When I was new to loving kindness meditation (and let’s be honest, I still am), there would come a point in my morning practice where the disembodied voice on the other end of my phone would tell me to train my attention on an object or a point on the wall and soften my gaze. And like the stubborn little cat lady I am, I would take a deep breath and slowly narrow my eyes to a suspicious squint before clamping them shut. And then, I’d realize… “Wait, that’s not helpful, now I can’t see anything!” At which point, I’d open them again and practice softening my gaze, letting the tension melt through my shoulders, my spine, and finally my heart.
I have been working this year to train my attention on the light that lies juuuuust beyond the fuzzy horizon of my softened gaze. It is a learning that I have tried to practice in my role as the Liberatory Leadership Manager, co-facilitating our many multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious learning spaces, including the Whole Communities Virtual Learning Space in collaboration with Leader’s Trust and the Center for Third World Organizing, the ten-month Liberatory Leadership Community of Practice and our monthly BIPOC Affinity Gatherings.
It is a lesson I am still learning as I transition out of my role at the end of this month. It is natural to harden against what necessarily demands our transformation. I know this, and still, there are moments I harden into what I know and not necessarily what I know is possible. Rather than rooting in that hardening stance, I have been opening myself up to the gift of a transition that will allow me to rest when I need it most, at the end of the year, at the door of yet another long winter. Slowly, slowly, I am softening into the abundance that endings can offer us. Today, I am thankful that transitions are a liminal space, a quiet clearing where anything is possible. A place where you can ask for what you need and, with enough trust, what you want.
Softening into Liberatory Practice
One of the learnings central to LLC’s forthcoming Liberatory Leadership Framework is the assertion that there is a value in softening, and we have seen that born out in the embodied wisdom of Black and Brown women-identified leaders whose brilliance has enriched our virtual gatherings. As our movements and organizations “navigate the scarcity created by economic, racial, and gender inequality” emblematic of this political moment, it can be enticing to lock into a rigid stance that is over-reliant on rigid structures, binary thinking, and extractive normative practices in an effort to reconstitute power into a thing we both understand and can wield effectively to maintain control in an ever-shifting political landscape.
“The systems make us hard. Rest keeps us tender. There is power in our collective rest and care.”- Tricia Hershey
As one of my colleagues, Iman Mills Gordon, pointed out recently in one of our weekly team meetings, “We keep bumping up against the assertion that strategy is not soft”–that it somehow is antithetical to softness, or as a participant in our Whole Communities Virtual Learning Space shared: “Sometimes our visions of liberation are different, and some people’s visions involve supremacy, and it winds up causing harm.” The value in softness (which has many names: love, grace, kindness, care, curiosity, mercy, compassion) in our leadership practice is that it makes us pliable and creates room for us and others to make mistakes and show up differently with time.
In a peer support conversation during our December Community of Practice session focused on rest, Executive Director Malaika Parker shared exactly how Black Organizing Project was deepening its culture of care by not only shifting to a 4-day work week but also instituting seasonal breaks (one in summer and and another winter) and conducting quarterly audits to make sure their policies were “in alignment with their vision of the world.” It is exactly this willingness to reimagine organizational policy and practice that allows us the rest and fallow time needed to tend to liberatory futures.
If I have learned anything from my time at LLC, it is that love is the point. My colleagues at LLC and the BIPOC leaders I had the honor of learning alongside shared over and over again that love was the renewable resource that fueled their integrity tank. In speaking to this point, our CoP participants named a few things in particular. According to Navila Rashid, Director of Training and Survivor Advocacy, it was important for HEART, a reproductive and survivors’ justice organization serving Muslim communities, to develop an organizational framework rooted in the Islamic concept of Rahma, or compassion, that was resonant with their Islamic values. For Ditra Edwards, Executive Director at Sista Fire RI, love is simply part of SFRI’s culture in ways that undergird the organizational infrastructure. She takes her cue from Ella Baker’s edict to “love the people.” When I asked the group, “how does love inform your work?” Ditra Edwards answered: “to walk this earth, I have to understand the love between my mother and I. To be black in America is to be loved. A better question is: how do you let your love and vision lead you?”
Photo by Aisha Shillinford, Artistic Director of Intelligent Mischief
Practice Makes Practice: We Need Third Spaces for Liberatory Leadership to Thrive
Third spaces like LLC’s BIPOC Affinity Gatherings, Whole Communities Virtual Learning Space, Liberatory Leadership Community of Practice as well as Change Elemental’s Prefiguring Future’s Lab are incredibly important to the movement ecosystem, and it is my hope that they are robustly resourced and that leaders in them are given ample opportunity to iterate their liberatory visions. These spaces have the power to break down silos so leaders can both articulate a shared vision and share tools and resources around how they are operationalizing parts of that vision according to their capacities and resources.
One critical benefit of the Liberatory Leadership Community of Practice has been its ability to serve as a bridge between Black and Muslim leaders working towards racial and gender equity at a time when Black, Muslim, and Queer communities abroad and at home are facing multiple layers of state-sanctioned violence. It is important, now more than ever, that we do not abandon each other to work alone toward our own liberation and that we circle around organizations and funders who have expressed solidarity with Palestine during this ongoing genocide.
“This movement is more than changing a couple of policies. It is how we change how we be, how we live, how we are going to get to liberation.” – Felicia Griffin, Transformative Leaders for Change
During our July gathering, Executive Director, Darakshan Raja shared Muslims for Just Future’s Theory of Change, inspired by Black Abolitionists and Divest/Invest strategies meant to combat criminalization in Muslim communities. In response, Ditra Edwards, Executive Director of Sista Fire RI, shared how Muslims for Just Future’s framework, which includes formulating policy demands, replenishing mutual aid funds, and collecting oral histories, mirrored Sista Fire RI’s framework in that it addresses “government abandonment and the implication for our communities.” Ditra continued sharing, “We are the social emergency. If we don’t band together to fight for our own liberation and freedom, we will not survive this.”
I began this reflection with a meditation on softening our gaze so that we can begin to look up, up, and out. Not as a way to distract ourselves from the current political moment but so that we can train our attention beyond it into the future we deserve and know is on the way. We will survive this moment and the many moments after, not because deepening liberatory practices in our leadership will somehow inoculate us from conflict or make the difficult work ahead less so, but because practicing our liberatory values now will help us build a bridge from where we are to where we want to be. And yes, there can be many bridges. But if we must go together, I want to sell you the bridge built on mutual trust, care, and reciprocity.
In the End: An Ask
The questions that remained persistent during our ten-month practice were not necessarily about movement infrastructure. They were about being, presence. How could we ever abandon each other when our work so deeply binds us? 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 seed nutrient-rich soil, 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.
Part of strengthening the movement lies in resourcing the organizations and therefore leaders, tending the soil of our collective liberatory futures. Communities of Practice and multi-year general operating grants are two ways that we can invest in the visions of BIPOC leaders right now. As you engage in conversations with partners and funding bodies, we invite you to share that it is worth our time, energy, and resources to build and strengthen organizations layering on liberatory leadership practices while serving as robust political homes for nascent organizers and emergent movement leaders. As Malaika Parker said in our gathering: “To do well and be well requires resources.” How do we make sure that resources are being freed up to allow our liberatory visions to come to life?
As we transition into a long and possibly unpredictable winter (hi, climate change!), I invite you to reflect on your rest practices and pick a few of your favorites to put into practice.
Examples of rest practices that can become organizational policy
- Building in fallow time by blocking out time to reflect, dream, nap, and step away from screens during the week.
- Consider supervision check-ins that take place over the phone while taking a walk or over Zoom while sharing a meal. What kind of connection does this make possible?
- Invest in wholeness and wellness by allowing employees to access their medical benefits as soon as they start.
- Expanding the definition of personal time to include mental health days, menstrual leave, and parental time or caretaking time.
- Incorporating art and wellness practices: At LLC, we held a play and mending series, which helped us incorporate play and mending practices into our weekly staff meetings and learning spaces.
- Redefining professional development to include what brings people joy. One of our colleagues took a trip to Portland to connect with other communications professionals in the area and also to hike, eat well, and reflect.
- Retooling Year-End Evaluations for Reflection and Celebrations. One of the highlights of my time at LLC has been breaking through the candied gloss of performance evaluations to a quiet clearing of reflection space, earnest offerings of support, and bids for support and connection.
- Modeling flexibility and follow through when colleagues need support.
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