|Photo from fotologic|http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotologic/3108613104|
At last week’s Transforming Race conference, Kirwan Institute founder john a. powell gave a powerful and compelling presentation about some of the false binaries that he says we have embraced in this country, to our own collective detriment. This includes pitting “whiteness” against “blackness” and “public” vs. “private” spaces in such a way as to lose sight of the larger game that is happening around us. Read More
“We will never let the pain have the last word. We’re bigger than the things that happened to us and held us back. Our parents had a bigger vision… We will win this century in the name of liberty and justice for all!”
-Van Jones
Reporting in from Columbus, Ohio, where we spent Thursday helping to kick off the Transforming Race 2012 Conference, hosted by the Kirwan Institute. This year’s theme is “Visions of Change,” and the tone was set by this evening’s keynote from Van Jones. His call to was to embrace a “deeper patriotism” where “diversity is the solution to pretty much every problem we face in the new century.”
Melinda (pictured above on the left), Cynthia (right), and I (middle) made our first conference contribution by way of yesterday afternoon’s session on “Facilitation Skills for Racial Justice Work,” a fuller experience of which is available in our upcoming 2 day workshop in Boston in early May, Fundamentals of Facilitation for Racial Justice Work. Follow more of the discussion today and tomorrow via Twitter through hashtag #TR2012 or #TransformingRace.
Picking up from Gibran’s post yesterday and continuing in the vein of follow-up to our LLC webinar on collective leadership, I want to respond to some of the questions we did not have a chance to answer or answer fully from participants, including requests for examples of collective leadership in action and inquiries about blocks and how to work through or overcome them. Read More
Much appreciation goes out to our friends and colleagues in the Leadership Learning Community for hosting this May 16th webinar with esteemed Professor john powell, Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study on Race and Ethnicity, and the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. IISC has been privileged to have partnered in the past with staff of Kirwan to shed light on the complex systemic nature and inter-sectional realities of racialized outcomes in our country. You can also check out other interviews, like this one, with Professor powell.
Check out this article by the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University about applying systems thinking to race equity work. It is a great overview of how important it is to think about race, racism and undoing racism systematically. Otherewise, we run the risk of reinforcing the very thing we are trying to undo, or even making things worse!
I had the great fortune of attending the 
I had the great fortune of attending the