Nikki Dinh

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Reflection: Start by taking a deep breath in and out. Close your eyes and imagine yourself launching into the multiverse where you are lightning-fast and can hover over the present, past, and future as you please. You catch glimpses of what has been, what is, and what will be as you’re space traveling. You wave to loved ones and beloved community from your life so far. You smile as you pass future people who you will get to know and enjoy later in your life.

If it feels right, go towards a past time where you were really proud of yourself. When was that? Remember, traveling fast may also mean there may be multiple moments you’re noticing. Acknowledge all the goodness. Don’t brush off any of them.

Journey for a few minutes and enjoy these scenes of joy, learning, and growth. When you’re ready to come back to Earth, take a few deep breaths to start regrounding. Plant your feet to the ground and reconnect to gravity and the home of the present.

1. On change in leadership

In 2024, LLC hosted two concurrent learning cohorts on leadership transitions and co-facilitated a field gathering of executive leaders, recruiters, researchers, and intermediaries on transitions in partnership with ProInspire. Leaders in these spaces studied transitions, offered peer coaching, and heard the best learnings from those who have walked this path many times before. The wisdom we gained with leaders was immense and compiled in this learning and resource padlet and also these blogs. 

In short, transitions are adaptive challenges, and they differ from leader to leader and organization to organization. If you’re walking this journey right now, know you’re not alone. Reach out to us if you’d like to discuss transitions, and if you’re looking for a place to start, we offer this transition worksheet with a facilitation guide.

2. On change in organizations.

“Love is typically considered a peripheral notion with no place in our organizational cultures and conflicting perspectives on how much space it should occupy in our broader social movements. Over the past few years, my conversations with many liberatory leaders who have been in this movement for much longer than I have helped me better understand and truly appreciate the many facets and ultimate power of love.” Iman Mills Gordon from the Leading with Love blog (February 2024).

In 2024, LLC leaned into love. This led us to host a five-part virtual series on mending, covering conflict, sashiko as a practice model for relationship repair, intergenerational workplaces, reparations, and art as a way to explore harmony and disharmony. These conversations and deep hang sessions on mending, generative conflict, organizational (and systems) change, and care held us while we were experiencing unexpected ruptures and shifts at LLC. Know that we needed these spaces as much as you did and benefitted from them as well.

Below are some words and resources that carried us through change in 2024. It is clear to us that mending and change in organizations is ultimately change in ourselves and our movement as well. For us, this was culture shifting towards just work in just and joyous ways.

“Leaders are navigating the work of supporting their organizations in the now, while also practicing the visionary leadership that can lead to brighter tomorrows.”
- Ericka Stallings
“Mending is an opportunity to be more intentional about how we [progressive organizations] work together despite our different approaches. The study of mending offers tools to move through potential conflict and remain focused on our shared end goals.”
- Iman Mills Gordon
“The body keeps the score when we have conflict, and [conflict] is part of the mending process. When done well, it is also tending to what the body is holding and what has experienced rift can be woven back together.” 
- Marquita James
“In any moment where you're feeling deep grief around conflict, invite others to help you disrupt it.” 
- Aida Cuadrado Bozzo
“Mending as a way to tend to both interpersonal and societal ruptures so we can heal and repair both forwards and backward. Thinking about rupture or conflict as a knot or tangle in the fabric of a story, some are deeper and take longer to tease out and others are just wrinkles that, even once you undo them, shape the narrative in a meaningful way.” 
- Sadia Hassan
“Organizations are places of practice, play, and innovation, and models of values-alignment as much as they are places for deliverables, outcomes, and returns on investments.” 
- Nikki Dinh

So, how are we applying love, mending, and cultural shifts to our work?

  • We are creating spaces for our team to reflect on conflict and our work to deepen our understanding of conflict resolution and liberatory practices. We collectively support each other, engage in conversations, and share tips for healing and joy. Here is a worksheet for individuals and teams to begin mending for you to use as well. 
  • We are working to create more practice spaces and tools to help our team navigate conflict with a liberatory lens, exploring ways to learn and unlearn. If you’d like to join in spaces like this, our public offering includes the monthly BIPOC Affinity Group. 
  • We are sharing our learnings in the virtual learning spaces and communities of practice we hold to propagate the tools and practices leaders are engaging to address conflict, embrace transitions, and navigate power. We offer this culminating resource on learnings from our mending series as a place to start. 
  • We are making it a clear habit to uplift, amplify, and make visible the wisdom of more leaders – particularly those whose voices are often silenced or excluded and especially that of Black women. This includes our staff and many of you. See HOME is Where the LOVE is zine, Leadership and Race: A Call To Each Other report, and the BIPOC Editorial Series blogs.
  • We continue to try on and practice shared and distributed leadership within our organization. This year, what has helped us was revisiting our values and staying transparent with our team through change. See Exploring Liberatory Leadership: Director-Level Insights into the Journey of Distributed Leadership blog.

3. On changing together

“Of my proudest moments at LLC this year were our in-person gatherings and the BIPOC Affinity Group virtual space. I appreciated seeing how much folks connected and enjoyed themselves and how we provided a comfortable and joyous space for folks to deepen learnings and share knowledge.”
- Alexandra Urdaneta

In 2024, LLC had the honor of holding space for liberatory leaders in the social good sector. We hosted several communities of practice, including the Liberatory Leadership Community of Practice, Whole Communities, the RSCF ED Learning Circle, and a treasured gathering of liberatory leaders called Holding Space: Space Travel 2024. We also worked with and interviewed dozens of leaders for our pinnacle 2024 report: Leadership and Race. Lastly, we held a monthly virtual space: the BIPOC Affinity Group. These are spaces that mirrored our organization’s make-up and centered, among many attributes, Black, queer, and gender fluid, Muslim, women of color, immigrant, and refugee leaders. They also invited relationship-building, conversations about lineage, and dreams of bright possibilities.

Photo by Amira Maxwell.

What did we learn? Below are a few reflections from these spaces and where you can read more about them.

  • “The beauty can sometimes be obscured. And so we wanted to show that, yes, we recognize the struggle of leadership and race, but also the beauty of who we are and the amazingness of what we have together.” – Ericka Stallings from the Leadership and Race Stakeholder Gathering (November 2024). 
  • “​​I have to practice being free in my first home, my body, so I can be free with others. To do that, I surround myself with beauty and leave myself tiny reminders (polaroids, plant clippings, knick-knacks from travels) of all the lives I’ve lived. In a recent Whole Communities virtual gathering, a beloved participant reminded me that “movement at the pace of your life is part of the liberation process.” She reminded me that getting free and staying free meant honoring the ebbs and flows of our daily lives. To do that, we must rest, reflect, invite dissonance and beauty, and be willing to start over many times.” – Sadia Hassan from HOME is Where Love Is, a zine of the Whole Communities Project (October 2024). 
  • Create space to claim our power and build relationships in multiple ways: Racial justice leadership requires us to lean into interdependence, to turn to rather than against each other by building deep and authentic relationships. The change we seek “requires deeper collaboration, trust, relationships, and community.” – Ericka Stallings and Iman Mills Gordon from Leadership and Race: A Call To Each Other Report (October 2024).
  • “Play is still needed more than ever.” – Nikki Dinh from Holding Space: Space Travel 2024.

4. On change in ourselves

“Prioritizing reflection space is necessary for leadership in these times.”

- Nikki Dinh

It is woven into all parts of this blog. Having time to do inner work can help us grow, affirm our knowledge, and work with our shadow areas. Where to start? Build a meditation or breathwork practice. Incorporate exercise and movement in your life. Sleep, rest, and set healthy expectations at work. Make it an organizational practice to pause and digest learnings. What is working? What is asking for attention? How do we give it attention? 

The practice of slowing down is also the practice of letting go of the chase, interrupting the scrolling, relaxing the cortisone or adrenaline high, and temporarily turning off responsive reflexes we might have all gotten too used to as fighters in this movement. We share more in the How to Time/Space Travel (and Do It Safely) blog.  And if you’d like to do some reflection today, you can also use our Brain Gifts and Leadership worksheet as a starting point for change within yourself.

Photo by Amira Maxwell

As we close out 2024, we are proud of all the LLC Team and community have been able to achieve together, our efforts to share support and connection, and our ability to innovate, dream, and imagine in collaboration. This dreaming work has continued transforming us as an organization and as individuals. If you were also touched and want to support our work moving forward, we encourage you to donate. Your donation makes it possible for LLC to move as a partner, cooperating rather than competing and seeking relationships not just transactions. If you’d like to be in a deeper support relationship, please reach out. This support enables LLC to take risks, push boundaries, experiment, and share out our learning freely.