Blog

Join Cities and People on November 28, 2023 at 11:00am for a deep dive into our new report produced with SoCal CAN: Represent All, an investigation of the diversity of student government at California's postsecondary institutions.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about disability movements and policies lately, and about how we can use our resources and knowledge at Cities & People to support and advance those movements and policies. It’s not new territory for me, personally or professionally. But I’ve come across some new works that have redirected my thinking, and I’d like to share them with you.

If all my data were laid out on the floor around me in some fashion, I could never escape its breadth, not even peripherally while honing in on some specific code or case. But when it is tightly nested away from me in folders, I am more likely to pay attention to what is on top, so I have to make sure I'm digging into the backs of those drawers regularly if I'm going to keep my data at the front of my brain.

In every community I've worked in for capacity building, some kind of important community organizing (formal or informal) could be identified prior to my entrance. This work is foundational not only to the when we come to develop programs, but in terms of the information we need to conduct an authentic evaluation of what we think of as "our intervention." What's more, this work is likely to keep happening at some pace and to some scale, whether we are investing from the outside or not.

And this brings us to here, to me, 54 years later, in the time of COVID and a dying planet, in the time of a bellowing monster of white supremacy who has taken a few arrows but isn't going down easy. In the time of festering patriarchy and unchecked capitalism, and surrounded on all sides by two dozen California wildfires, and to this attempt to lay it bare.

By designing programs that required tens and perhaps even hundreds of people to fly, I was racking up metric tons without even flying the miles myself. I was designing learning communities, for instance, that were dispersing 185 metric tons or more of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere of our vulnerable planet! I want to take my work to scale, but not like this.

In some situations, for some people, typical versions of community agreements are more than merely bogus (or even benign): they can be a tool of oppression and a means by which to protect abusers.

Admittedly, I've tried 1,100 ways of talking with people about transformative change through policymaking, with varied responses. I've been most successful with college students, but then again I have had them for as much as 16 weeks of lead up to the big ah-ha moment. More often, I have sixty minutes, and in this particular case I had forty-five. So, here's what I did in the whirlwind.

We can fly with the swallows and bees or we can stay lost in the plastic maze of human-made systems of oppression. But reading Emergent Strategy over and over has convinced me that the swallows and bees are coming back, and so I choose the murmuration. And I hope that others who read brown's book will also, even if it takes them some time to let their inner control freak go so they can get through it.

The whole point of learning about the system of oppression was so that we could see how it organizes us. When you see how you and others are being organized by the logic of white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, and capitalism, then you are in a better position to develop an intervention – to fight back strategically rather than to merely react to what is loudest or most appalling.

Like all good pilots, we'd learned and corrected course as we went along, and while those course-corrections were documented, recommendations for what to do with specific objections were absent. WWMQPD? He'd roll up his sleeves and analyze each objective in turn, deriving useful recommendations as he went along. That made sense. I figured I'd just throw the nine objectives in to a table and write a few sentences about each one. No big deal, right?

I could tell he thought I was a little nuts. "No," he insisted. "Separate diseases, separate expertise."

Communities of Practice tend to go awry when conveners and/or facilitators are not adept at the core conceptual components required for success, and the more often this happens in the philanthropic sector, the less likely participants are to enter the Community of Practice space in an open and optimistic way.

Blogging from the American Evaluation Association's Evaluation 2017 conference in Washington, DC. 

Blogging from the American Evaluation Association's Evaluation 2017 conference in Washington, DC. 

Earlier in the week, I asked my students, "When was the last time you intentionally read something that you knew in advance you would strongly disagree with?" I got thirty-five blank stares. And I wasn't surprised. Under what circumstances in our contemporary American society would they come across a reason to do that? When they see something they don't like, they swipe left and it's gone.

Our president has strongly insinuated that he is about to act on DACA in some way. Trump's recent pardoning of Joe Arpaio could be a foreboding sign of how he will act on DACA. Now is time for us to protect our friends and community members who are most at risk. 

I know that the folks I'm talking with in this session will generally be more amenable to charging for a fundraising event or even engaging in fee-for-service with some of their training materials than this one simple thing, which just happens to be the thing that we talk about all the time when we talk about economic inequality: Wealthy people have the money. We need it. How do we get it?

I remember being asked to attend a small meeting years ago at a radical Bay Area grassroots organization. There were five other folks at the table, and I was surprised (and delighted) to see that one of them was a member of the Board of Supervisors. Later, I mentioned to the meeting organizer that I was impressed her org could just call up this big-city supervisor and get him to attend attend. She laughed and told me I had it all wrong – the supervisor had actually called the meeting; she'd just taken care of the logistics.

On the night of the panel, we had a good turnout, with the crowd including resident-advocates, nonprofit professionals, and several grassroots leaders from our own Commissions Training Program cohort. The panel discussion was going well and picking up steam when an older African American man in the back raised his hand and was given the microphone. "I have a question," he started. "Why are there no men on this panel?"

The need to engage verstehen (or empathic neutrality) is equally important whether my "subject" is someone with whom I'm already inclined to empathize (like the young woman in the park) or someone with whom it is very difficult for me to empathize. And so it was verstehen that I called upon later in the week when I found myself in the backseat of a cab being driven by an outspoken white nationalist.

I raised an eyebrow and commented off-handedly to a friend that I hoped that the new organization was making sure that long-time advocacy groups were at the planning table, since they were the ones who most understood not just the local terrain but also the root causes. My friend shot back with a surprising level passion, assuring me that the process would be authentic, that root causes would be central to all strategy, and that the money would be well spent.

I'm with you, Senator Harris. Let's go! But, how? We can all agree that we must act quickly and strategically in the work we are doing right now to protect our communities, but the way forward is murky at best. Over the last few days I've been checking in with my clients, and in one way or another the conversation ultimately lands on, "What makes sense now?" As we've all pretty much figured out at this point, our "now" is wholly unlike any moment before.

I had to admit that I felt the same relief. For several years, I'd been working on my own pretty successfully, but the least successful thing I'd managed was explaining to folks what I was doing all day that resulted in an actual deposits to my checking account.