Various Items

CONTENTS:
--Jo Sanzgiri on Nonviolence
--Seasons Fund For Social Transformation
--“Transformative Movement Building:”
--Reader’s Comments

Jo Sanzgiri on Nonviolence

On January 9 at the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, Dr. Jyotsna Sanzgiri and Imam Khaled Hamoui served on a panel that responded to Kathleen Barry’s opening talk concerning her new book, Unmaking War, Remaking Men: How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves. Sanzgiri’s comments struck me as particularly telling.

With deep roots in the Indian independence movement led through the involvement of her parents and currently serving on the faculty at the Unitarian Starr King School for the Ministry, Sanzgiri said:

Our focus [prior to independence] was not on the British but on building a nation….

It's harder to deal with the enemy within.... including the degradation that comes from passivity.

[We need] the reclamation of the soul... [which requires] daily practice, standing up and talking about our actions...debriefing....

We have lost our humanity in the way we are treating each other, and other countries. We need to develop more compassionate means of communicating.

During the discussion period, I remarked to Sanzgiri, “If we translate your comments to our current situation in this country, it seems that our focus should be not on the war machine but on growing compassionate communities, transforming our nation into a compassionate community.”

I also said to Sanzgiri, “I assume that when you referred to the enemy within, you weren’t just talking about within this country but also within ourselves and our need to engage in ongoing introspection and self-improvement in order to acknowledge our mistakes and correct them.” She confirmed my understanding on this point.

I then argued that we need support groups for activists, so we can listen to each other report on our self-improvement efforts. Merely listening can be very supportive. Many activists have told me they like this idea, but no one has implemented it. Most activists are so focused on their outer work they have little time for inner work.

In response, Sanzgiri supported my comments and Barry said that in Santa Rosa she’s proposing the development of small groups dedicated to nurturing both empathy and action, similar to the consciousness-raising groups in the women’s movement.

The next day, I emailed Sanzgiri to confirm the accuracy of my notes and asked her to send me or refer me to any of her work, or the work of others, that elaborates on these themes. She replied:

I have not published papers in this area specifically, but the following two books outline a lot of what my philosophy is based on: MK Gandhi, My Autobiography; Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian. They describe the roots of the philosophy through which Indians eventually returned to a spiritual base in their activist work.

Upon further reflection, seeking to clarify the basic point, I asked her:

Would you agree that what we need is a balance between inner and outer work, and between confronting established policies and growing alternative institutions -- rather than a primary or exclusive focus on one or the other? Was this the case with the Independence movement?

She replied:

I could not agree more that a balance is what works the best, especially between inner and outer work. Once we take the time to get those primary balances in focus, we take on increasingly complex work, within ourselves and the outside world. Yes, the Movement was very much based on creating a balance of inner spiritual development and work that would involve a moral, non-violent opposition to colonial rule.

All in all, I find this exchange heartening. Finding another kindred spirit is very reassuring.

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Seasons Fund For Social Transformation

Also encouraging is the continued good work of the Seasons Fund For Social Transformation, which makes grants to support opportunities for reflection and training aimed at fostering personal transformation, building leadership skills, promoting organizational development, forging effective coalitions, and cultivating new ways of envisioning our society, as well as efforts to evaluate the impact of contemplative practices on social change initiatives.

A seven-minute video of their first Transformative Leadership Awards event can be found here.

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Transformative Movement Building:

MSC's Framework for Social Change

Staff at the Movement Strategy Center (MSC) have selected the following excerpts from their 2010 report, Out of the Spiritual Closet: Organizers Transforming the Practice of Social Justice www.movementstrategy.org/resources

This summary reads as follows:

Movement Strategy Center uses the term transformative movement building as an umbrella to describe the diverse efforts of groups and individuals to fundamentally change our political, material, social and spiritual reality. Transformative movement building (TMB) links the process of individual transformation to group and social transformation. In this framework, inner change and outer change are deeply connected. Transformative movement builders seek to synthesize wisdom and practice from spiritual traditions (often focused on deep inner transformation) with social change traditions of the Left (generally focused on social analysis and systems change). Transformative movement builders share a deep commitment to holistic individual, group and social change, driven by a connection to something larger than themselves.

Transformative practices allow us to tap into deep wells of insight and innovation. They include:
· Spiritual practices
· Creative practices
· Cultural practices

MSC intentionally focuses on TMB in grassroots, frontline organizations. Frontline organizations are groups based in the needs and leadership of communities most impacted by social injustice. These communities and organizations are called "frontline" because they experience disproportionate impacts around issues such as education cuts, climate change, or welfare reform. These communities are most often communities of color and low income. While many of these groups have faith-based counterparts, the groups we focus on are secular. Frontline organizations have a major stake in questions of social, political and spiritual transformation, but they have often been excluded from the formal dialogue on spiritual or transformative organizing.

Stages of Change

MSC has identified five steps in this process of cultural change:
* Individual change
* Leads to change in the organizational community
* Leads to change in the organizing model and practice
* Leads to greater social impact and systems change
* Culminating in deep cultural change

Where are we stuck?

1. Operating from a Sense of Urgency - Crisis Mode

"Everything is critical, nothing can wait," explained Jen Soriano, formerly with The Center for Media Justice. "There is a sense of urgency and anxiety about missed opportunities. This makes everything much more high stakes."

"People wear themselves out by just reacting, writing papers, attending meetings. They do a lot without making much occur, except to create outcomes for foundations," says Norma Wong of The Institute for Zen Studies.

2. Embodying the Dominant Culture

"We all hate on each other at some level." - Jermaine Ashley, Oakland Kids First

3. Recycling Trauma

"We need to rehumanize each other," said Ettinger. "This requires a value shift on the Left."

Many of us come into this work because we, or the people we love, have experienced deep injustice. However, if our wounds have not healed, trauma can severely limit our ability to be present with each other. Without awareness, we recycle trauma and create new wounds within the movement.

4. Attachment to Anger and Struggle

Our movement culture uses struggle as a word to define itself. We are always struggling against something. The term itself connotes hardship and extreme exertion. While this definitely describes a portion of our work in this movement, it is not and should not be the entirety of it.

5. Maintaining an Exclusive - and Narrow - Movement

"In the end, people want to feel safe, loved and part of something," said Ai-jen Poo. "But right now we lack the ability to make people feel the movement encompasses them."

6. Ambivalence with Power

In our movement work we rarely imagine ourselves as the power holders. This ambivalence is rooted in and reinforced by our movement self-image as "the underdogs" of society. It is also reflected in our relationships with targets, where we have created a rigid dichotomy of good versus evil. To be on the side of justice and good we position ourselves as watchdogs rather than decision makers. While watchdogs are important, their role is to react not to lead or govern.

The New Way

1. Integrating Individual and Group Transformation
"The nature of transformation is that is does not happen in the absence of absolute change. It includes you." - Norma Wong, Institute for Zen Studies

2. Big Visioning and Reclaiming Values
When we vision what we really want our communities and movements to look like, we tap into a sense of imagination, creativity and hope. What is most important about visioning a new way is that the answers we unearth can inform our present-day work. Furthermore, understanding our interconnectedness means including all living things in our vision for liberation. We cannot be free unless we are all free.

3. Centralizing and Investing in Relationships and Community
"If we are going to create any meaningful change, we must model new relationships to ourselves and the world around us." - Ai-jen Poo, Domestic Workers United

Movements are about moving people. The need to be connected and belong is a basic part of our shared and evolutionary history. As organizers we need to understand and work with this truth of human nature.

4. Evolving Our Understanding of Power
"The system creates enemies, opposition and social conflict, of course, but we can't be prescriptive about it. We have to complicate the picture instead of oversimplifying it. The power mapping we do is just not complex enough." - Jason Negrón-Gonzales, Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project

5. Expanding Our Idea of Useful Work
We need all types of work in our movement to make it successful. We need organizers, strategists, teachers, artists, farmers, nurses, engineers, scientists and politicians. Our goal is not to make everyone into a professional organizer, but to create a movement that is relevant, attractive and accessible to all kinds of people.

6. Building Alignment and Synergy
You can recognize alignment within groups by the ease with which decisions are made and communication occurs. It is easy to feel when it is present, and equally easy to feel in its absence.

7. Cultivating Patience and Reflection
The enormity of the task at hand requires us to reflect - Why am I doing this? What kind of change do I expect to bring about in this world? What do I need to do to make this change occur?

8. Creating Space to Heal and Transform Ourselves
Acknowledging the world as an oppressive place means also acknowledging its negative impact on our minds, bodies and spirits. Healing from this oppression is an important task for activists and organizers. It is essential if we want to successfully change systemic conditions.

9. Expanding Awareness and Agility to Act
Through practice we can develop an expanded awareness of our surroundings, the present moment and our power to make change.

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Reader’s Comments

Comments concerning last week’s “Why Some of Us Seek a New Strategy”:

Nedi Safa: Well said. Be the change.

Chris Price: A beautiful statement and reminder for all of us who work in groups, with groups for a goal, however we identify ourselves, including the groups called “citizens” or “family”. Thank you.

Marcella Womack: Wade - you've developed a template for consciousness-raising ourselves into new human beings. Good job!

Patricia Bulls: This says it all so perfectly I can hardly think of a way to respond. I know as I read this it reverberated through my whole being as "yes that's it, that's a way of being with myself and all others with whom I meet day by day on this journey".Thanks for sharing this deep wisdom. It is apparent that it comes from great experience. I am enjoying sharing it with others.