Love Work: Liberatory Leadership in Practice

Letter From The Editors

Grounded in a desire to radically reimagine our view of leadership, The Leadership Learning Community’s 10-month Liberatory Leadership Community of Practice (CoP) brought together eight powerful and inspiring racial and reproductive justice leaders to reflect, discuss, experiment, and embody liberatory leadership practices. Taking place both virtually and in person, this collaborative experience supported participants in expanding their current liberatory practice toolkit by exploring topics including liberatory values, operations, accountability processes, funding, and research. 

The Community of Practice aimed to surface, incubate, and innovate liberatory leadership practices to inform each organization’s individual work as well as to inform the broader field and move us closer to collective liberation. While visioning this space, two questions anchored our dreamings: 1) Who needs deep time to dream, reflect and vision towards a future of collective liberation, and 2) What does it look like to offer a collaborative, iterative, and experimental oasis to conspire towards a more just and joyful liberatory leadership ecosystem?

We decided to invite in BIPOC leaders focused on changing the world in new and innovative ways. Our mostly virtual gathering space served as a clearing to explore the tools, practices, and capacities needed to practice liberatory leadership and support liberatory leaders, but it also served as a space for us to build deep relationships, surface concerns about dominant habits in nonprofits, and share honest reflections about the state of our movements.

Ultimately, the questions that remained persistent throughout our ten-month practice and beyond, were not limited to movement infrastructure or leadership development (though we discussed that too). They centered on love, on rest and care, on the principles and values that anchor us in our pursuit of justice and equity. As one of the participants, Felicia Griffin, so beautifully put it,

“this movement is about more than changing a couple of policies. It is about how we change how we be, how we live, how we are going to get to liberation.” 

To that we add, it is also how about how can we soften our focus on the road ahead and trust, even when the miles keep ticking and the roadblocks are plenty, that there are legions of us doing our just and joyous work in corners we cannot see, whose intentions feed the nutrient-rich soil of our ecosystem, whose effects ripple out and fortify our work in invisible and spine strengthening ways. We may not always be aware of who all is doing work that is scaffolding our own, but we can trust that when the time is right and when the resources are available, we will find each other in rooms being prepared for us by folks who believe in our visions.

Third spaces like the Liberatory Leadership Community of Practice are as important to the personal transformation of our leadership as it is to the movement ecosystem. It is our hope that more spaces such as these are robustly resourced, and that the leaders in them are given ample opportunity to iterate their liberatory visions. The purpose of this offering is to share insight into the reflections, wisdom, and dreams of the leaders who participated in the CoP. We hope that this offering will inspire people to begin (or continue) thinking about the role of liberatory practices within their lives, organizations, and movements and to assess if there is room for more spaciousness, imagination, and expansive ways of being. Additionally, we hope to generate conversations and greater transparency about the challenge and reward of practicing liberatory leadership in, and beyond, the nonprofit industrial complex. 

See you on our continued journey towards liberation.

With love and gratitude,

Sadia Hassan and Iman Mills Gordon