A Movement Like We’ve Never Known - recording
For everyone who couldn’t make it or who wants to re-listen, here is the link to the recording (as above!), and here are the slides. Please feel free to share them with folks you trust.
We really really appreciated people showing up and engaging with us. And it’s exciting that so many of you are interested in this topic - we had just over 440 people sign up to the session.
Coming up in this post:
A couple of things we wanted to make clear, in case they weren’t
The practical next steps we’re offering and ways to get involved;
Acknowledging our influences & inspirations, and sharing some links for people to follow up with some of the things we mentioned.
A form to respond to a few questions - please only answer the ones you want to.
A few things we want to make super clear:
There is a lot more to it than we could cover in a large 2 hour zoom call. We’re touching on massive and very complex things.
We wanted to put these ideas out there, to get more of a sense of what people make of them, and spark conversation and engagement with the questions and possibilities we are seeing. Could we do way more with way more collective power? Could we co-create a massive, deep social movement that would be beautiful and nourishing to be part of, and could transform the systems that are devastating Life on Earth? And what is our best guess of what we can do to bring this about?
We imagine that for some of you what we were saying was new, challenging or stuff you don’t agree with, for others it may feel very familiar and your responses are more like “yeah, what do we do to make this happen?”.
We want to find and connect with people who are actively interested in the possibilities we are exploring (that includes people who are actively interested while also having questions, concerns and doubts - we have a lot of those as well).
We want to be totally clear that we are not in any way criticising the work people are currently doing. We completely support and celebrate so many different things people are doing to respond to the devastating conditions we find ourselves in, to make things better in any way they can. We have spent many years working very hard in supporting groups in doing what they are doing. The work people are currently doing changes and saves lives. We also respect those who, while they might wish for a very different world, are not currently engaged in social change work for all sorts of reasons. We absolutely are not saying what anyone should or should not do.
What we are saying is that we don’t believe that what we are currently doing is likely to transform the systems that are devastating Life on Earth in the timescales we believe would be needed. We believe that we face ecological, climate and social-political tipping points - lines that, if we cross them, it will be way more difficult, or impossible, to come back. We believe we are in an emergency, and the most useful response to an emergency is often to slow down, breathe deeper, connect with whatever can resource and support us, and get clear. And we believe that, if we could get together, on a level way beyond anything we’ve known in this part of the World for many many generations, there is a possibility we could really turn things around.
A lot of what we are saying is about trying to find a way to integrate the different things that might be important to us - what can we do to bring together power and love, upstream and downstream action, practical transformative action with care, etc. ? We dream of a social movement that finds ways to bring together what often gets separated, into something that is more than the sum of its parts.
What Happens Now?
Part of the purpose of the call was to reach out more widely to find people that what we are saying rings true for. We’re not asking you to agree with us, but we are interested in moving forward with those who do feel similarly to us.
We want to try and lay out clearly what we are suggesting/offering to those who are actively interested in what we’re talking about.
The question of “Leadership” came up on the call - people understand that word in very different ways, and there is a lot of complex stuff attached to it. Miki Kashtan talks about leadership as “caring for the whole” - a principle that we try to follow. We are entering this exploration as facilitators, mediators and trainers, trying to make the abilities and experience that we have to offer as useful as we can. We are therefore taking some kind of lead in 2 ways:
1) Laying out why co-creating a Movement Like We’ve Never Known is so important to us.
2) Creating spaces where we can guide and facilitate the processes that could bring about powerful collective leadership and collaboration in building this much deeper and wider kind of Movement
So, these are the 3 practical actions we are seeing right now. You might want to:
1) Make space to feel, think and talk about what we are putting forward, to engage with it, and explore what makes sense to you in relation to it all. We’d really like this to be something that had more focus amongst those who are trying to create positive change in the World, and to find out what emerges from that. If you feel drawn to it, find ways to make movement building a much more significant focus of what you do in whatever way feels right for you, alongside continuing what you are currently doing to whatever extent makes sense for you. It could become a major focus of your work or organising.
2) Get in touch if you have any ideas of how we might be able to support you in building and sustaining collective power, or developing transformative strategy, or anything like that. Get in touch where facilitation support might be useful in building relationships or working through disagreements, differences, tensions, low trust or conflict between you and others who you could, perhaps, work together with - The FIGHTING TOGETHER project is our offer to facilitate processes to engage with what separates us, in order to grow and build collective power together. Email us at hello@navigate.org.uk if you would like to explore this possibility.
3) Come to Movement Building Assemblies, like the one we are planning alongside the LWA. Applications open here! We hope to hold more in the future alongside partner organisations. These will be gatherings for a range of people and groups who actively want to build a different depth of collaboration, power and powerful strategy together. We want to work with groups working within the same area (e.g climate justice), and also want to work building movement power across issues (e.g climate justice and migrant justice). Get in touch if you might like to work with us on this - hello@navigate.org.uk
We could also hold a follow up call potentially, for people who are interested and want to engage more/ask questions/explore how to create a Movement Like We’ve Never Known. Please let us know in this form if you would want that and would try to come along.
Where This Came From - Acknowledging Our Sources, Inspirations & Influences, + How to Learn More:
All of Paul and Ama’s perspectives are deeply rooted in and massively woven from the work of others. We also acknowledge that lots of what we are saying has almost certainly be known, said and practiced by others around the world before us that we sadly do not know of and have not been able to learn from directly.
We want to acknowledge the many influences and inspirations that we have drawn from directly, or adapted ideas from, much more fully than we made space for on the call. We feel a particular importance of doing so when these influences and inspirations come from more intensely oppressed and marginalised people and communities. In no particular order…
Movements
Kurdish Freedom Movement
An incredibly powerful Movement in the world right now that is bringing to life and putting into practice anarchist ideas of radical democracy, feminism and ecology, exploring how to dismantle patriarchy in ourselves, our communities and society. It is a living reality for millions of people right now, and is constantly inspiring to us. Dilar dirik's ‘Kurdish Women's Movement: History, Theory, and Practice’ is a good place to start. And look out for ‘Worth Fighting For: Bringing the Rojava Revolution Home’ by Jenni Keasden and Natalia Szarek, forthcoming from Active Distribution.
The Civil Rights Movement
We try to ongoingly learn from this movement and the thousands and thousands of people who made it, with courage, wisdom and Love beyond words. Two people who we have quoted directly, and who inspire and inform us deeply, are Bernice Johnson Reagon and Martin Luther King Jr.
Fred Hampton & The Black Panther Party
We are very inspired by what we know of Fred Hampton’s leadership and vision in working for liberation, empowerment and systemic transformation for Black communities in the USA, and we particularly want to learn from the work to build coalitions and collaboration across differences that lead to the Rainbow Coalition.
These are a few among the many movements that we find inspiration, hope and learning. Others include: Indian Farmers Strike, Zapatistas, The Uprising of which Boudica was a leader (around the year 60 A.D.), the MST in Brazil, the Indian Independence Movement, and so many more in the past, present and future who strive for a World that works for all.
Approaches
Restorative Circles & Dialogical Systems - these areas of work are a huge and central inspiration and influence on our thinking and work in general, and those influences were woven through many of the different things we spoke about on the call. We have learned about them from Dominic Barter, who has been at the centre of the development of this work around conflict, restorative justice and the collaborative development of social systems. As we understand it, these areas of work began in and grew from favela and other highly marginalised and oppressed communities in Brazil with whom Dominic collaborates. Some specific ideas we drew from this work include the idea of setting up “Fight Rooms” - intentional spaces for engaging with painful conflict - a concept originally named by students in the peripheries of São Paulo, and the focus on, way of understanding and way of developing social or organisational systems that we referred to as “Living Systems” that can create social conditions that support the ways we want to act together. Another fundamental principle that is deeply woven into our perspective that we heard from Dominic is that of conflict having the potential to join us together with more power to collaborate in transforming the conditions that brought us into conflict - this was the root of our understanding that conflict can organise or disorganise collective power, depending how we engage with it. Also things like shifting the question “can we make change happen (or not?)” to the question ‘what support, or collective power, do we need in order to bring about the change we want?’. The classroom metaphor Paul used as a way of making sense of how power is organised or disorganised, and the idea that we’re likely to inherit the implicit social systems from the dominant systems in our societies - including implicit punitive systems for handling conflict and justice - have come to us directly from Dominic. As we understand it, this work has been developed by people who experience oppression and violence much more intensely than we do. We really want to honour that development and the gifts it has brought us. You can find out more about Restorative Circles and Dialogical Systems and contact Dominic Barter, as well as offer support for the work if it’s been of value to you, here contatodominic@gmail.com
Miki Kashtan
Convergent Facilitation, was developed by Miki Kashtan from the principles of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), and it’s a major influence on our work in loads of ways. One specific element that Ama drew from it was the way of gathering constructive principles that we can hear within concerns - the concerns people have about a movement potentially containing key signals of what people would want or need to trust in or take part in a movement. Miki’s formulation of 5 organisational systems is a major root of the 7 Living Systems approach (with the Dialogical Systems work) and her influence shows up directly in the definition of leadership above and her very strong focus on connecting with and being moved by Vision. Loads of other elements and principles of our work around collaboration, dialogue, conflict, power, etc. are drawn directly from her work. You can find out more about her work here and here
Sarah Peyton
Sarah Peyton has formulated and works with an approach to what she calls “Unconscious Contracts” or “Sacred Vows” - the commitments we might make to always or never do something to avoid bringing suffering to ourselves or others. They are a kind of fixed, not fully conscious rule we have given ourselves, normally as a reaction to experiencing pain or trauma without enough support, doing our best to survive and be ok. Paul wondered whether a lot of us - especially with strong Left-Wing or Anarchist beliefs, have something like this in relation to being powerful - to stop us causing harm by being powerful, and to stop us getting harmed because we are powerful - and to stay away from hope or vision because it hurts too much to have our hopes dashed or live so far from the World we might dream of. Sarah has formulated some simple ways of making those
Marshall Rosenberg & Nonviolent Communication - NVC
A profoundly important root of the work of Dominic Barter, Miki Kashtan and Sarah Peyton, and of Paul and Ama, is Nonviolent Communication (NVC) which was developed by Marshall Rosenberg in partnership with many others including many from marginalised and oppressed communities, particularly in the USA. As an exploration of what supports collaboration, healing and transformation for people, relationships, groups and communities, it’s at the core of everything we do, including all of our facilitation and mediation work. One specific element of this work that we drew on was the understanding that needs or values that connect us are living within everything we do or want - this is at the core of the way we are making sense of concerns that come up around building a movement.
Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows has been a massive influence for us in her articulation of Leverage Points - Places to Intervene in a System and systems and how they move and change generally. We’re also inspired by what she said about the importance of vision.
And there are many other influences that we won’t list here.
A very large chunk of what we said was either brought together and/or applied to this context by Paul, or came directly from Paul thinking about this kind of stuff. Ama brought a few key elements of what we spoke about, and has been a constant team mate with Paul in exploring and believing in this, bringing her insight and passion to the development of it all. Paul has also been engaged in a deep, ongoing exploration of movement building with Zahra Dalilah & Natalia Szarek, and their wisdom and experience are also present here.
Phew, that’s the end. Here’s the link to the form again, hope to connect more soon.
All good wishes,
Paul and Ama