Unitarian blog praises Spirit in Action

I saw a great blog entry about the workshop we gave at Third Sector New England the other day and I wanted to share it with you. 

Circles of Change as Organizing: Cynthia Suarez

Cynthia Suarez has been a participant in SIA’s Circles of Change  program.  (Her comments are also relevant to the Leadership Training Network, which is currently accepting applications for a training coming up in January).  Here are some of Cindy’s thoughts about Circles of Change:

I’ve been trained in Circles before, in a very different way, in the Yukon with indigenous people. It was out in the wild and very experiential. They were more concerned with having you understand the values and life that support circles, and not big on methodology. One thing that I was seeking and got from the Spirit in Action training was more of a sense of structure. The focus on healing divisions was particularly important. The Yukon model is a restorative justice model, which starts with an assumption of sameness. It was good to experience ways of actually working with difference head on. I like having a variety of approaches available.

I’m the Training Director in my network, and I’m a black Puerto Rican woman. Our new strategic directions has a core goal of connecting mostly white-led statewide groups to community-based groups, and in doing so to more groups led and defined by people of color. I suggested that how we do this work is very important. We don’t want to go into these sessions asking people of color we don’t know to join our predetermined projects. It’s a fine balance of working together to advance our goals and being open enough to build authentic relationships and learn. We plan to use circles as a core process for this work.

I exposed the organizers in my network to circles and they loved it. Some were concerned about their ability to do them. I felt they were thinking, “I’m not a charismatic person of color, how could I do this?” For me, Spirit In Action demystifies circle leadership. It provides concrete planning steps, as well as create a space were the principles are lived so you get a clear sense of how it ties together.

People want to do this relationship building, vision developing work, but are at a loss for how to start. Organizers in my network struggle to balance leadership development and the campaign driven outcomes central to the work.   

We use a one-on-one relationship building model and while it is great, I think another space, a group space, will help us do leadership development in a more exponential way. Rather than one organizer “developing” a group of leaders, the organizer creates conditions where the leaders learn together, from many sources. The circle model brings in a much needed heart focus, so that it’s not just the analytical approach of “do this because it’s in your own best interest.” 

The circle model also moves us closer to a systemic view. By hearing different people you get a better sense of what the system looks like. Everyone is in the position to teach something as well as learn.   

I’ve used circles to help one of our state-wide groups develop their strategic plan for the year. It’s been a tough year for this group, and when you have a group of passionate activists, there’s always a potential for tension. They developed a shared understanding of the work they wanted to do this year, obstacles to doing that work, principles to drive their work, and a detailed plan of action for the year. It was the first time they were able to have this sort of collective input and build understanding and buy-in. Their ability to work together is really taking off. Linda helped me plan these circles.

I’ve used the Healing Divisions exercises in a gathering we held recently that had a focus on racial justice. It included the state groups in our network in six New England states and New York state, plus other groups working on racial justice that we want to build relationships with. We’re just starting to use circles in this work.

The circles model is important in working towards equalizing the voices at the table. It tends to be organizers, who are the lynchpins of the work, who want this. An organizer who is a man of color said to me, “I don’t want to bring other people into an organization where I don’t have a voice.” The circles exercises are a great start for doing what is really difficult work.

I haven’t experienced many approaches to collective visioning. I love those exercises, how it moves you from your individual vision to the collective vision. It helps move the work from being issue driven to vision driven. 

Linda is a great support. It’s great to have someone so smart and experienced to talk through circle design. She’s a life-saver. It helps me to have someone of her stature devoting her energy to circle work. It’s so different being committed to racial justice and actually having the skills to do something about it. She keeps in close contact with me. She’s driven out to meet with me in Boston. She’s been so interested in what I have to say. It’s rare for experienced people in their fifties to be interested in the ideas of people in their thirties the way she is. She says that she thinks that we’re the source of new ideas for alternative paradigms and frameworks, which I think is true. But this is not often even acknowledged, much less valued by nonprofit leaders. When my friends and I have met to talk about this stuff, there is an overwhelming feeling that we might not be able to shift organizations that exist. But Linda share my vision of what could be. She values questioning everything, our very assumptions, which I love, but seems to be scary and “not the work” for many nonprofit leaders. That gives me faith and helps me feel more confident in what I know. 

In my network we focus on infrastructure building. I’ve been thinking about how to create spaces where paradigm pioneers can thrive, spaces for creativity that are not driven by direct outcomes, spaces for regeneration, visioning, and hope. I think of them as generative nodes in the infrastructure, between organizations, as opposed to a think tank model.

Circles of Change workshop at TSNE Conference

Hi, this is Susan, Spirit in Action’s new web manager.  I’m excited to be putting up our second post because Linda Stout and Pamela Freeman  presented a workshop in Boston yesterday at the  Third Sector New England Nonprofit Workout 2007 Conference. 

The workshop was called Circles of Change: Creating New Ways of Working Together.   People experienced and learned about developing a collective vision that propels us into the future and inspires and energizes us toward creative action. 

That is at the heart of our work, and a good introduction to Spirit in Action.

After the conference, the TSNE folks plans to post a podcast of the workshop, and we’ll link to it when it’s up.

Since this is an introduction post, here is a little more about Linda and Pamela.

Linda Stout, a grassroots organizer and activist for 25 years, is a 13th-generation Quaker born to a tenant-farming family. In 1985, she founded the Piedmont Peace Project, which attracted national attention for its success in building a powerful multi-racial, multi-class organization that made both local and national political change. In 1995, Linda became executive director of The Peace Development Fund and initiated several groundbreaking projects, which explored ways to build a winning progressive Movement for change. Linda founded Spirit in Action in January 2000 to seek out transformative tools, models and resources for building a powerful and visionary progressive movement.  

Pamela Freeman, a longtime social activist, is the founder of the Philadelphia Black Women’s health project and a cofounder of Playback for Change, an improv theater company that has a focus on looking at race, class, rank, privilege and gender. She is also a former board member of Spirit in Action and Training for Change. Pamela is a therapist and facilitator who resides in Philadelphia. She is in the Community Dharma program at Spirit Rock meditation and also leads trainings on nonviolent communication

Mind, Body & Soul of Movement Building

Spirit in Action Executive Director Linda Stout has been named recipient of the 2007 Frances Crowe Award for social and economic justice.  This award comes from the National Priorities Project, a group that clarifies federal data so that people can understand and influence how their tax dollars spent.

Linda received the award on Sunday, October 28 at an event with the theme of Creating Better Federal Budget Priorities.  Other speakers include Rachel Maddow, a national radio host for Air America Radio; Matthew Rothschild, magazine editor, The Progressive, and author, You Have No Rights:  Stories of America in an Age of Repression; and Greg Speeter, the executive editor of NPP.

Here is the speech Linda gave:

Mind, Body & Soul of Movement Building

Thank you. I am so honored to receive this amazing award. Francis Crowe is a heroine in our work for change, and one of the many elders whose shoulders we stand on in our journey to create a just and peaceful world. Thank you, Francis & thank you, National Priorities Project.

As someone who struggles with disability – with Multiple Sclerosis – I think a lot about how to stay in a healthy place, so I can continue to do my life’s work. So tonight, I want to focus on the health of our movement for social change: the Mind, Body, & Soul of movement building.

The mind is critical in providing us with the research, analysis, and a grounding of information that supports all the other work we do for change – it’s what supports the body of our work. National Priorities Project is one of the brilliant minds in our peace & justice movement.

The body is the grassroots organizing – the people to people, door to door work that has to happen in our communities to make change happen. We can’t do the work without the mind, but the mind is useless without the body.

And, the soul. The soul of movement building is the heart, and it is the part that is most often left out of our work for change.

The soul, or heart, of our work is about connection – our relationships with each other and how we work together; it is about how we link our different issues and build networks and coalitions so we equal more than the sum of our parts.

There is a project called WiserEarth that has been making a list of all the organizations that work for social change, and they now have over a 100,000 groups listed. But if there are this many groups doing work, why are we not seeing massive change?

We have the information… we have the numbers… AND WE HAVE the ability to change the world… but we need to work across our boundaries of race, class, identities, issues, and strategies.

We need to embody a different way of working that can truly win – a way that can transform the world.

 In order to do this we have to learn how to include the soul of movement building in our work. We MUST work from a place of vision, a place of hope, of joy… a place that is grounded in our hearts.

To build a winning movement that mobilizes millions of people, we need to focus not only on what’s wrong, but we must also offer a vision of what’s possible.

We have to build a movement that reflects our values – a movement that nurtures and supports us as activists – as individuals and as families – a movement that feeds our hearts.

We also need to learn to speak to a public outside of our own circles.

Imagine: WHAT if all the time and resources we spend on fighting the Right were spent on building a majority?

I want to tell you the story of how an organization of poor people in rural North Carolina partnered with National Priorities Project in 1990 to do just that.

In order to change our conservative state, a state that continually re-elected Jesse Helms as our senator — we knew we had to reach out beyond our own organization, Piedmont Peace Project.

For the first time, we had a candidate that we could really believe in running against Helms – a person who not only reflected our values and beliefs, but reflected many of our constituency as an African American – Harvey Gantt.

We knew we would have no hope of winning, if we did not reach a much broader public than just the few progressive groups in the state. So we reached out to all the other organizations we knew to form a coalition of 34 groups throughout NC.

National Priorities Project provided us with detailed research and Greg Speeter led a workshop on how our tax dollars were being spent.

We took this information and translated it into visuals that our folks could understand (even though many could not read or write). We created a report and held speak-outs throughout the state.

As a result of this campaign, which truly combined the “mind, body & soul” of organizing, we were able to make a huge difference in NC.

Harvey Gannt — who used this report in his campaign in the face of incredible harassment and fear tactics toward African American Voters –did what many thought was impossible. He won 48% of the vote. He did not become Senator, but for us, it was still a victory. We elected many people of color into city & county government for the first time – in some cases, unseating Ku Klux Klan members. But most of all, we built a strong and lasting partnership with other organizations in the state. The campaign truly combined the “mind, body & soul” of movement building.

I want to close with thanking National Priorities Project for their amazing work, thank you for supporting them, and ask that you consider how you can be part of building a healthy winning movement for change.

As the Hopi Elders have reminded us,

WE ARE THE ONES

WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR!