Bella Celnik
December 31st was Deborah’s last day as LLC’s Co-Executive Director, and marked her transition as an LLC Senior Consultant. This was not how I imagined her sendoff (virtual celebration).
In our blog, we include the voices of not only LLC staff, but also trusted leadership and racial equity practitioners, by speaking on a wide range of topics that advance an equity-centered agenda
Dig into our blog posts below and share with your community!
Happy New Year!
Like many of you, LLC is kicking off the year with a set of new goals and an emerging vision for the future. We hope you are as excited about LLC’s future as we are, and we invite you to be our partners as LLC sets out to realize our goal of advancing leadership for liberation.
We are happy to announce that the networkweaver site will soon become a project of the Leadership Learning Community. The networkweaver site has been an invaluable resource for beginners wanting to learn about networks and experienced network weavers eager to deepen their skills or connect with others. Networkweaver has also been at the forefront of supporting BIPOC and innovative network voices.
Wow, so this is really happening.
This month, LLC celebrates its 20th Anniversary. Wow! At the beginning of the year when we talked about coming up on the 20 year mark and reflections we might want to share about the future, we could not have anticipated the pandemic, massive uprising for racial justice, or corresponding level of state repression. Quite frankly, I was finding it very hard to write this blog caught up in anxiety about what will happen over the next months.
This Saturday marks July 4th, Independence Day, a day where Americans celebrate the USA’s Declaration of Independence in 1776, freedom, and liberty for all with barbeques and fireworks. The last time LLC reached out to our network about a holiday it was Juneteenth, the celebration of African Americans emancipation from chattel slavery in 1865.
Juneteenth, a holiday many are only recently discovering, celebrates the emancipation of the last U.S. slaves more than two years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The racially disproportionate impact of COVID-19 and murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Sean Reed, Tony McDade, and many others at the hands of police and white supremacists reveal that while emancipated, black Americans are still seeking full liberation.
At LLC our hearts are heavy, and for those of us who identify as people of color, we are exhausted. On this National Day of Mourning, we want to acknowledge and hold the pain and trauma many of you are experiencing as well. As evidenced by the murder of George Floyd and the disproportionate COVID-19 deaths of people of color, we see that racism is killing people of color.
The COVID-19 pandemic presents the leadership field with the challenge of both responding to the crisis in our communities while learning to operate in fundamentally different ways. It also offers us the opportunity to reimagine how leadership in a Post-COVID-19 world could look. The “new” normal doesn’t have to just replicate the imperfect and inequitable old normal. It would be a missed opportunity, and a disservice to our communities to just go back to business as usual.
In the midst of all of the fear, anger, and anxiety I, like perhaps many of you, am experiencing right now, I’ve been pushing myself to focus on appreciation for areas of abundance in my life. I’m thankful to have my health, a safe and healthy family, meaningful employment and an amazing network of friends, colleagues, and friend-colleagues (frigues?), who have reached out to connect with me during this scary time. I’ve felt fortunate to be in relationship with them, to share virtual space with them, and to have the opportunity to continue to learn from them. Every webinar, conversation, internal LLC conversation, virtual coffee or brunch I’ve joined in the last few weeks has really helped me think about how leadership can adapt to the new reality precipitated by COVID-19. What has struck me is how generous folks are with their amazing ideas, rather than proprietary.
Given the fundamental shake-up COVID-19 has done to the world, one of my amazing friend-colleagues, Stephanie Yazgi, has been encouraging folks to consider “reckless reimagination” as a way to think about what our work and world could be like. This has inspired me to begin recklessly reimagining leadership. As I have been talking with folks and thinking about what leadership could look like, three questions arose: