Coherent Social Movements
...because there's no time to spare.
"...our movements are in danger because we don't know how to handle conflict or how to move towards accountability in satisfying and collective ways. It feels like we don't know how to belong to each other, to something big and collective and decolonizing.”
~ adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us - and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice (2020) p 16.
Internal Coherence
Sometimes a social movement can harness enough collective energy to generate its own storm. Operating in real time under relentless pressure to stay responsive to external developments - often with little formal infrastructure - it can be easy to forget to take a relational approach to the humans within the movement. Even the wisest leaders may falter in such circumstances. Movement members must remember that the desire for a particular "end" never justifies harmful, callous or reckless means.
Meaningful Accountability
A combination of mercurial growth, lack of structure and stored trauma - especially among movement leaders - can create the conditions for abuses of power, financial malfeasance and even corruption within a movement or organization. Individuals who succumb to these or similar behaviours aren't "bad" people. It's complicated. The movement isn't served by cancelling or blaming its participants.
Accountability recognizes that everyone makes mistakes, whereas blame culture encourages members to deny and hide their mistakes to avoid censure and judgment. When fear is the primary motivator, the opportunity to learn from mistakes is lost.
We can work with you to develop an accountability framework that supports responsible and constructive conversations. We can help with moving through the anger and disappointment to reflect on the larger systems factors, social pressures and intergenerational harms at play.
After following a process, it may be clear that one or more individuals needs to move on. Such decisions are not made in anger or reactivity, but by reference to the movement's principles and other contextual factors.
Stopping Lateral Violence
Participants are often passionate, perhaps united by a "common enemy", but little else. The potential for inter-personal conflict to become entrenched increases when it hooks into ideological differences and trauma in all its forms (direct, vicarious, cumulative and intergenerational). Lateral violence hurts individuals, communities and saps energy from The Cause. When such behaviours infect a movement, organizational trauma follows, which can lead to movement collapse. Let us help stop these self-defeating cycles by slowing down and staying relational.
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Durable Coalitions
Lasting social change requires cooperation between multiple movements and organizations. Like an unstable ion, coalitions are at increased risk of high-energy reactivity and fragmentation. Rivalries, perceived competition for power or prominence, and ideological differences can undermine long-term collaborations. Under these conditions, the age-old strategy of "divide and conquer" is just too easy. Through explicit commitments to shared purpose and life-centered ways of doing, we can help stabilize your free radicals!
Offering Accompaniment
Our approach is to journey with you for awhile; we can help you reflect and figure out a good way forward. Central to the work of decolonization is dismantling the role of the “expert”. The settler-expert has been described by scholar Susan Dion, a Potawatomi-Lenapé, as “the perfect stranger”, who sits in judgment of community dynamics (such as lateral violence) while denying any culpability or role in the violence of colonization.
Instead, Denise Findlay, a Coast Salish practitioner of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh ancestry, suggests a framework that promotes transformation of the settler-expert from “perfect stranger” to “imperfect friend”, who, “through the process of humility…walk[s] alongside communities, and all our relatives and kin, with a willingness to learn and be transformed” (pp 358-359).
Findlay D. (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw) (2023). Gathering our medicine: strengthening and healing kinship and community (AlterNative 2023, Vol. 19(2) 356–365).
