| "CULTURE CHANGE HAPPENS...
when people take informed action and are open to accountability."
These are the words (italics our own) of Ericka Hines and Mako Fitts Ward in the 2022 Black Women Thriving Report, which is the beginning of a 10 year mission to improve workplaces - by developing tools, leadership trainings and strategic support - so that Black women can thrive.
We have talked often about abundance and scarcity. But to look a little more closely at scarcity, to get the root of the feelings it triggers, we have to talk about fear.
If we are responding out of fear, we may be taking action without putting much thought into it - you could call that un-informed action. Other times, we stay small, 'safe', and in our comfort or complacency, because we fear being held accountable for potential errors.
Scarcity-driven fear can impact not just material resources like money, power, and wellbeing, but also emotional resources like compassion and grace. This is probably one of our hardest lessons in life: that errors will happen, and no amount of growth or transformation gets us to a place where we won't need to address those errors - within ourselves, which you could think of as getting in right relationship to your spirit - or with others, which is getting in right relationship with your community.
But what we think is so beautiful about the quote above from Hines and Ward is that it contains the full pathway within it: you keep taking informed action (making space for learning, resting, and pausing so that you are not acting out of urgency) and then...knowing that mistakes will always be a part of the process...you practice remaining open to accountability. Rinse and repeat. This is how culture change happens.
I've been reading a bunch of small but might books lately (including Francine Prose's take on Cleopatra, and Margo Jefferson's mind-blowing memoir, Constructing a Nervous System) and one that I keep going back to is Parker J. Palmer's, Let Your Life Speak. Palmer writes:
"Leadership is a concept we often resist. It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are made for community, then leadership is everyone's vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads."
(Italics our own) Lately it feels like the conversation around systemic inequity is shifting - or perhaps that perspectives on it that we are drawn toward are changing - from urgent, fear-based responses, to discussions that center freedom, joy, and community. From seeing the potential for disaster, as we wrote last week, to seeing the potential for reimagining. Palmer goes on to say:
"We capitalists have a long and crippling legacy of believing in the power of external realities much more deeply than we believe in the power of the inner life. How many times have you heard or said, "Those are inspiring notions, but the hard reality is..."? How many times have you worked in systems based on the belief that the only changes that matter are the ones that you can measure or count? How many times have you watched people kill off creativity by treating traditional policies and practices as absolute constraints on what we can do?"
When we act out of fear, our values fall by the wayside. All the things we purport to care about become sidelined by those 'hard realities' Palmer refers to. How do we get to a place where values are strong enough, engrained enough, accountable enough, to supersede our fear? We believe that happens through culture change.
Last week, we shared a lot of information on reimagining. Whether you are still working through those, or want to go back and take another look, know that we are privileged and grateful to be in community with you. With the 'four agreements' of Glenn Singleton's Courageous Conversations, we invite you, as always, and alongside us, to "stay engaged, expect to experience discomfort, speak your truth, and expect and accept a lack of closure.”
Yours in food justice,
Tay + Dor
photo by Christine Han
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