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November 19, 2020

From Trauma to Transformative Futures: Four Dimensions

As you review the framework, would you share your responses to the questions below in the comments?

  • What does it bring up for you?
  • Where do you find yourself focusing your thinking and efforts?
  • What might you want to explore, start, continue or further develop, or stop doing in any of the stages?How does the framework help you prioritize and perhaps find empowering areas for action and partnership?


As you navigate the complex times of COVID-19 and racial uprising, consider what it would take to transition through these four dimensions, what needs to be in place, what is already in place, and what we need to reimagine and rebuild.


1 – In the Trauma Dimension: How are we responding to the impact of trauma from COVID, racism, and other shocks?

Racial Equity & Justice:

  • Are we removing racialized barriers to emergency resources? 
  • Are we using a racial equity impact analysis tool to understand and evaluate our response? Even when we feel rushed?
  • Are we recognizing deep racial harm in our organization and networks?

Collaboration:

  • Are we pausing and engaging in quick and meaningful stakeholder engagement to guide our responses and ensure less harm?
  • Are we attending to both relationships and results as we carry out our work?

Love:

  • Are we acting and responding with humility, empathy, and transparency?
  • Are we practicing presence and accountability?

Networks:

  • Are we connecting with diverse networks to gather and share information and foster flows to address critical needs?

2 – In the Reckoning Dimension: How are we grappling with deep distress and the reality of shifting resources? How are we embracing racial uprisings for change? How are we embracing uncertainty?

Racial Equity & Justice:

  • Are we acknowledging inequities revealed by crisis?  
  • Are we acting to undo the racialized impacts of our actions?
  • How are we recognizing the leadership of Black people and what are the lessons for our organizations?
  • Are we remembering and communicating that equity is not the same as equality
  • Are we designing from and with the margins to approach every problem and solution?

Collaboration:

  • Are we engaged in transparent and collaborative decision-making?
  • Are we facilitating conversations and activities to face the pain and opportunity of this crisis, our potential power together to make change, while also planning for next steps?

Love:

  • Are we embracing where people are? Their feelings, conditions, perspectives?
  • Are we modeling vulnerability as a sign of strength?
  • Are we exploring the reality through the lens of love and possibility?

Networks:

  • Are we setting strategic direction with critical partners? 
  • Are we listening for and following the ideas of BIPOC communities (Black, Indigenous, people of color)?

3 – In the Healing Dimension: How are we creating the conditions for healing and well-being?

Racial Equity & Justice:

  • Are we supporting BIPOC people and communities to move through trauma, grief and anger toward joy?
  • Are white people leaning into discomfort, trauma and pain, and working that through with other white allies?

Collaboration:

  • Are we generating and living into community care guidelines to support self-care and collective well-being?
  • Are we designing and facilitating in ways that allow people to process holistically – intellectually, physically, emotionally, and spiritually?

Love:

  • Are we convening grounding conversations that allow for brave space, emotions, and truth sharing?
  • Are we offering resources for healing modalities?
  • Are we acknowledging all paths to healing?
  • Are we meeting pain with action and redistributing power and resources?

Networks:

  • Are we deepening networks and attending to flows of resources that create healing and well-being for people?
  • Are we setting up more distributive structures focusing on regenerative flows of resources of many kinds?

4 – In the Transformative Futures Dimension: How are we envisioning and living into equitable and resilient futures?

Racial Equity & Justice:

  • Are we pivoting from supremacist and extractive practices to what is liberating and life-honoring?

Collaboration:

  • Are we facilitating leaders to envision and invest in equitable and resilient futures?

Love:

  • Are we encouraging building futures from the lessons of love, possibility, and shared humanity?

Networks:

  • Are we fostering a new level of learning, sustainability, innovation and radical collaboration with people and our planet?
  • Are we focusing on systems change and building long-term movement?

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May 13, 2020

From Emergency Response to Resilient Futures: Moving Towards Transformation

Note: This blog was authored as a framework to assist leaders moving people and organizations through COVID-19. Shortly after it was written, the racial uprisings of 2020 began after the many deaths of Black people in the United States. We have since updated this framework to bridge the approaches we believe are necessary for navigating both COVID-19 and racial injustice. Please view this blog and new resource.

As we find ourselves rowing in uncharted, uncertain, and scary waters, feeling like we’re up against waves of deep tension and crisis, we know that we need to row together in new and deeply collaborative ways. Yet under current conditions, many leaders are overwhelmed with concern about their own organizations; their staff, volunteers, Board, constituencies, and networks. We are all problem solving minute-to-minute and facing many critical decisions – decisions which could determine if people have a source of income, if they will receive essential services, and, indeed, even if they will remain healthy and alive.

We need to support leaders at all levels – individually, organizationally, and at the level of the ecosystem of networks around them – to work strategically and collaboratively in this critical moment. We are using IISC’s Collaborative Change Lens, to harness the power of collaboration by focusing on love, racial equity, and networks. We are supporting leaders online, and will eventually support them in-person (yes, that day will come), to plan and move through the stages of transformation offered in this framework during the pandemic and beyond.

Organizations, communities, networks, and even individuals may experience these stages in linear ways. Or, they may dip in and out of the stages at different times as they move through challenges and opportunities. We are supporting them to shift from emergency responses to creating conditions for resilient futures that create regenerative and equitable systems that are sustainable for the longer-term. This includes helping individuals and groups “do what they do best and connect to the rest,” and to act in networked ways to strengthen response and movement.

As you review the framework, would you share your responses to the questions below in the comments?

  • What does it bring up for you?
  • Where do you find yourself focusing your thinking and efforts?
  • What might you want to explore, start, continue or further develop, or stop doing in any of the stages?How does the framework help you prioritize and perhaps find empowering areas for action and partnership?

Facilitate rapid problem-solving and decision-making in the face of immediate needs, heightened risk, chaos, and/or uncertainty.

_____

Collaboration Priorities:

  • Focus on relationships and results for rapid decision-making and crisis management
  • Engage in quick and meaningful stakeholder engagement of those impacted by critical and consequential decisions to generate effective responses.
  • Ground all decisions in what is best for our shared humanity and fate.

Love:

  • Act and respond with love, humility, empathy, and transparency.
  • Let those in critical need know they are not alone.
  • Show up with and model presence and focus.

Racial Equity:

  • Avoid “savior syndrome” and respect the dignity and voice of those most in need in the moment.
  • Recommit to racial equity practices and approaches from the organization’s past that can build resiliency.
  • Anticipate and remove racialized barriers to accessing emergency resources and uniquely tailor responses to account for historic inequities to eliminate disparities in the emergency response.

Networks:

  • Foster connectivity and flows between leaders in various sectors and ecosystems to gather and share information, understand the current reality, and respond to complex problems.
  • Tap into diverse networks to address critical needs and discover new possibilities.
  • Eliminate bottlenecks and liberate the flow of critical resources.

Grapple with the reality of fewer resources and more distress within the organization/community.

_____

Collaboration Priorities:

Love:

  • Shape conversations, cultures, and approaches to exploring the current reality through the lens of love and possibility.
  • Embrace the full complexity of where people are and how they are experiencing current reality.
  • Model vulnerability as strength.
  • Encourage people to reach for connection to experience belonging and avoid isolation.

Racial Equity:

  • Acknowledge and address the reality of stark racial disparities in our social systems that the emergency reveals. Remember and communicate that equity is not the same as equality.
  • Collect and examine data on who has been impacted by your and others’ decisions and how; determine new paths and approaches to root out inequities.
  • Design from and with the margins to approach every problem and solution that can move you toward stability.

Networks:

  • Foster deeper trust and network connections by continuing to exchange ideas and resources.
  • Build a gift culture where people offer what they can for the good of the whole.
  • Set strategic direction with critical stakeholders and partners. Join forces, align, or merge.

Create the conditions for healing and well-being for people in groups, networks, and sectors in which we live and work.

_____

Collaboration Priorities:

  • Model communication and consistent practices of support, cooperation, and coordination.
  • Generate and live into community care and mutual aid guidelines to support healing, refreshment, self-care, and improved physical and emotional well-being of oneself and others.

Love:

  • Convene healing conversations that allow for brave space, nourishment, emotions, truth, and care.
  • Leave channels of communication open for how people are feeling and experiencing things.
  • Remind everyone that individuals will be in different places at different times, and that is okay.

Racial Equity:

  • Make space for people with shared racial identities or a shared purpose to come together to move through and release trauma collectively, and to experience liberation.
  • Design and facilitate in ways that allow people to process holistically – intellectually, physically, emotionally, spiritually.

Networks:

  • Generate new connections or deepen older ones to refresh and heal on individual, interpersonal, organizational, and network levels.
  • Attend to flows of resources that create healing and well-being for people.

Envision, live into, and develop capacities for new and better futures

_____

Collaboration Priorities:

  • Facilitate leaders, organizations, and networks to envision and generate elements of a new future that is different from what was imagined before the emergency.
  • Create emergent learning spaces for people to share what they are experimenting with and learning.

Love:

  • Imagine a future from the lessons and examples of love, possibility, mutual aid, and collective care.
  • Build systems, processes, and practices that begin to manifest the future that you envision.

Racial Equity:

  • Design your vision and future practices by grounding them in the value of transformative equitable well-being and thriving.
  • Pivot from supremacist, extractive practices to what is fundamentally liberatory and life-honoring.
  • Design around the principle of belonging (not othering).

Networks:

  • Foster a new level of equity, sustainability, and radical collaboration with people and our planet.
  • Work in expansive, equitable, free-flowing, and liberated networks for abundance and regeneration.
  • Encourage social learning, experimentation, freedom to fail, and sharing what works and has promise.

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April 29, 2020

Dimensions of Network Success

Currently engaged in a number of state-wide and regional network-building initiatives focused on food, health and education system change, I am beginning to see some interesting patterns across efforts to build connectivity-based and more fluid movements for change.  Watching these dynamics unfold, I can’t help but come back to one of our foundational frameworks at IISC, what we call the R-P-R Triangle, for all that it has to offer our thinking about network strategy and success. 

This framework (see below) makes the point that any kind of collaborative endeavor is a multi-dimensional affair when it comes to the core determinants and definitions of success.  Of course, many of us come to “net work” and collaborative efforts eager to see results, to work in new ways to have greater impact on the issues that we care most about.  Without concrete results or “wins,” it is hard to keep people engaged and morale up.  But results are just a part of the story, and the big results may take some time in coming.

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June 21, 2017

IISC Welcomes Kelly Bates as New President

On behalf of the Board of Directors of IISC, I am delighted to announce that Kelly 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!

Very best wishes,

Frank Robinson

Chair of the Board, IISC

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May 15, 2015

Hearing Voices from the World of Philanthropy

The European Foundation Centre (EFC) is an international membership association of foundations and corporate funders working to strengthen the philanthropic sector in Europe and further afield. It is currently creating a new strategy for 2016 and onwards. IISC staff based in Belfast are supporting the EFC with the design and facilitation of this process. In developing the strategy EFC really wants to engage with a wide range of stakeholders so that the plan will be aligned closely with the needs, interests and aspirations of foundations and corporate funders in Europe and the wider world.

From Louise O’Meara, Regional Director of IISC Ireland: “We are delighted to be working on this project. The future of philanthropy in Europe and beyond is hugely important in addressing issues of social justice. Across the planet people are looking for new ways to have a greater say in the decisions that affect their lives. Philanthropy is central in enabling this and the European Foundation Centre has an important role in helping foundations and others to maximise their impact”.

IISC has worked with the Board of EFC and its staff in the early stages of the planning process and is now reaching out to its wider membership, seeking their views and wisdom, to inform the new strategy. A key mechanism for this is EFC’s Annual General Assembly and Conference, this year being held in Milan, Italy. IISC and EFC staff members will be hosting strategy workshops, conducting one to one conversations and employing a ‘strategy booth’ where participants can post ideas on where EFC should be heading in the future. They will all be donning super sized ‘strategy spectacles’ during the conference to help promote the strategy process and encourage people to get involved – even if at risk of looking a little bit silly!

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November 10, 2014

Racism. What will it take to end it?

We are pleased to announce the release of Senior Associate Cynthia Silva Parker’s TedX talk. Cynthia shares moments she’s witnessed racism, and how she thinks we can end it. We hope you share this talk with your networks.

Cynthia has spent decades helping people understand how the system of racism operates. As Senior Associate at Interaction Institute for Social Change, she designs and facilitates collaborative equity and inclusion initiatives. These initiatives make change in organizations, cities, and networks. Cynthia also trains leaders through our public workshops.


She is a life-long advocate for racial equity and social justice, and for deeper awareness of each in our systems and organizations and the wider society. She focuses her observations, personal stories and career on strengthening collaborative networks by building the will, skill, knowledge and strategies to undo racism together.

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October 15, 2014

Ferguson October and #BlackLivesMatter

blacklivesmatterfergusonoctober

Photo source: Democracy Now

Last weekend, thousands of activists converged in Ferguson, Missouri for Ferguson October, a weekend of resistance including marches, panels, creative actions and civil disobedience. The purpose of the weekend was “to build momentum for a nationwide movement against police violence.” Two months ago, an unarmed Black man, Michael Brown, was killed in Ferguson by a white police officer who has not yet been arrested. While Mike Brown’s death was not an anomaly – at least two African American males are killed by law enforcement every week in the U.S. – the energy that is building in Ferguson, the organizing that is deepening there, the connections between Black activists and racial justice advocates of all races across the country that are being forged, and the new level of attention that Ferguson is bringing to this disturbing trend across the nation is new. I believe that we are in the midst of a crisis in this country. I believe that the young people and their allies who are on the front lines in Ferguson are calling all of us to action.

I believe this “movement moment” as many are calling it is about much more than Ferguson. This moment is opening up new opportunities for us to face and undo racism in all of its forms in all corners of this country. Let us finally declare that #BlackLivesMatter, all lives matter, and make this our reality. Read More

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October 15, 2014

Big Data Alone Isn’t Enough to Spark City Innovation

This post was published by E Republic in the City Accelerator Blog.

Cities are complex places that can lack the infrastructure and processes to stitch together their constituencies. Today, cities are innovating, but many times that innovation is laser focused around data, big data and getting more data. This only gives us a glimpse of the reality regarding citizen experiences within a city. In short, big data by itself is insufficient for innovation.

In a guest commentary for the City Accelerator, Ceasar McDowell, President of the Interaction Institute for Social Change and Professor of the Practice of Community Development at MIT, argues we must bring together the public to gain a holistic picture of the problems in our cities and the solutions needed to build communities that are economically healthy.

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October 8, 2014

Networks, Sensing and Surface Area

Nerve-Cell-4

In recent work with a couple of different leadership development programs, I shared a few stories about organizations that failed to recognize the value of informal networks within and beyond their formal boundaries by choosing to see themselves primarily through the lens of the “org chart” and fixed roles/job descriptions (what I sometimes call the “stay in your lane” approach).  In these cases what was lost was the ability to access greater organizational potential and intelligence.  If we think of organizations as living entities, then our connections within and beyond those cellular walls might be thought of as vital nerves or sensors.  When we fail to acknowledge or even cut these connections within, which often represent the pathways through which work actually gets done, we may stymie or destroy critical flows and functioning.  And when we fail to see and leverage how people in all roles are connected beyond the organization, then we reduce not only the potential contribution of each individual, but the overall surface area of the organization that might otherwise attune it and help it to respond to larger systemic opportunities or threats.  Which is why increasingly people are seeing mechanistic and fixed organizational roles as “irresponsible” – they do not allow people, individually and collectively, to effectively respond to circumstances and activate around that about which they care most.  So the invitation is to think and act more like a living network.  What are you doing to build greater sensitivity and surface area in your organization or change effort?

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June 25, 2014

More Beautiful Questions

“A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something – and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.”

– Warren Berger

A-More-Beautiful-Question-Cover

One of my favorite reads of the past six months is Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.  It strikes me as being an important read for any social change agent.  Early on, Berger begins with the following provocative statement, that rings true to personal experience: 

“Well meaning people are often trying to solve a problem by answering the wrong question.” 

In some cases this is because they have not paused long enough, if at all, to consider the underlying question their efforts are trying to solve.  Or, as my colleague Cynthia Parker has said, they are “solving for solution,” essentially promoting and/or fighting over their own preferred approaches.  And so they continue to offer the same old, ineffective and outdated, approaches or products.  This is especially problematic in a time of such change and flux, when we can’t fall back reliably on what we already know. Read More

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June 24, 2014

Agree on Process

pillars

You might have picked up that I’m down on too much process and too much meeting.  It’s a funny place for someone that makes a living facilitating.  It is part of a semi-conscious effort to look at the opposite of my core assumptions and seek the wisdom there.

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June 20, 2014

One for the “Righting a Wrong” File!

The settlement of the case of the Central Park 5 is a great day for the five individuals, add a great day for the cause of racial justice. The case of Antron McCray, Raymond Santana Jr., Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam and Kharey Wise is a textbook case of structural racism: implicit bias, coupled with strong-arm institutional police practices used against young men of color, and a media too eager to believe the hype, leading to the conviction of five innocent young black men for a horrendous crime. The documentary about these young men, by Ken Burns, captures the intense impact of the wrongful accusation and imprisonment on the lives of the five young men and their families.  Read More

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