it look like to try shared leadership practices and experiments in your organization or institution? Where are you having success with shared leadership? Please comment.
(1) The Knowledge Share Group is a partnership of capacity and infrastructure building organizations in the United States. The groups include Change Elemental, CompassPoint, Crossroads Antiracism Organizing & Training, Interaction Institute for Social Change, ProInspire, and Rockwood Leadership Institute. (2) James Shelton III at the PolicyLink Equity Summit 2018 defined power simply and clearly as “power is the ability to create, limit or make choices for oneself or others.”
If you’re like me, I never would have thought I would be leading an organization during epic extremes and upheaval in our nation. I was not prepared for this! On many days, I feel like I’m leading through total chaos without any kind of a manual for it. That’s why IISC is bringing leaders of all kinds together on May 7th in a virtual interactive learning experience. I’ll be there, along with my colleague Simone John. We will acknowledge and cultivate the orientation and skills that are needed to lead through, well, wild times.I could use expletives in place of “wild,” but I know you get the point.
I‘ve led six organizations over my three-decade nonprofit and social justice career and none of it prepared me for what I’m up against now or what has been going on since 2020. I’ve had to lead our staff through a global pandemic, weather disasters, political and social upheaval, as well as the day-to-day struggle of accelerating our mission for racial justice and creating an organization that centers human wellbeing.
What has helped me lead through it all? Frankly, it was partly being a black biracial woman who was raised in untenable circumstances and had no other choice than to be resourceful, rely on others, and blast music in my ears when I ran out of hope. The other critical part was working in an organization such as IISC that cultivates shared and equitable leadership through our collaborative change lens of love, equity, and networks.
No one should be alone, struggling, or pushing through leadership. Not when it’s so chaotic and absolutely wild and hard out there. Not when IISC has got some wisdom and tools we’re excited to share, and we bet you’ve got some gems to share, as well!
This work is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Traditional management has run its course. At IISC and in our network of clients and equity practitioners, we’re trying to create something new in its place. We don’t have all the answers, but we know it’s time to discover another way.
As a Generation X’er who worked “under” bosses trained in traditional command and control leadership, I saw the poor results of “do what I say” or “do as I do” leadership. In the 80s and 90s, management strategies were based on military and manufacturing leadership practices which relied on top-down hierarchies, rigid routines, and long work hours.
Obedience of the workforce was paramount. And it was suffocating.
A natural product of the system of racialized capitalism, management was – and in many cases still is – about dominion over people and making sure they work harder and faster to amass money and resources for those “at the top.” It’s too often about quantity and output over people and quality, rather than what you ultimately accomplish.
Fortunately, collaboration as a critical proposition for team effectiveness, and equity and wellbeing as vital strategies for organizational success, are now in play in more workplaces. And yet, if we’re honest, we’re still churning out work and people like generations before us. The pandemic tried to teach us otherwise, but now that we’ve moved from pandemic panic to endemic acceptance, we’ve fallen back into old habits. We’ve defaulted to management practices that are rooted in the anxiety that comes from living in a world of systems which perpetuate oppression, political chaos, and climate catastrophes. Anxiety compels us to micromanage, remove employee autonomy, and revert to workplace disciplinary practices,
At IISC we’re working hard to stay true to our values and practices by approaching our organizational structure and practices with intention. We’re moving away from traditional management to transformational leadership that is based in shared leadership and the facilitative leadership and equity practices we bring to others.
So what are we doing? Here are three strategies we’re trying:
We’re decentering ourselves as “managers.” We’re developing a new leadership and decision-making structure that envisions each of us as leaders in a network, offering our contributions individually and collectively to move the whole. People closest to their areas of work and the impact of the work will be entrusted with decisions in those domains. Multiracial and multigenerational leadership will be a core principle as we undo work norms that stem from cultures of white supremacy.
We’re creating a workplace that is about preserving dignity and wellbeing. We believe that policies that promote wellbeing help us approach our work with greater focus and creativity. And having more time outside of work to rest and connect enables us to see the world more clearly and better understand our organization’s role in making the world a better place. We have implemented a four-day work week to give people a greater balance between work and personal time, and we’ve launched a compensation pod to explore how to increase our wages through an equity lens. We’re repackaging some of our functions so they fit better within each person’s job and hiring more people to share those responsibilities. We avoid booking meetings before 10am so people have time to plan their days, do solo work, and attend to caregiving responsibilities.
We’re building new practices for holding each other accountable to our work goals and values by navigating the conflict that naturally arises in an organizational setting. We’ve had a dominant culture of “niceness” that allowed tensions to stay buried, leading to work inefficiencies and resentment. To address that, we’ve worked with transformative justice practitioners to learn to step into more radical candor with each other. We’ve learned it’s possible to have hard conversations and hold people with dignity by engaging in truth-telling that emphasizes impact over intent. And, last but not least, we’re piloting mechanisms for sharing feedback that are not based on a supervision model but rather on coaching and mutual accountability sessions.
I’m relieved that future generations may be spared the problematic management practices of the past that treated us like widgets instead of precious humans. But we need a lot more people and leaders who are willing to stand with us and our allies. And who are ready to lead us forward into this new way of working.
We want to hear from you! How are you trying to replace traditional management practices with transformational leadership? How do you want to take a stand?
Earlier this summer, I walked into the Boston Convention Center with thousands milling about and locked eyes with a Black woman who had the kindest smile. As I learned later, she, like me, had been to hundreds of conferences in our lifetimes but we felt shy. The exhibits weren’t open yet so we started chatting about our work and lives. I learned she is the president of a local chapter of the NAACP in the south, and a Black woman president at that. Her power has been challenged daily by white power structures resisting change and by male leadership within her ranks who assume they know better, but she didn’t look tired. She was ready for the convention and she was proud of her youth leaders who were participating. She was here, at the NAACP convention, working to build a better future and that was all that mattered.
New friends at the NAACP convention
If the convention had stopped there, I would have learned something. When you get to my stage of life and attend events like this, you often spend time with people you already know. That day, I spent time with people I didn’t know and at workshops in which the content was unfamiliar. I came away enriched with a new relationship, with new ideas, and – most importantly – with new-found hope. And I learned a lot about what advocates working for change most need in these times.
Here are three takeaways:
These times are not new, and we have the people and tools to break through this painful America we are living in right now. Shavone Arline-Bradley, president of the National Council of Negro Women, brought the house down at the women’s luncheon when she ran down the list of conservative white supremacists that Black leaders have reckoned with – including George Wallace, former Governor of Alabama, who was an ardent advocate for school segregation in the 60s and 70s. Despite his efforts to keep in place Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized school segregation in 1896, it was overturned 58-years later by the US Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. She argued that we have seen the likes of supremacists like Donald Trump and Ron Desantis before and we have stopped their progress through organizing, get out the vote efforts, and in the courts. And she credited the strategy and strength of Black women who waged these fights.
The climate crisis must be viewed as immediate and dangerous, and as a critical racial justice issue. Boston environmental and racial justice activist Reverend Mariama White-Hammond and other climate leaders clearly laid out the climate and weather shifts that we are now facing. We learned that the impacts are disproportionately centered in Black, Brown, and low-income communities where residents don’t have access to sufficient air conditioning or plentiful and drinkable water in hot conditions, or places to go when flooding hits apartments and homes because of poor water mitigation systems.
As I listened to the inequities, I realized that there should be no “change” in climate change because it’s now a crisis, and there is no “threat” because climate chaos is already damaging our cities and rural communities in the form of extreme heat, wildfires, floods, and droughts. What gets in my way and the way of others who are in this fight is that it’s just so hard to face. We need to stare the climate reality in the eyes, and as indigenous people and people rooted to land know, we must focus on healing our planet and taking the best care of it we can.
We must bring young people to our tables. There were hundreds of youth at the convention, all attending workshops and participating in events designed to develop their leadership at all levels of the NAACP and in local communities. It was clear from the panel conversations and the myriad of people I spoke with that if we’re going to fight modern-day supremacists and their successors, we need young people leading the way. And we need to train and support them with strategies, tools, and resources for social change and racial justice. Our legacy will continue through their passion and ideas and we have a responsibility to support them, teach them what we know, learn what we don’t, and follow their great ideas.
I am walking away inspired by the knowledge that we absolutely have what it takes for the fights ahead, as long as we continue to build the strength of our networks and prioritize the leadership and energy of young people. We can – and we will – do this.
What happens when thousands of racial justice leaders and practitioners come together after a pandemic? So much power and knowledge-sharing – and plenty of dancing and hugs, and even a few martinis!
At the 2022 national Facing Race Conference in Arizona, sponsored by Race Forward, participants were graced with gratitude for their work for racial justice, invited to be even bolder in our approaches, and instructed to avoid internal implosions at a time in which our organizations and the movement are needed the most.
I heard five important calls-to-action:
Backlash Means We’re Winning. Keep Going!
We’re winning! The number of people of color leading and pushing change in institutions is at its highest levels. We see movement wins such as the growing people of color electorate and the halt of the Keystone pipeline. The use of the word “systemic racism” is now commonplace. We were encouraged to keep pressing forward and harder to break through on our biggest ideas. Opening plenary speakers said, “Fight for your impossible idea… and let us dream and fail.”
Get out of Isolation. It’s Time for Reconnection!
We’ve become accustomed to quarantine and staying close to home but we were encouraged to move out of our comfort zones. Specifically, we were reminded to talk to people at their doors and to bring them back into protests and visible organizing. One speaker said, “we have to retrain people, including ourselves, to interact again, especially in person and in public.” At IISC, our mission is creating skills for collaboration and interaction. We’re exploring how we can enter and hold physical spaces with care while still centering those at risk from COVID through an equity and disability access lens.
Don’t Underestimate White Nationalism. Expose and Bring it Down!
As distinct from the ideology of white supremacy, white nationalism is coordinated and direct action fueled by hatred and violence. Organization-building to support white racist and anti-semetic attacks and violence is on the rise and getting very sophisticated. From Boston to Michigan and Florida, leaders pointed to overt and well-organized actions in their communities from white nationalist organizations. They encouraged us to work with community organizations, government leaders, and neighbors to develop strategies to prevent their inroads and to frame messaging to drown out their discourse.
Stop Internal Organizational Implosions. Build Organizations on Soul Work!
We heard a loud and clear call for each person inside an organization to take responsibility for extinguishing the internal fights we are waging against each other so we can focus on the external fights for justice. No organization, person, or leader is perfect so we can’t cast each other to the curb in punitive and harmful ways, stay in victimization, attack each other, and fall into gossip. They asked us to build our organizations so people can do their soul work and be liberated to do work with joy and happiness.
Move Forward. Live into Possibility!
I was struck that you barely heard the name “Trump” around the conference. The focus was on moving and organizing for what we want and imagine. Not that we don’t pay attention to the war on our democracy and progressive values but that we go in the direction of creating even more conditions for change and living good personal lives as we do it. IISC held a workshop at the conference on fighting the return of the old normal by envisioning and leading for liberatory systems and racial justice transformation. We produced a resource guide to help you and other organizations do that while attending to the current challenges before us. Check it out.
In summary, we have power, we’re winning, and we need to reconnect and get our own house in order. Now that’s a push we at IISC appreciated and definitely needed, and maybe you feel that way, as well. We hope to see you at the next Facing Race conference in 2024.
IISC was thrilled to host a workshop at the Facing Race Conference 2022 called “Let’s fight the return of the ‘Old Normal!’ – Leading for liberatory systems and racial justice transformation.”
The workshop was offered on the Institutional and Sector Change track, which “is a home for practitioners from a wide range of sectors wanting to get real about transforming how our institutions operate in order to dismantle structural racism and generate racially equitable outcomes.”
We created a space where participants could take a breath, experience something new – a space that was infused with joyful music and where they were surrounded by provocative art and quotes and could imagine a more beautiful future. Here’s a brief workshop description, followed by a link to a resource guide that we hope that you will use and adapt.
Are you fighting the “return to normal”? Unsure about what “new normal” looks like? Marian Wright Edelman taught us that, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” So we’re going to spend some time trying to see the new normal together. These past few years have taxed racial justice leaders and organizations in unimaginable ways. Join us for a moment of collective hope. We’ll co-create visions of racial justice in practice, sharing stories that feed our collective imagination. We’ll strategize about leading our organizations and networks out of “old normal” white supremacist systems and practices toward liberation and transformation. We’ll share tools for helping leaders to demand, envision, and build more liberatory and racially just futures. We’ll raise up structural and organizational strategies for creating a new normal of moving from trauma to racial justice transformation in organizations, workplaces and networks. Together we can fight going “back to normal” using the greater strength of both vision and strategy to bend the arc of society to transformative futures.
Check out IISC’s new resource guide that shares some of the prompts, practices, and artwork that were featured in the workshop. Please use the comments function below to let us know how you are using the resources offered here and what you are learning by offering this opportunity to others. We hope the resources are useful in support of your own visioning and your own practice!
This post is a revision of one that was shared on June 11, 2020. The poem has been revised.
As the world tries to return to the “old normal” of racism in every facet of our life, or to the exhaustion from an overproducing system, let’s resist it fiercely and walk into the next one hundred years together in the spirit of new creation and norms.
May this poem that I wrote be a source of vision and inspiration.
Sun rays coming through trees, Pikrepo
Let not the slow creep of the old return
Like childish feet come slipping through your doorways
Look in the direction of the sun
Remember the lessons of staying in place?
Wading into presence
Tending to family
Resting your breath
Facing scars
Embracing insecurities
Abandoning perfection
Slowing your heart to hear cries of “I Can’t Breathe”
For the futures of humankind
Erase the “old normal”
Walk toward the light
Grieve the long path of injustice you were in
And stand upright
There can be no turning back
You can look over your shoulder and peek once in awhile
But there is no freedom behind you
Greed, exhaustion, and oppression live there
You said you wanted change in your lifetime?
Keep walking forward
Keep pausing to hear your heartbeat
To hear the people in the streets
And create the next 100 years
And you will not return
Because we will rise forward with the force of 100,000 horses galloping
Tens of thousands of drums pounding
And a Planet alive with millions dancing
Plants growing
Animals running
Seas churning
Temperatures readjusting
Life spilling over into our lineage of children
With Earth healing
We will reclaim the Earth!
And live into a future we’ve never been to before.
There’s never been a more important time to claim your full power in philanthropy. We need you – your authentic and most daring selves during these times. This is the moment to relinquish power and exercise deep trust in the field. This is the moment to recognize the important role we need you to play as a catalyst for transformative and progressive social change.
Remove and redefine the boundaries of what a funder or program officer should be.
Resist rolling out long applications and grant reports again. The field is working and we can’t be overtaxed as we fight the many battles that have been placed upon us. We need you working alongside us, not reading proposals and reports.
Avoid reverting back to prioritizing program grants. We need unrestricted general operating funds to apply what we are learning each day to what must be done.
Fund movement organizing and capacity building organizations so that we can work together to unlock profound social change during this period.
Make strategy with us, not for us. Together we must be emergent and adaptable to our challenges and opportunities. Change is not always linear. Like COVID-19, further attacks on social and racial justice will be unpredictable and hate and greed will produce new variants.
Please…come now out of your homes and offices to toil alongside us. You are not apart from us. You are us. And we need you.
We need all hands on deck. Come as you are, but come, and please do all that you can to make justice easier for us.
P.S. I share these words as someone who has spent twenty years in philanthropy – leading a charitable foundation, working with foundations, and advising donors. Discard the constraint of what you think philanthropy is and was. Philanthropy, a Greek word, means love of humanity. That’s your job now – to love humanity – and it’s urgent.
A personal blog about the power of the Juneteenth holiday to foster Black joy and freedom.
I woke up to a text from my community health center that it was closed for Juneteenth, something I wouldn’t have thought possible just a few years ago. This started my week of JOY and FREEDOM! I cleared my eyes from sleep and imagined my Black ancestors on the plantation celebrating their freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation reached most corners of the country.
Black people still experience deep racism and racialized trauma and yet we are living dreams our ancestors could never have envisioned. Running organizations and businesses, taking our rightful place in elected office, saving lives during COVID as doctors and nurses, and seeing our children off to college and on to planes to places in the world our ancestors were forbidden to see.
This week alone, I walked freely in the streets, sat in the front of a bus, ate at an integrated restaurant, and hugged my husband and child who will never be sold away from me to a white person in the middle of a town square.
Celebrating at the Embrace Ideas Festival in Boston: Kelly Bates, IISC President, and Sheena Collier, Founder & CEO of Boston While Black
This week I participated in the Embrace Ideas Festival sponsored by KingBoston, a program of The Boston Foundation, one of our racial equity change clients. On a panel of Black leaders of arts organizations, one leader shared that while white people must do the work of anti-racism, what’s really needed is for BIPOC leaders to embrace and experience joy and fun.
I co-sign this belief so where will you find me this weekend of Juneteenth? I will be wearing traditional African clothing, line dancing with my Black friends, eating scrumptious soul food, kissing my child, and praying for greater forces of justice to prevail in our future.
Ok, you know the way the movie starts about the state of this country.
Opening scene. Racism is deeply embedded in communities and every institution, our world is at war, reproductive rights are crumbling, COVID has weakened our health, our economic system is collapsing, and climate change is wreaking havoc on the planet. Among these and other crises, Black people, Indigenous people, and Latinx and Asian & Pacific Islander communities are the first and last to be impacted. They are trying to stay alive, protect their children, and hold onto their bodies, lands, and dignity.
Cliparts #45080
Scene 2. You get out your cape. A really nice fitting, fabulous, super hero, version of a cape that ties around your neck while you stand effortlessly on top of a mountain. You’re a hero for this moment. You’re living in this mess so you might as well join with others to make the movie end better than the first draft of the screenplay.
Scene 3. Imagine the faces of people who are in your sphere of influence. Who are they? Go down the mountain and get them! Build power through collaboration. Join organizations and networks and train up your skills together.
ClipartKey is a free community supported website
Final scene. You pack your social justice emergency kit. It’s a gorgeous cool suitcase that matches your cape. It’s got everything you need to make change:
A bowl of laughter for the tough days
Fulfilling relationships with people who care about you and will also support change
A mutual aid handbook that helps you find rest, money, food, water, and shelter as you work for justice
Good nights of sleep and putting your feet up on the couch
Movement of your body, exercise, and breath
And, lots of cuddles!
You stroll out to the road and your cape billows in the breeze as your suitcase rolls behind you. Your favorite power song comes on cue as the credits roll. It’s the kind of walk, the kind of music that comes at the end of a movie and makes you feel connected to something greater. You feel ten feet taller, you feel – and are! – more powerful and wiser. You got this!
Back in the 1960s women talked about the personal being political. They linked their personal lives and situations directly to the impacts of sexism which operates at the personal, interpersonal, institutional, and structural levels to devalue and systematically oppress women.
Sexism and its companion, male domination, are powerful forms of oppression. And if you intersect these with others like racism, classism, transphobia, or the oppression of mothers, it’s clear that a woman’s life and material well-being are in danger.
With Roe v. Wade on the brink of being overruled, Black women who already have poor maternal health outcomes will lose their lives and low-income women will have to scrape together their last dollars to make it across state lines to get safe and legal abortions. Parenthood is difficult, even for those who choose it. Very few of us talk about or normalize the pressure of raising a child: the deep exhaustion, the financial cost, and – if you’re in a dangerous relationship with the other parent – how life threatening it can be. And this is all nearly unimaginable if the person who placed the child in you did so against your will.
Roe aside, the psychic wounds of being a woman are real, whether you are a cis woman1 or a trans woman. Women’s lives are threatened by domestic and sexual violence including in our own homes. Many work for less pay than men and toil away in unsympathetic workplaces that don’t provide paid family leave, child care, or flexibility around school drop-off and pick-up schedules. Women are cut down to size by cis-men2 who they think they know more, know better, and know what we need. We have watched every woman who has run for public office belittled, objectified, dehumanized, and even fetishized. We can’t elect a woman as president even though the stakes are high for women without representation as we are witnessing now.
Women are in mourning. Whether they support a woman’s right to choose or not, they know deep down that their lives are not as valued as cis-men. They can feel it in their homes like a fog surrounding them and as they enter into workplaces and places of power. Women need powerful allies in this moment – people of all backgrounds, even from various political parties, to rise up and challenge the status quo. There are women’s marches, elections, and policy decisions that we can participate in and influence. Otherwise, we risk a major roll back of rights for women – from reproductive freedom to same-sex marriage and equal pay for equal work.
These times aren’t easy but they won’t get any easier if women minimize their struggles and allies stay quiet. We can fight many oppressions at the same time and because they are inextricably connected, if we win in one place, it’s a win for the others.
We took to the streets to #resistracism and #resistfacism.
We have #masked, #vaccinated, and #boostered.
Even when others wouldn’t to save our lives.
What would it take for us to #emerge&envision?
To free ourselves from the mass social psychosis of COVID fear, loss, and restraint?
Yes, we’ve been sick. Yes, our beautiful ones have passed. And, yes we are tired. And we’re still alive and our futures are waiting for us.
We will either be in a regular cycle of variant upswings and downswings, or COVID will become endemic. In either case, I believe the time has come for us to make a decision. To no longer just survive COVID, but to live with it like a storm we come to expect or eventually will retreat, and to emerge from it and envision futures that are equitable and resilient.
Futures, plural because people, communities, and continents may need different kinds of futures; there isn’t not just one that fits all. We deserve and can design together futures that are full of joy and wellbeing, and that reflect systems of liberation. Futures that are grounded in collaboration, love, equity, and networks.
I hope to be immersed in these questions with you and other leaders. In the blog comments, will you join in?
What is this country and this world crying out for?
What is your vision for equitable and resilient futures?
How can capacity builders like IISC, and leaders in general, help make your vision possible or help make your vision come into view?
What experiences, resources, and tools do leaders and networks need to deepen their heartset, mindset, and skillset for emergence and envisioning?
What kind of experiences and transformative spaces can help us emerge from this time of pandemic, fear, and deeply exposed racism and oppression, to futures of joy, wellbeing, and systemic liberation?
