Of special relevance within the context of movement-building organizations

We must be able to live by the principles that we set for others and for the society that we are in the process of transforming. If we are to help everyday people come into greater activity, leadership and collectivity then we must cultivate the utmost integrity individually and collectively, we must be trustworthy and cultivate mastery of “movement-building” practices while minimizing “movement-killing” practices. Otherwise we follow in the footsteps of all that have abused their power and applied a double standard to their own behavior while harming others.

Shared principles:

• Our behaviors are not “who we are”.
• We all make mistakes – the key is admitting, correcting and repairing harm.
• Movement love does not look like co-dependence. We have an obligation to hold each other accountable.
• Good practice can help build relationships. Bad practice can help destroy relationships.
• Good process can help build relationships. Bad process can help destroy relationships.
• We’re not always going to be happy with each other. Conflict and contradictions are a natural part of our process.
• Your goal is not to avoid anyone ever being mad at you.
• Regular feedback is an important part of our process.
• Feedback is very different from attack.
• We are all on a learning and healing journey.
• We take responsibility for resolving our own conflicts as a leadership task whenever possible.
• We all deserve patience, respect and care in how we are treated and talked to. That doesn’t mean sugarcoating just as it doesn’t mean being vicious.
• Intention is not the same as impact. Assume best intention but attend to impact.
• There is no basis for working with those who are not doing so in good faith.
• The fact that you may be dealing with the impact of trauma and mental health issues does not place you outside the realm of accountability.
• Everything changes – including our emotions.

Movement-Killing Behaviors

• Shit-talking – speaking disparagingly of people when they are not present
  • How to interrupt: “Have you shared any feedback with this person?” “Please don’t talk negatively about this person in front of me, I don’t want to hear it.”
  • Alternatives to shit-talking: Incorporating regular feedback sessions into your meetings. Tell people what you appreciate about them and what you see as their areas for growth.
  • Talking about members and their growth and development in the context of base building and leadership development without them present does not constitute gossip.
• Untruthfulness
  • Outright lying cannot be tolerated.
  • Some people live by exaggeration. It’s been a survival mechanism to help them to be heard or to get what they want.
    • Additionally, some people are not rigorous with their word or the truth. They have a pattern of intentional or subconscious laziness about how to portray what happened or what was said, constantly stretching the boundaries of reality like silly putty, adding to, omitting or changing parts of the story as they go along. We all need to be held to account for striving to be as accurate as possible in our representations of meetings, conversations, processes, plans, etc. If you know this is an issue for you please make a note that it’s something that you need to work on.
  • Don’t tell two different people two different things based on what you think they want to hear. Tell both people the same thing. Telling everyone a different version of the same events keeps people off kilter and is a mechanism to sow confusion and manipulation. If you find yourself telling many people a slightly different version of the same events or if you feel like you are hearing a different version than what was told to someone else, you’re likely participating in gossip, please see that section.
• Accusation and attack
  • Making vague or general accusations instead of giving direct feedback
    • Don’t say “people do this”. Give feedback to specific individuals in an appropriate time and place (ie not in front of a group or when they are leading something). Do not generalize and suggest that the organization does something or has a policy that in reality happened with one individual inside the organization, or in a social setting.
  • Attacking the organization/enlisting others to attack the organization on social media, ie tagging the organization’s name on Facebook or Twitter with slanderous remarks
  • Blowing up a shared space, taking the opportunity in front of a group to air your grievances with a particular person or situation in ways that are unaccountable, not related to the matter at hand, and target particular individuals while they’re trying to facilitate or lead a group process.
• Defensiveness
  • Refusing all constructive critique; repeated defensiveness + playing the victim when you are called to account
  • Defensiveness is the enemy of leadership. If you find yourself on the defensive, ask “what did I do to co-create this situation?” Go through this list and see if you have participated in any of these behaviors. Ask yourself about your follow through. For all of the ways that you want to lash out, question every justification that you’re providing for your own behavior. Do those justifications really stand up to the light of day?
• Rugged individualism
  • Using the organization’s name and credibility to take action on your own rather than acting collectively with the organization, misleading others into thinking that you’re representing the organization when you’re only representing yourself.
  • It’s fine to have other organizational affiliations or roles! However, please be transparent about your intentions. If you’re running for office or leading another organization and you want to use the organization’s energy and work to bolster your visibility and win more allies (for example), you must make clear what your intentions are before embarking on any process so that everyone in the situation can make clear informed choices about how to proceed.
• Refusing to participate collaboratively or to work with others on the basis of their gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, language, age, religion, documentation status.
• Refusing to acknowledge the realities of power and oppression, to listen openly to others’ experiences and to acknowledge when you’ve contributed to harm.
• Refusing to participate in political education and leadership development processes and studies.
• Constant negativity. Consider that never being able to find the good in any situation and constantly thinking of what went wrong or what people didn’t do well is a reflection on how you feel, not on the process or other people. Please be careful that you don’t project the ways you may have been conditioned to be hyper-critical of yourself onto other people or to the organization.
• Manipulation
  • Trying to operationalize or manipulate another member for your ends
    • If you see a situation in which a current member or someone who has already left the organization has attached themselves to you or to another member and is constantly “in their ear” about what they should be doing, and trying to use that member as a conduit to have influence in the organization without the operator’s explicit participation and accountability, this is a problematic situation that should be avoided. By the same token, don’t allow yourself to be operationalized by someone who is seeking to be outside the boundaries of community and accountability.
• Being a “people-pleaser”. Telling everyone what they want to hear so as to avoid conflict. Never making tough calls or holding people accountable so that they won’t be mad at you.
• Abuse or harassment whether verbal, physical, or sexual of any member.
• Reactivity – reacting, responding, writing, posting before you breathe and check in with yourself. How is my response going to benefit myself, the other person and the organization as a whole? Reactivity is another enemy of leadership. It takes strength, resolve and courage to pause before reacting. It takes patience and wisdom to not always say the first thing that pops into your head. Reactivity is flawed practice. It is not the same as speaking your mind, being true to yourself, or being honest. It is possible to do all of those things – and do them well – without being reactive. Being reactive is responding with a lack of self and community awareness, defaulting to conditioned patterns rather than being in our choice, agency and power. Reactivity damages trust.
• Stuck in place, refusing to accept that things change. A month ago, you may have been dismayed that another person wouldn’t step up and do their fair share. A month later, they are stepping up! Isn’t that what you wanted? It’s what you said you wanted, but you’re still harboring resentment for this person instead of appreciating the shift that has occurred. Holding onto past grievances as if reality is static as opposed to ever-changing is counter-productive. Go with the flow.
• Fomenting conflict, ill will, troubles, and problems through any of the above means

Steven Covey, author of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People talks about our “Emotional Bank Accounts”. Despite the fact that it’s weird to talk about banking in this context,  I think the concept of making investments in our relationships – actions that demonstrate trust, understanding and support – is a good one. He takes the metaphor further to suggest that when we violate trust or make a mistake, it’s akin to making a “withdrawal” against the investments that we’ve already made. I have often thought of this metaphor when I think about building trust with movement colleagues.

The more that I work with this metaphor the more I become aware that this grounding is only useful when it is broadly understood and reciprocal. There is much that gets in the way of us treating each other with deep respect, including ego, competition, lack of self-awareness, and oppressive conditioning.

At times the lack of respect that I experience make the work almost unbearable. I also have said and done things that I’ve regretted, made lots of mistakes and treated people with less respect than they deserved. I am in no way saying that I do not exhibit problematic behaviors.

I am also working on improving my practice.

I think the thing that I’ve been most harmed by is that people that I’ve invested in heavily – that I’ve given jobs, provided opportunities, supported, mentored, helped, not over the course of months, but over the course of years, have been able to turn on me as a result of a real or perceived “withdrawal” that feels so asymmetrical – especially in light of our history of multiple, sustained investments of trust. That kind of betrayal really pains me. There has to be a way to understand, overcome and avoid it outside of simply not trusting anyone ever again, or being made to feel ashamed for being taken advantage of – like I’m the one at fault for “having it happen to me”. Also seems important to note here that every single person who has ever behaved this way toward me was a man.

Relatedly, I’ve recently been reflecting on the things that are getting increasingly difficult for me in the course of doing this work. There are a lot of narratives out there about how we are supposed to expect that movement work is a hard and never-ending slog through shit. However, I am very much interested in improving our practice and not having the work produce a lot of collateral damage. If the work that we are doing serves to re-traumatize ourselves and others, how exactly are we getting free? We are already situated within an economic, political and social system that prevents us from being our fullest selves. We have no choice but to transform it. However as we do that, the ends don’t actually justify the means when the means are bullshit. We all have to make sacrifices and compromises, and our hands aren’t clean. We can’t stand outside the system to do our work. However, as we make the road by walking, we have to clear the path through our actions, and act – create systems, structures and processes – in ways that liberate instead of oppressing, for ourselves and others.

As I’ve been doing these reflections, here are some places that feel like they are becoming untenable for me in terms of the emotional labor that I’m doing on top of the intellectual and physical labor of movement work.  It’s not any one of these that’s untenable, it’s the fact that sometimes it feels like I am doing all of these things, all of the time. No single one of these is a deal-breaker, but taken together, and when performing these tasks of emotional labor actually crowds out my ability to be well myself, and do the things that I really love, like strategy, base building, and study, they become unbearable.

• Constantly mediating conflict between people for the good of the work
• Absorbing people’s emotional outbursts, when targeted mistakenly at me or others; being expected to de-escalate and mend the situation even when it is re-traumatizing
• Anticipating and troubleshooting problems and providing extra support proactively in order to avoid re-traumatizing other people – ie trying to solve problems before they happen
• Accepting people being impatient, judgmental, negative or demanding in ways that are very challenging to deal with because of where they are in their leadership development process
• Cleaning up after other people’s bad behavior, playing a reassuring or ameliorating role to calm people’s feelings because of someone’s unaware or intentional bad actions
• Being someone that people come to when they have problems, being someone that is expected to fix people’s problems and make them feel better, rather than them fixing their problem on their own, or offering to help fix my problems
• Constantly being expected to absorb negativity, people unawarely not balancing their critiques, complaints and problems with affirmation and appreciation
• Making issues personal instead of understanding them as part of the process, organizational, and co-created (ie acknowledging their own role)
• Being the object of the assumption that I am able to do a tremendous amount of work without strain, stress or pain
• My ideas being repeated as if they were the original ideas of others who then get credit and recognition for them
• Despite fighting for people, helping them and defending them, being treated as if I am not worthy of the same, being turned on quickly for the convenience and benefit of others
• Having a position of non-conflict and nonviolent communication used as an excuse to be an “easy target” or scapegoat as needed because I won’t make the kind of scene that others will
• Perceiving my work and my ability as a threat rather than an asset because of ego and behaving in ways that lack integrity as a result
• Working with people who are afraid of conflict, therefore if conflict arises, quickly exit the scenario rather than take a principled stand for the sake of no one “being mad at them”; can’t distinguish between reasonable or justified accountability and unprincipled attacks
• To not have the role of oppression acknowledged in situations, to have people around me not acknowledge power when being treated badly by someone that society imbues as more deserving of respect and dignity than I am. To have the oppressive component of the mistreatment ignored or minimized, to exhibit a complete unwillingness to assist the person doing the behavior to achieve greater awareness.
• Being a constant cheerleader, having to maintain hope and continue to be inspirational during moments when others are lost or feel hopeless. Having to maintain discipline around hope and a clarity of vision that carries other people through difficult times.
• People who use their privilege to step on you, using your emotional and intellectual labor for their own benefit and using it to maneuver themselves into positions of power or influence without giving credit or assistance to help better your situation.
• Constantly getting the unaware and oppressive feedback that I’m aggressive, threatening and intimidating simply as a reaction to my natural way of speaking and being.
• Not being allowed to express anger or frustration at the above treatment, expected to always appear to be okay with whatever is happening even when it is unacceptable, receiving reactions of anger and frustration for my reactions because they are seen as a distraction and an inconvenience when none was given for what caused them.

“Building a Diverse Working Class Movement to Transform America”

From the description of the epidsode: What is to be done? How can I get involved? Those are questions that a lot of people are asking now that Donald Trump is about to become president of the United States. Today, I speak to Nijmie Dzurinko, a Black woman who grew up poor in the deindustrialized Western Pennsylvania steel town of Monessen. Nijmie is one of the smartest and most experienced organizers we know. In the past, she has been Executive Director and organizer with the Philadelphia Student Union, was a co-founder of the Media Mobilizing Project, and is a co-founder and currently co-coordinator of the group Put People First! PA.

A year ago today I spent much of the day on planes coming back from 10 glorious days with the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil. I attended their National Congress and spent a few days visiting MST settlements with a delegation put together by the Friends of the MST.

The MST is one of the largest social movements in the world, with over a million members. The movement has won land for over 350,000 families, and has a three part program: reclamation of land, collective production and transformation of society. The movement celebrated its 30th anniversary during the time I was there, and the National Congress functioned as a massive birthday party, agricultural fair, political education school, and a time of strategy, visioning, and building community.

The trip I took one year ago could not have come at a better time for me on my personal/political journey. I am someone who has found myself driven to collective action through my own early life experiences in the context of my family, and an early visceral sense that there were larger forces and structures at play on the people in my household, which were invisible to me at the time. My experiences within organizing communities in Philadelphia and throughout the country have provided both beautiful and extremely painful experiences – sometimes feeling more like the culture of a dysfunctional family than a force for good and liberation.

Over the last few years in particular, I’ve been driven to evaluate and transform myself, and my approach to and practice of organizing, after asking myself the question “If we (loosely defined as those working for social justice) were in charge tomorrow, what would that be like?” and not liking the answers that come to mind.

Over the past 30-40 years, the time period in which I have grown up, have arisen three (to me, inter-related) phenomena: 1) the ascendance of neo-liberalism, 2) the emergence of the non-profit industrial complex and 3) the primacy of organizing based on identity categories. Although we don’t often look at connections between these three developments, it seems more than co-incidence that all three have occurred together. Delving deeply into the implications of this is a subject for another time.

In working to transform my own practice, I have committed to increasing myself awareness through my own healing work. There is a lot of trauma in our people, and the saying “hurt people hurt people” really is true. There is no way to move forward when we are simply acting out trauma onto each other under the guise of organizing.

There are a number of lessons that I drew from Brazil that I’ve committed to incorporating into my own practice:

Collective action should bring us back to life. It must activate us as whole people. What we do must be connected to a long term vision and strategy. It must develop us into better people – not just people who know the right things to say. We must live by a new set of values, not just speak them. We can use the immediate to secure the future – if we prioritize political education. Our work is not sustainable if we organize as individuals – we must organize as families and communities. If we can’t presume to lead our society, and not just people who look like us, then the system that we are working to transform has already won.

For me over the past year this has looked like:

• Prioritizing 1 on 1 time with leaders
• Building an organizational culture where values and principles are a focus internally as well as externally
• Creating a separation between my paid work and my organizing work
• Seeing individual expressions of oppression as symptoms, not causes
• Focusing on my own healing work and sharing it in my organizing community

Here’s to a 2015 filled with humanization of our movements.

I was raised in Monessen, PA.  My maternal grandparents and I lived in a one-floor house on Reeves Avenue, almost at the top of a hill.  There are some huge hills out that way.  My family’s move up the hill from “down-street” (closer to the mills spewing out black smoke, poorer, and lower elevation) was a symbol of slight upward mobility that was afforded by my grandfathers’ lifelong employment at Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel.  My grandmother’s two brothers also worked in the mill (she even did a stint there during World War II when there was a shortage of male workers), and one of her brothers died in the mill, crushed by a molten hot beam.When I was 10 years old, the steel mill closed for good.  When I was 11 my uncle moved us away.  In the 2010 census the population of Monessen was 7,720, down from a high of 20,257 in 1940. Per capita income is now $16,627. My memories of Monessen as a place are fond.  I spent a lot of time outside, we grew our own vegetables, and when I tested into 4^th grade at the age of 7 after being homeschooled by my grandmother, I wasn’t the only kid of color or of mixed heritage, not by a long shot.

Over two decades after I left, I reconnected with friends from elementary school on social media.  Many of them are still in Monessen or in the surrounding towns of Donora and Charleroi.  I’ll always love and care about my first friends because I grew up with them.  I notice their positive qualities and I see their shortcomings and challenges through a lens of loyalty, as is customary among friends.  Their way of seeing the world shows up in my news feed.  There are lots of family photos, struggles with health, relationship drama.  Some of them – not all – are angry about recent waves of immigration.  Some don’t like Obamacare much.  Some aren’t in favor of raising the wage for fast food workers to $15 an hour.

Surprisingly perhaps to you, there’s a lot of resonance between their views and the views of people on my block of row houses in the Cobbs Creek section of West Philly (with the possible exception of a positive, as opposed to negative disposition to Obamacare), in a city of 1.5 million people, with a per capita income of $16,509.  When there are fewer and fewer means to survive, and we don’t have answers that get to the roots of why or a way forward (instead – powerlessness, isolation, scapegoating and false solutions) we tend to become less – not more – magnanimous.   We’re influenced to believe that if we have something it’s because we outdid someone else, and whatever anyone else “gets”, whether that’s a pension, a raise, healthcare, or some form of assistance, it means less for us.   And because we don’t have any guaranteed means to survive or the power to mold the world to our benefit, as our true opponents do, that worldview has a certain logic to it.

I don’t feel the need to apologize for the people that I grew up with any more than the people who live on my block.  To do so would be insulting and dehumanizing.  At the end of the day, my people out in Monessen and Southwest PA are struggling, in a way that is similar to my people on the block.  They are not calling the shots, making laws, creating policy, buying candidates, granting tax breaks, or ruthlessly exploiting our very real and justified fears of survival.

That’s why I’m involved in a movement to create more connections between people who both the politicians and the pundits seem to want to see at odds.  To disrupt the two-sides-of-the-same-coin ideology that makes people in Philadelphia feel fear and loathing for people in Monessen in the same way that people in Monessen are made to feel fear and loathing, instead of closeness and friendship, for us.

I’m a fan of Game of Thrones.  Before the opening credits are over, we get a short lesson in each of the “sigils” of the major houses – the symbols of the people who are vying for power.   Well beneath those who are vying for power are “bannermen” – vassals who owe their service and allegiance to the feudal lords. They get their name because as they ride into battle they carry the banner of their lords – they are, in essence owned and controlled by the interests of this banner.  They do not show up as real actors in the story, but extras who merely serve a function for the ongoing quest for power between different factions of elites.

There are women and men throughout our state of 13 million people that have a capital D or capital R next to their name on the voter rolls.  That designation is the basic thing about their lives that matters to the powers that be.  It’s not all that matters to me.

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.  We must love each other and protect each other.  We have nothing to lose but our chains.” – Assata Shakur