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In the Before Times, early 2020, working in-person was a given for the majority of people. Yet for me and many of my friends, virtual work was already the norm, and we were developing a co-working space in Boston because we needed social connection in our remote work. After months of meeting and experimenting in the space, in March of 2020 we gathered on a Saturday to assemble furniture, celebrate, and put the finishing touches on the workrooms. That’s probably when we gave each other COVID, but we didn’t know that yet. Nobody could imagine the challenge that was to come.

By March 9, 2020, we had our first day of welcoming co-workers into the space. And by the weekend, most of us were experiencing serious and escalating symptoms of COVID-19, though in that early stage of spread in Massachusetts, no testing was available. Quickly, it became apparent to us that co-working in person would not be viable in the near term. Yet what we needed most was to be in connection with one another. That was one of the difficult things about COVID; there was so much pain, hardship, and grief, yet we were disconnected from our support networks.

Nobody wants more “Zoom fatigue” or waste-of-time meetings on their calendar. People blame the technology, but the problems with attempts at virtual gathering are so rarely about the technology. I believe a version of teleportation is available to us via video conferencing—we are just in the baby stages of learning to use it. For me personally, coming out of the fever journey and a long period of illness, I was behind on my work for clients and also extremely tired with no creative juice to bring to the table. It was helpful to find myself not alone. We were all struggling.

Lawrence Barriner II, coach and facilitator, changed the game with an offering: PomPod, a virtual workspace. He wrote, still making sense of what was happening, “Clearly COVID-19 is a thing. Most of us are physically apart, and there is tension between (a) slowing down and resting and (b) building community and getting what work we can do done.” Lawrence initiated a Zoom gathering where we could get stuff done using the Pomodoro technique, which is great for concentration. It had worked for us in person, but would it work online?

In short, we turn off all notifications, concentrate for 25 minutes on a single task with the Zoom open, and then talk to each other for five minutes about what got done and what remains in the balance. At first the interruption every 25 minutes was hard, but as my brain has gotten used to it, I find it supports endurance and completion of tasks. Having even just one other person nearby when I am working helps keep my focus. It doesn’t matter if the person is doing the same thing as me or not. Listening to other people talk about their progress and tasks helps me stay focused on mine.

Kendra Hicks, director of radical philanthropy for Resist and candidate for Boston City Council District 6, has been there from the very beginning. “PomPod provides me with focused time to get work done with accountability from a collective of people who are also there to help me get unstuck if necessary.” It is surprisingly helpful. Just the other day, after a couple of rounds being stuck on a task, co-worker Andrea Atkinson, executive director of One Square World, asked me, why are you blocked? Within two minutes she helped me identify a next step that resolved the task in less than 30 minutes by delegating.

Hicks appreciates that PomPod helps break up the day. Rather than working for long exhausting periods of time, she works in bursts and stays energized. During peak shelter-in-place, Barriner said of PomPod, “Without it, I would be flailing in my work life. Also, I love these people.” The quality of the people, the simplicity of the method—PomPod became a lifeline. Today, we have more members joining who are creative consultants, healers, organizers.

“In the midst of pandemic mind (low energy, high distraction, easily blocked) PomPod helps me move what I need to move,” Barriner said. “It makes clear, through the process of explicitly naming my work goals and being witnessed in my successes and failures, what of my work is energizing, exhausting, flowing, or blocked.”

For Sol Gonzalez, a facilitator and astrologer, PomPod has been essential for concentration. “I’m building a healthier, less isolated practice space for working and productivity. Self-employment can get really lonely and confusing and blocked. PomPod allows us to be in each of our own work, together.”

Even though this practice was forced by sheltering in place, the qualities of gathering online, working independently, and being witnessed in your process is something we can create in any organization, any day. Among the creative changemakers I know, we value how fast our work can move and how deep we can go when we meet in person. There is nothing that can match it. Yet I have always remained curious—and experimenting—with how to connect online. Because connecting online is not impossible; we just need to upgrade our practices. The pandemic forced us to innovate and stay together. Creating a PomPod environment where people can connect while they work brings up energizing feelings, like a good day at the office.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Click here to download this article as it appears in the magazine, with accompanying artwork.

This article comes from the Spring 2021 edition of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “Radical Leadership: Visioning Lines of Flight.”

So many aspects of my identity inform how I think I am being received—make me question if I belong and, ultimately, if I will be treated with dignity due to the content of my character, not solely on how I present. My imposter syndrome goes from 0 to 100 whenever I am acutely aware of what I call “The Three Ws” in my working sphere: Whiteness, Wokeness, and Wiseness.

WHITENESS

From my educational upbringing to the community I come from and a good majority of my career, navigating predominantly white spaces is not unfamiliar to me. Still, after almost three decades of wayfinding through whiteness, I too often feel the effects of imposter syndrome creep up on me.

Because imposter syndrome is fundamentally about not realizing the gravitas of one’s own brilliance and the desire to be recognized for one’s own unique contributions, I understand with every day that passes why spaces designed to center the experiences of white folks have often left me calling into question my own intellectual capacity. On a macro level, the colonial project of the United States remains invested in an undercurrent of forced mass assimilation into Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition. We see this in what is and isn’t recognized as patriotism,¹ we uplift it through many of our national holidays,² we prop it up it with the abstruse messages encoded in the advertisements we consume daily.³

Understand white American culture, or be “uncultured.” You decide.

I think back to my teenage years, when I recall at least two white teachers who looked at me in bewilderment as I told them how moved I was while reading Soledad Brother, by George Jackson.⁴ He was no Mark Twain in their eyes—they could hardly understand. And because they didn’t understand, they met me with silence, a silence that was so spurning from educators from whom I desperately sought approval. (It should be noted that I had no problems diving deeply into Socrates or studying the works of Ernest Hemingway, and such endeavors were always met with praise.)

A defining behavior of those experiencing the “imposter phenomenon,” according to Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in their 1978 journal article “The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women,” is that individuals will choose not to reveal what they truly feel, downplaying their own interests to appease others.⁵ I think back on those moments and wish I would’ve told those teachers, “Socrates was no Soledad Brother.”

In my early career, I remember all too well how code switching helped me be taken seriously. Colloquial language was met with stares that reeked of judgment. More bluntly, the pride I took in my vernacular could open me up to ridicule. Let me be clear, mastery of the English language is not monopolized by white folks. I despised hearing things like, “Why are you talking white?” when growing up. But there’s danger in professional environments where the lexicon of communities of color is thought of as anything other than ordinary. It forces those of us who communicate with language that reminds us of where we come from to ask, “Am I being a fraud when I want to say something that feels right and natural, and I don’t, for the comfort of this particular audience?”

Ultimately, I find myself able to escape the vertigo of self-doubt and phoniness when I turn to the mirror and, as Tupac Shakur describes in an interview in 1997, “look directly into my face and find my soul.”⁶ Why do I need their stamp of approval for my intellectual range? Why am I more focused on how they see me than how I see myself? What would my Bigmama say if she saw me shape-shifting to earn the favor of white folks?

There are still times when I’ll walk (or lately, Zoom) into a mostly white board meeting, or take on work to support an all-white leadership team, and the letters galore behind their names (MPA, MPH, JD, MBA, LMAOWTF), and the stories of vacation homes, will make me feel as if I’m confined to a small sliver of the world; and the apparently funny jokes about Arrested Development will have me doing all the Google searches I can in sixty seconds.

But then I remember: I’ve been invited into their space for my lived and learned experience. They asked me to join them to give voice to what I see from my vantage point. There’s nothing phony about their need to understand my experiences and the experiences of people like me. I have nothing to prove other than my desire to build bridges in a world that seems hell-bent on knocking them down.

WOKENESS

I would’ve thought that, by 2021, this word was mostly used in jest—but apparently it still has some traction. The concept of being “woke” is one that we saw rise to prominence around 2015 to describe increased consciousness of systemic and structural oppression. It is a word that once upon a time carried real weight; it has now been weaponized by conservatives across America (woke supremacy, what???).⁷

While the word “woke” may be mostly a joke in the spaces I navigate, what seldom feels like a joke is folks who seem persistently to derive pleasure from assessing someone else’s consciousness. These folks will test your wokeness without revealing their hand. I call this process a “woke assessment.” Woke assessments are often done to determine if you’re enlightened enough to work with, share space with, support the cause(s) of, and/or simply grace the Twitter timeline of said assessor. While we should be seeking to build with those with whom we are aligned, I often wonder if the assessment process plays out to identify how folks can grow, or to belittle them for how little they know. In my experience, these woke assessment “tools” become more popular the more privileged the environments you find yourself in: academia, philanthropic boardrooms, cocktail parties, and so on.

Also in my experience, these woke assessments are seldom extended with compassion. No, they are executed swiftly and abruptly. While I understand the urgency to build critical consciousness around all forms of oppression, I can’t help but notice the ivory-tower nature of performative wokeness. Some of my homies call this that “blue-check Twitter sh*t.” There is a wide chasm between requiring that people recognize the entirety of what makes us human and demonizing individuals for not fully regurgitating the buzzwords of your choosing.

And still, as this feeling becomes more and more common for me, I’ve noticed myself creeping into the self-doubting space of asking: Am I aware enough? Do they understand just how much I care? If I stumble into a reckless “no” to any of those questions, it’s a recipe for self-imposed catastrophic guilt.

I can overcalibrate for displays of enlightenment, exerting immense amounts of effort to prove I am knowledgeable about any issue at hand, but not truly figuring out my unique call to action. Ultimately, that becomes an exercise in disingenuity. Clance and Imes identify another behavior that those with imposter syndrome experience: seeking the approval of “superiors.” The superiors are those who, while assessing your wokeness, feel entitled to deliver the ultimate pollice verso,⁸ determining your fate vis-à-vis whether or not you’re conscious enough to carry on in shared space.

I imagine that even after years of working to support leaders across fields, lending my time and voice to various movements, there will always be a chance to be more conscious or “woke.” I believe it was Socrates who said, “I know that I know nothing.” Every act of introspection inspired by assessing my own “wokeness” returns me to this truth. If I hold that truth closely, I don’t have to worry too much about others’ assessments of me—because there is no assessment that can be given that magically completes the quest to recognize people’s humanity. That is a lifelong process, and only satisfied when one forms meaningful connections with others because of who they are, not just what they know.

WISENESS

I grew up in the age of Nintendo 64 and PlayStation. Yes, I am dating myself: I’m a millennial, and I wear it as a badge of honor. I often find myself to be the youngest person in the room. Perhaps many of my millennial peers can recall a time, as do I, when someone told them, “You’re wise beyond your years” as a form of flattery. (I can only imagine how Gen-Z folks feel hearing the phrase.) The compliment always comes from those I can confirm, or that I perceive, to be my elders. Having been raised by my Grandmother, I do appreciate the compliment, because it makes me think of the wisdom she exuded so effortlessly. But it often makes me wonder: what compels people to appraise someone else’s wisdom?

Wisdom is understood in so many ways: self-transcendence; the ability to exercise good judgment; having an abundance of experiences from which to draw. For the sake of keeping the “-ness” in my three Ws, I will offer that wiseness is the measure of being wise or exercising wisdom. I work in a space of supporting leaders and creating spaces for learning. For the leaders I support, exercising good judgment is highly important in having their leadership recognized. Transcending limitations is inspiring. Sharing a wealth of experiences allows individuals to connect with folks across many walks of life. All of this can be true, but the goalposts shift when wisdom is made inextricable from age—when the driving factor of our wiseness is the decade we were born. Wisdom and age are not a 1:1 tandem.

I’ve seen so many brilliant leaders who are afraid to take on increased risk and responsibility because they have been told, “You don’t have enough experience.” You’ll have twenty-something-year-olds working in agencies to end homelessness, who have formerly been without a home—for years of their lives—told, “You don’t have enough experience” to lead in significant ways. The irony.

When we ask ourselves about the measure of our wisdom, we should never be content with landing on our date of birth. For me, when doubt of my wiseness creeps in due to being the youngest person in the room, I recall the grief that I’ve endured, the tragedies I’ve turned into triumph, the seemingly endless moments of laughter I’ve shared with folks from across the world.

Doubt projected onto me by others and doubt I’ve internalized have stifled my development. Introspection is one antidote to the incendiary doubts we experience when imposter syndrome takes root. Introspection is the gateway to self-determination within our psyches. Ultimately, understanding why we experience the doubts we do and where they are coming from presents us with the choice to question what it is we need to overcome them. Not what someone else says we need. Not what we’ve been told we’re supposed to need. But what we know at our core, looking in that mirror, we truly need.

…

Whether the source is from reactions to Whiteness, Wokeness, or Wiseness, the doubts I unpack only make me more capable of asking myself the questions I must to catapult me to places of pride, fulfillment, and purpose. Imposter syndrome may not be going anywhere for many of us, but introspection will allow us to show up authentically.

Notes

1. Eli Watkins, “Pence leaves Colts game after protest during anthem,” CNN Politics, October 9, 2017.
2. Christian Allaire, “Why I’m Not Celebrating Thanksgiving This Year,” Vogue, November 25, 2020.
3. Trevor Robinson, “A Brief Rundown of Racism Within Advertising and Why It’s Still Happening Today,” Adweek, February 21, 2019.
4. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970).
5. Pauline R. Clance and Suzanne A. Imes, “The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention,” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice 15, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 241–47.
6. MTV News Staff, “Tupac Talks about Acting Goals in One of His Last Interviews,” MTV News, September 26, 1997.
7. “Lemon to Sen. Tim Scott: I don’t want to yell, but what are you doing?,” CNN Politics (video), CNN Tonight, March 11, 2021.
8. “Commodus Gives a Thumbs Down,” from Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott (2000, DreamWorks and Universal).

Kad Smith is the founder of Twelve26 Solutions, LLC. Smith is also a member of CompassPoint’s teacher team, a lead designer and cofacilitator of CompassPoint’s B.L.A.C.K Team Intensive, and he trains frequently in the organization’s public workshops. In his former role as a project director at CompassPoint, Smith specialized in program design and facilitation of the organization’s cohort leadership programs. He currently serves on the board of directors for Berkeley’s Ecology Center and GreenPeace Fund USA.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

One of the questions that often comes up in our popular workshop, Facilitative Leadership for Social Change, goes something like this,

“It’s great that I’m learning all of these practical leadership and facilitation skills, but what happens when I’m not the one leading or facilitating?”

How can we keep things rolling when we aren’t formally in charge and when formal leadership is perhaps not so skillful? My answer: There’s usually some opportunity to lead, ask good questions, and to facilitate from the chair!

Behind most of the practices, frameworks, and tools that we offer in Facilitative Leadership for Social Change (FL4SC) is at least one good question that can be asked to help to move a group towards realizing greater collaborative potential. The point is not to ask these in threatening or aggressive ways, but in a spirit of service to help make more transparent, intentional, accessible, equitable and shared a joint endeavor.

Here are some FL4SC-inspired questions to consider …

Purpose/Goals/Desired Outcomes of Meeting/Convening/Conversation

• What’s the purpose of (this) meeting/conversation? Why have we come together?
• Where are we trying to go? What is our vision of success?
• What outcomes are we striving for? What understanding do we want to achieve? What agreements do we want to build? What commitments do we want to make? What products do we want to generate? What (kind of) relationships are we trying to build? What spirit/feeling do we want to generate?

Stakeholders/The People

• Do we have the people we need to have in the room to have this conversation/make this decision?
• How do we get the people who are not here in on this?
• What are the implications of not including _______ ?

Decision-Making

• What is the decision (or decisions) we are trying to make here?
• Do we have the right information (and people) to be able to make the decision?
• How are we making this decision? Who makes the final decision?
• How are we communicating decisions we make here to those who are not here? Who needs to know?

The Process

• Where are we right now in this conversation/meeting?
• Is this process (the way that we are having this discussion) working for everyone?
• Is there some other way that we could go about this ?

Roles and Resources

• Who is facilitating?
• Who is taking notes?
• What other roles do we need to fill to support this work?
• What data and other resources do we need to have this conversation/do this work?

Power, Networks, and Love (Facets of the IISC Change Lens)

• Are we fully accounting for power dynamics in this meeting/conversation? Is this meeting equitably inclusive of and accessible to everyone who is participating?
• Have we made enough time to cultivate relationships/critical connections in this meeting? Who is not here who could and should be connected to what we are doing?
• Are what making enough space for both head and heart in this conversation/meeting? How could we make that possible?
• Do we all feel like we can speak our truths here? How could we make that possible?

Reprinted from the blog of the Interaction Institute for Social Change with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Kendra Hicks, Director of Radical Philanthropy at Resist, convened Justice is Essential, a three-part series. This conversation on “creative resistance” between adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon took place on February 17, 2021. In this excerpt, the speakers discuss the role of individuals in creative change and how paradigm shift is a lot like speculative sci-fi, because it requires imagining a world we have not lived in yet.

Kendra Hicks: I want to move us to the next part of our conversation, and I want to anchor us in this quote from The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity by Alex Khasnabish and Max Haiven. And the quote reads, “At its most superficial, the radical imagination is the ability to imagine the world, life, and social institutions not as they are, but as they might otherwise be. It is the courage and the intelligence to recognize that the world can and should be changed.” And so, I want us to invite us to zoom out beyond the “I” into the “We” collective space, because so much of the work of liberation is creative, speculative work. This is a muscle that both Toshi and adrienne, you work on often. How have you seen, in your work, movements, organizers, artists, using their radical imagination and building a collective creative practice as a response to the uprisings and the pandemic?

adrienne maree brown: What you see out there, Toshi? [Toshi: Huh?] What do you see?

Toshi Reagon: Well, first of all, I love “I”s. And I will testify the “I”s are the best “we”s. You know, during the Civil Rights movement, “We Shall Overcome”? My godfather, Pete Seeger, changed the words to “We Shall Overcome,” but the words were, “I’ll overcome.” It’s a “I” song. And “this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,” it’s an “I” song. I really love “I”s. And the reason why I love “I”s is because I think you can’t get no “we”s without “I”s.

adrienne maree brown: Keep it fractal, baby.

Toshi Reagon: Yes. And lots of times people will be like “We”—you know, they in a room—“We gonna…” you know, do something. But if every single person in that room has not said “I’m going to do something,” then the “we” is not going to happen. And so, I really adore…I guess, a couple of examples I have is you, adrienne maree brown, and your incredible, deep scholarship and love of Octavia Butler’s Parables. It might be one of the best examples of this that I have, but it’s like, it’s so multilayered what you’ve done with the three books. They’re all really different; they all cover different territory. They’re all community books, which means your voice is not the only voice in any of the books. Like, I forgot I was in this, Emergent Strategy. Somebody took a picture of my quote and sent it back to me, and I was like, wait, did I say that? So, it is you, expanding, opening up multiple venues or pathways or whatever, and then, you know, all of the people coming in. And it makes a great vibe, vibration—we use “vibration” forever—but it’s text, but you can feel it, it’s tangible. Because it’s so—I can’t tell you how many people have found themselves a room inside of one or all of those books. And even in our exploration, when we’ve been doing Octavia Parables, we often refer back to something in one of those books that somebody did.

So that, and then the other is, I had a really powerful experience in my other homeland of Durham, North Carolina. Our good friend Manju and another good friend were texting me and was like, you have to come down and teach us a song. So I was like, I mean, I’m happy to teach songs, but they were like, “No, you need to come down on this date and teach a song.” And the idea was, here they are, basically imagining, you know, a free place of Durham, North Carolina, without specifically the violence of the police, and specifically of the violence of legislative decisions that would actually not take care of the community. And they imagined it, because they know it can happen, and they know it’s true, and this is a great activist community.

So, basically, a city council meeting is coming up. There’s $93 million on the table, and the police are like, “We should have it. It belongs to us. We need to hire more police.” And they were like, “No, we don’t see that. What we do see is taking care of workers, public workers who haven’t gotten a salary bump in forever. What we do see is taking care of people who are being kicked out of their homes. What we do see is….” They saw all of these things, and they said it could happen, and so they created a movement towards it. They wrote out the plan. They were like, this is how you do it. They wrote the document—absolutely gorgeous document—then they made a circle. And in this circle, because the imagination can work multiple ways, you can imagine the steps of the past. And so, they actually were like, how can we show our community how important it is for us to see this now? Because we know before, when people have seeded things, it might take two years, five years, eight years, 10 years, 15 years, but they get things done.

adrienne marie brown: [interspersed] Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Toshi Reagon: And so, then, they brought the representation into the space.

So, they won that victory. I came and sang, taught them this song. They went to the city council, and they did a whole bunch of things. But they got up and had 80 people get up and sing this song.

adrienne maree brown: Exactly. I love that.

Toshi Reagon: And they won, so. A lot of “I”s.

adrienne maree brown: Exactly. Well, it’s beautiful. Because I think that’s it. I mean, we’re on the same wavelength here. First of all, I love it that I was on your list of examples, because you’re also on my list of examples, which is why we work together. But I was thinking of the work that you did, from you and your mom seeing the Parables and being like, this is something that we need to bring to community, to then turning it into the opera, to then turning that into a community engagement strategy. Right? That was like, every time the Parables opera come someplace, you totally have the permission. And people would be very satisfied if you just showed up, sang, and left. We would all just be like, “Thank you, thank you, thank you. ‘God is Change.’ I’m full.” Instead of doing it that way, each time, you have shown up and turned it into an opportunity to say, how does this community need to engage with these songs and this journey and this process? What is the path, the Parable path, for this community? And I feel like that, to me, is one of the ways we take the—you know, I feel like I’ve been following in your footsteps tried to learn, like, okay, how do I take my own creative impulse and nourish it, you know, as much as it needs to be nourished inside myself? Which I feel like you did with the standards; you were like, this is what the sound needs to be like. It’s going to be like this, older. The vocals are going to sound like this. It’s not just going to be any old teenybopper-whatever. This is a specific timbre that we’re looking for. And so, you’re  like, meeting your own need as an artist, but then also partnering with others.

And I’ll say, for this Black History Month—and also, earlier, when the pandemic first started—I did a series of prompts, just on Instagram, of just, like, here’s some prompts to write poems around. And now I’m doing the same thing for Black History Month where I’m like, here’s some prompts. These are things that I’m writing, that are my personal writing practice, that are helping me to bring Black history into the present, because time is nonlinear, and time is a construct, and all of these things are still happening to us right now. But I was like, what if I offer the prompts out and see what comes back? And I’ve been getting all these beautiful DMs and messages and videos from people who are like, “I made a poem. I wrote a story. I talked to my grandmother. I had this experience.”

So, on one level, I think that the “I” to the “We” is like, there’s something about really listening for what feels most nourishing to me as an artist, and how do I invite other people in to join me in that dance? And then I also, I love that defunding, or redistribution of resources from the police is also on your list, ’cause I’m like, that is a visionary directive. Like, that right there is a visionary creative directive, because in order—like, when people hear “defund the police,” it activates their imagination immediately, whether they realize it or not. And for some people, their imagination is like, “What? That could never happen!” Their imagination shuts them down, right? And then you have to contend with that. Like, why can’t I even imagine that? And for other people, they start asking the question of like, “What does it mean to defund the police? How do we deal?”

You know, the first question that people come up with is, “Well, what about the worst humans? What about the worst humans?” Like, if we don’t have the police, the worst humans are going to take over. To which we respond, the worst humans are in charge currently. The worst humans have already taken over, they’ve been in charge. They’re the ones who have this system in motion. The worst humans are the ones who have us going to unnecessary wars and closing borders where children and parents are trying to cross. The worst humans are the ones who have us locked up in jails and the ones who have continued the enslavement system through these prisons. The worst humans are the ones who are destroying our planet. The worst humans have been in charge for 250 years in this country, and what we’re saying is we want some of the other humans to have an opportunity to experiment with what it would look like to try other methods that address our mental health, and our physical health, and our spiritual health, and our well-being in our communities. So, to me, I love when we land those things.

And you know, we know we’re on the right track when humans who have major power are like, “Don’t say that. Don’t even plant that seed.” We’re like, oh, seed planted; we are all gardeners, because gardeners and farmers are also the creative visionaries of the world. So, I really think that Movement for Black Lives right now is on to something. Like, I think it’s full of creatives and has been, like, letting that unleash amongst our people, that now—I mean, I don’t know if it feels this way to you, but now, when I see movement in the streets, when I attend a march or a gathering, we’re so much more centered around that dance, the art, the celebration of our aliveness, as opposed to the focus on our death, right? Even when we are showing up to combat a death that has happened, we’re showing up with a second line mentality, right, that we will celebrate our aliveness, and we will keep moving towards aliveness even as we make these demands. And I think that, to me, that’s a trend I want us to keep following, because then the other thing we’re constantly trying to create is a larger and larger and larger movement for justice so that ultimately everyone can see themselves inside of a justice future, a liberated future. And I think that creativity, the way that we practice it—not as an aside or an addendum to movement, but as a heart of movement, the vision, the beauty, the songs are the heart of it—I think that becomes the beating pulse that everyone can move towards and is compelled towards, right? We want to be that light in the dark, right? I think about, it’s like we have to be the light in the dark.

Toshi Reagon: I love this, and I love this. You know, I hope it’s still up on YouTube, but Movement for Black Lives National Convention is such a powerful, collaborative motion. And you know, talk about the “We” and the “I,” and the jumps to the imagination. Like, it’s—everything is in there. [adrienne: It’s all in there.] I’m really begging for them to reintroduce that piece to the public in a way that it can stay contemporary. Because you know, people are like, “Well, the convention is over.” I’m like, no, but all of these things you need to see, like, they’re all in action.

adrienne maree brown: But it’s also a documentary on like, what all needs what. I think it’s so important because it also shows that, you know, to be an organizer is a fundamentally creative act, right? That’s why when we were talking about Octavia’s Brood, we were like, all organizing is science fiction, you know? It’s that we are dreaming and co-creating a world that we have not lived in. We’ve never experienced it. We have no reason to be so committed to it other than that our visions tell us that there’s a better way, there’s another way. And I’m like, to me, when we see what movements are up to right now—and not just in the US, right? I think that there’s also a global unfurling of this visionary creative. You know, I look at the farmers in India. I look at what’s happening in Lebanon. I look at what’s happening in Puerto Rico. I look at all these places, and I’m like, yeah, we’re on to something. We’re recognizing that the age of controlled monocultural endeavors is coming to an end. The supremacy-based endeavors are coming to an end. And there’s a ton of room for our diversity: our biodiversity, our creative diversity, and our remembering. All of our peoples, we started a song. We started with song; we had songs that gave us instructions for how to be here. And now it’s time to listen for those again.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

For good reason, the world of work is rarely seen as a liberatory space, but can it become so? This webinar in our Remaking the Economy series looks at the workplace of today while exploring how our work lives might be transformed to support health and wellbeing, promote restorative justice, and provide not just “jobs” but livelihoods.

Alissa Quart is a journalist and director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. In the discussion, Quart asks what has been learned from the experience of COVID-19. Amid the pandemic, Quart notes, Americans “saw people who were essential and then they unsaw them again. So, I am trying to figure out whether solidarity and collectivism is going to win in the end, and this kind of awareness, seeing the unseen labor, or are we just going to go back to this, like, confusion of what’s important.”

For her part, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Economic Thought and Practice, notes that building a more positive and humane future of work requires a values-centered approach. As Gordon Nembhard puts it, “We often talk about the seven principles of co-ops but not the values of co-ops. But the values of co-ops are really what matter… I think that is what is really going to get us transformed to a new paradigm and to new ways of being.”

Emily Kawano of the US Solidarity Economy Network draws out the difference between jobs and livelihoods. Today’s economy, of course, is structured around jobs, but Kawano notes there are other ways paths to achieve livelihoods, holding up Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi, as an example of using community production—ranging from community gardens to high-tech 3-D printing-based manufacturing—as an integrated strategy to support overall well-being. “Thinking about livelihood,” Kawano says, “really supports this belief that we are, that part of us at least is hard-wired to work together; we’re social beings, we’re cooperative, and we engage in mutual aid. It is very consistent with a vision and the values of a solidarity economy.”

Additional topics covered in the discussion include the following:

• What work in a solidarity economy might be like, and how a solidarity economy would deal with contemporary challenges such as automation
• How practices from the system of incarceration affect the broader world of work and to what extent worker co-ops can disrupt those patterns
• Actions philanthropy and nonprofits can take to improve the world of work
• Visions of what a restorative future of work could look like

Resources

Jessica Gordon Nembhard, “Incarcerated Workers’ Co-ops: New Frontier for the US Cooperative Movement?” Co-Producing Justice: International Social Economy Network, Glasgow, Scotland: December 17, 2018.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard, “How Prisoner Co-ops Reduce Recidivism: Lessons from Puerto Rico and Beyond, NPQ, May 19, 2020.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard, “Racial Equity in Co-ops: 6 Key Challenges and How to Meet Them,” NPQ, October 21, 2020.

Emily Kawano and Adam Simpson, “Episode 16: ‘Resist & Build’: Discussing the Solidarity Economy,” The Next System Podcast, February 12, 2018.

Emily Kawano and Julie Matthei, “System Change: A Basic Primer to the Solidarity Economy,” NPQ, July 8, 2020.

Shannon Henry Kleiber, “A Parenting Movement Emerges from the Pandemic” [interview of Alissa Quart], To the Best of Our Knowledge, May 22, 2021.

Ann Larson, “My Pandemic Year Behind the Checkout Counter,” NPQ, March 24, 2021.

Arwa Mahdawi, “For the struggling middle class, Alissa Quart has a message: you’re not alone,” Guardian, June 20, 2018.

Alissa Quart, Astra Taylor, and Brittany M. Powell, “How we can truly repay our frontline health workers: clear their debts,” Guardian, July 2, 2020.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.