3
Purpose
Preparing Emotionally for the Fight of Your Life
Why dedicate our lives to social change? Surely there’s an easier path to a good life?
People get involved in social change for many reasons. We see problems in our community that need to be addressed. We care about an issue that affects our life. We want to help others. We want to feel a connection to people. But deciding to get more deeply involved, take on leadership, or make a lifetime commitment to fighting for justice takes a different level of motivation. This choice is more about emotion than logic. The payoff for deepening our commitment is less about a specific issue than the opportunity to feel included and respected, to know that we matter and that our lives have meaning. It’s less about helping other people than about our own freedom.
The first conversation that helps us clarify our purpose is important because it makes it possible for us to join others to take on the most entrenched forces of injustice. If we know that this is how we’re meant to be living our lives, then we can persist against opposition. We can motivate those around us. We can build the deep, trusting relationships people need to go into a fight together. That’s why the first conversation in social change needs to be with ourselves about the purpose of our lives. One of the biggest mistakes people make when working for justice is to skip over their own internal revolution. Personal commitment is what helps us work through the obstacles that beset even the best organizing strategies, campaigns, and tactics.
This chapter on purpose has three sections. The first looks at the emotional and spiritual work that can help clarify our purpose in life and deepen our commitment. The second section provides practical advice for applying what we’ve learned about managing our emotions to lead meetings, trainings, and events that deepen other people’s commitment and bring the most out of them. The third section lays out a framework for using these facilitation tools and ideas about emotional commitment to build purpose-driven organizations and movements around which people can make sense of the world and create meaningful lives.
Clarifying What’s on the Line
When I was learning to be a community organizer in Philadelphia, I met a woman named Rosie Mateo. She worked as a crossing guard in a neighborhood where people drove to buy drugs, day and night. The dealers owned every corner—but not hers. It was across from an elementary school, where I was working with parents to fight for better education for their children. Rosie knew everyone. She didn’t just stop traffic—she hugged children and their parents as they crossed from one side of the street to the other. She was a human connector—the kind of person I was taught as an organizer to get close to. In a neighborhood where drug dealing made people afraid to leave their homes—let alone go to meetings—parents whose trust I needed trusted her.
But as much as I tried to get her to participate, and as often as she told me that all the boys and girls at the school were her children, she hung back. Dressed in her crossing guard uniform, she’d stop by meetings and sit at the edge of the room. Most parents saw the school as a haven in a neighborhood that had spun out of control. They wanted to work together to make the streets safer for their children. Rosie had young grandchildren living in the neighborhood, which seemed like plenty of self-interest to me. It frustrated me that she wouldn’t join the circle. When I asked her why, she’d say that she would do anything for her (450) children who attended the school, but these meetings were for the parents, not for her.
At one point, without planning to, I asked Rosie whether she was afraid out there on the corner. Her first response was “No, no.” But as we continued to talk, she told me how it scared her to spend hours out on the street, watching all the drug dealing and the shootings. She explained how no other crossing guards would agree to take the other corners. She cried, and her fear shook me.
Rosie’s willingness to be honest about her own fear broke the wall she’d put up between herself and the parents at the school. Once she could participate for her own sake, Rosie pulled her chair up at the next meeting and she never looked back. She kept talking about all her children—but now began acting like her own life was on the line. Her fierceness and devotion helped set the parent group in motion. It was amazing to see the energy released when Rosie realized she was in the room for her own well-being and not just to help others.
I didn’t have the clarity then to share how I was feeling. I felt out of place—shunned by the teachers at the school and confused in the neighborhood. I walked past mothers pushing strollers, young men selling drugs, cops, and burnt-out houses. I’d constantly look down at the index cards I carried to make sure I was knocking on the right door. I was ignorant about the social codes, unsure how to dress, overwhelmed by the stimuli, and barely aware of the privilege that allowed me to float in and out of the neighborhood. But something drove me to be there, to hit my goal of twenty face-to-face one-on-one meetings every week. I wanted this organization to succeed more than anything. The conversation I had with Rosie, and what it unlocked for her and did for the group, helped me begin to see that organizing required something different and more difficult from me. I wasn’t there to help other people. My work wasn’t just, or even primarily, about finding and connecting people or using my brain to teach them how to change policies. I started to understand that this work of repairing the world began in confronting the emotional stuff in our hearts. And at the time, my heart was the part of me that I least knew how to use.
Rosie’s breakthrough illustrates the role that emotion plays in clarifying our purpose and preparing us to act. Rosie had to feel and express her fear before she could lead. Our path into social change doesn’t always start with facts. It begins with regret, rage, anger, fear, despair, sadness, love, compassion, and all the other emotions that make us human. As Mario Sepulveda said about his decision to stand up and lead in the collapsed Chilean mine, “At that moment I put death in my head and decided I would live with it.”1
One of the classic stories of social change in the Bible is Nehemiah’s effort to rebuild Jerusalem. Nehemiah learns that the people who remain in the city are “in great trouble and shame. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are destroyed by fire” (Neh. 1:3). Before he approaches the king for materials to restore the city, Nehemiah says, “As soon as I heard these words I sat down and wept and mourned for days and I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven” (Neh. 1:4). Feeling the pain of a city in ruins gives Nehemiah, and ultimately the whole community, the courage to face what will end up being violent opposition. Like Rosie, rather than bottling up pain and shame, Nehemiah turns these emotions into the primary resources out of which he rebuilds the city.
The experience of acknowledging our fear, sadness, and other emotions clarifies what we have at stake. Even when the knock at midnight seems like a plea to help another person, it’s always about our own freedom. We clarify our purpose in life, and the commitment that flows from that clarity, by reflecting on what we personally have at stake in changing unjust systems. Michael Walzer writes in Exodus and Revolution that the biblical story of Exodus teaches us three lessons about freedom: “[F]irst, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt [i.e., a place where you are not free]; second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land; and third, that ‘the way to the land is through the wilderness.’ There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.”2 We don’t get to a better world by trying to help other people. We do it by walking together.
Even when the knock at midnight seems like a plea to help another person, it’s always about our own freedom.
Yet many of us first come into social change through doors labeled “service” or “advocacy.” We see people in pain, children who need tutoring, vacant lots to be cleaned. We say, “Yes, here I am.” I had first visited Rosie’s neighborhood ten years before I met her. As a freshman in college, I went to work at a soup kitchen run by lay Catholic volunteers. I returned as a legal service lawyer to represent people who were being drained of what little they had by debt collectors, who turned $30 debts into $300 legal demands. One day, I went to a client’s home to have her sign a legal document. After she signed, she took me to her backyard to show me the garbage from the abandoned house next door. It had piled up to her fence and brought rats into her home. She told me that she’d been trying for months to get the city to do something. The smell was overwhelming. At that moment I knew that I needed to leave my legal aid job to stand alongside people at fences like this, not sit across a desk trying to solve people’s problems. What mattered most wouldn’t walk into my cramped legal office. I wanted to build organizations with people, to do what I’d been taught during the year I spent living and working in Chile at the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. That’s when I decided to figure out how to become a community organizer.
My client’s house was a block from Rosie’s corner. When I came back the next time, it was as an organizer. Yet, as my experience with Rosie showed, I still had a long way to go. I had been brought up to believe that it was important to be active in the community and to be helpful to those in need. Too often, though, I’ve seen people make the mistake of expecting that service alone can cure the underlying illness. And sometimes when we’re engaged in trying to tear out the roots of injustice, the urge to help solve another person’s problem (rather than walking alongside the person as a coconspirator) trips us up. It keeps us from bringing our full selves—and our own liberation—into the fight.
Henry David Thoreau—who cherished solitude but was nonetheless socially active in the Underground Railroad—said, “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”3 Those are strong words for those of us who knock on people’s doors. There is a difference between trying to save another person from oppression versus challenging a person to stand up and walk toward freedom. But the line is not always easy to grasp. As is often the case when things get murky, the answer usually lies in connecting honestly with people. We can follow Michael Walzer’s point about the relevance of Exodus for our own lives by asking ourselves, How am I experiencing Egypt in my own life? What would the promised land really look like for me? Whom can I walk with to get there?
Practical Exercise
There is no magic recipe for clarifying your purpose and what you have at stake in a fight, but there are ways of getting closer. Try this: Put aside for a moment your opinions, however strongly you feel them, about what is wrong in the world and what needs to change. Put aside the people whom you want to help, however noble that urge may be. Write down what you personally need from the change you want to bring about. What would it mean for your life? Without judging your own response, ask and answer this question three times in a row. Be as honest as possible, even if you think the answer isn’t something you’re supposed to say. You’re aiming at the kind of shift that Rosie experienced. You should get clearer each time.
Our values are shaped by our experiences and the stories we tell about them. Often what we most need is to be included, to find a sense of connection with other people, to know that our lives matter. When we find our purpose in life, we have the commitment to act in the face of uncertainty and explain to others why they should trust us with their lives. Rosie’s resolve to stay on the corner despite the danger was tied to a deep religious belief. Her willingness to take the next step—to join others to attack the underlying problems facing her community—depended on seeing organizing as part of her purpose. For Rosie, that flowed from her understanding of what God wanted for her. That’s true for many people. For others, our purpose flows from the difference we want to make in the world, what we want to leave behind when we’re gone. Our commitment hinges on how aligned the work we’re doing is with our understanding of our purpose. If we know this is what we’re meant to be and do, it’s hard to knock us off course.
When we find our purpose in life, we have the commitment to act in the face of uncertainty and explain to others why they should trust us with their lives.
That’s why creating space in our organizations for conversation about purpose is so important. For some people, the moment when we know we’re called to a lifetime commitment to social justice falls like a ton of stone on our heads. For most of us, the breakthrough moments aren’t that clear. Figuring out our purpose can be like looking for a lost object that can be found only by searching in our minds. I once filled up my gas tank and drove ten or fifteen blocks before someone leaned out his window and shouted that my gas cap was missing. In the dark, I drove back to the exact spot where it had fallen off the roof of my car. My mind knew just where it was, but I needed someone to tell me to go back and look for it. People who ask us to reflect on our purpose and agitate us to wake up are invaluable because they help us fit all the pieces of our experience together to find the larger pattern. The knock at our door may be so soft that we risk missing it. We may need someone to help us hear that we’re being called. Then we have everything we need to make a difference.
Emotional clarity is important because it makes us magnetic to other people. When we’re aware of our emotions and clear about our purpose, we’re able to forge virtually unbreakable relationships with one another. This trust built from honesty is the collective “endurance” that the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass described as the one thing that can set “the limits of tyrants.”4 Organizers like to quote Margaret Mead, who famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”5 But the trusting relationships that make change possible don’t just happen. They take work. And they flourish best when we build organizations and movements around human purpose and transformation.
During the six weeks after Rosie had her breakthrough, the parent group talked to hundreds of people in the community to hear their concerns. The group met with public officials to figure out what could be done to make the neighborhood safer and improve the school. The parents leading the effort were still afraid of getting on the wrong side of the drug dealers who ran the corners, but the work they’d done to clarify what they had at stake and build trust together kept them moving forward. They decided to go ahead with a big public meeting—the first one in many years in the neighborhood. The night of the meeting, more than five hundred people showed up. Parents, children, and neighbors crammed into the school’s small auditorium, filled the main hallway, and stood in the schoolyard. People testified about the shootings that had taken place around the school. The main demand was for the local police captain to assign an officer to be at the school at the start and end of the school day. The goal was to create a truce that stopped sellers from dealing drugs during the times when children were walking to and from school.
I remember watching the captain respond to the demand and my not being sure whether we had won or lost. Had he said yes or no? But then I looked at Rosie and the other parents leading the meeting, and I knew from their faces that we’d won. The feeling after the meeting was electric. The next day, a sad-looking cop walked around the school in the morning and afternoon with his head down. His presence was cold comfort, given everything happening in the neighborhood, and did nothing to get at the root causes of the problems. Still, it was a start: a tiny down payment on the idea that collective action could create a reaction in the world.
In the years that followed, the parent group went on to win a new roof for the school, full-day kindergarten, and the first Spanish-speaking teachers (one per grade). When parents began organizing around reading levels and the fact that even children who were receiving good grades weren’t adequately prepared for middle school, the principal kicked the parent group out of the school. For six months, we held meetings on Rosie’s corner. Eventually, the parent group pushed the school district to hire a new principal. He was a Latino man who did a lot to reconnect the school to the community, including having ten years’ worth of graffiti removed from the building’s exterior. Along with an umbrella organization of schools and churches, the parents helped anchor a major campaign to get the city to renovate, and in other cases tear down, hundreds of vacant homes.
None of these changes altered the underlying inequality that still makes Philadelphia one of the poorest big cities in the United States. But they created virtuous cycles in the community and in people’s lives. In 2012, eighteen years after Rosie and the other parents first stood up, parents and teachers at the school defeated a plan to close their school. They won that fight by showing that even though the building was old, the school was doing a better job of preparing its students for middle school than other nearby schools. In the news coverage, I noticed that the building (which I hadn’t seen in years) was still completely clean of graffiti. Over time, the parents who had had the courage to step forward into uncertainty and danger helped transform their community into a better place to raise children. Along the way, they changed their own lives.
This personal transformation is inseparable from the struggle for social justice. Our growth is both the greatest resource we have and the purpose for the changes we seek in the world. After the first big meeting organized by the parent association, someone made a video about their work. What struck me was how much people lit up when they talked about what had happened to their own lives. People would mention the issues in the neighborhood and the changes they were making. But what they wanted to talk about was how they’d changed. They shared how amazing it was to stand up and speak their minds, to tell officials what to do—and how they’d never imagined doing such a thing.
Angelina Rivera, a parent of five young children, often expressed the white-hot anger of the group. She would bring people to tears at public meetings about improving the quality of education at the school. (“Just because we’re poor doesn’t mean our children don’t deserve a good education.”) One day she said to me, “I’m going back to school.” I said that was great and asked where she was going to get her GED. She said, “No, I’m going back to finish high school in the same school and the same grade where I left off ten years ago.” And she did. Angelina, like Rosie, taught me that what leads people to stand up is almost always deeper and more personal than the problem that they said needed to be solved.
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates tells his son, “History is not solely in our hands. And still you are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life.”6 Jerry Wurf marched with the Memphis sanitation workers as the head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. He said that union organizers “think they’re peddling better wages and working conditions, but essentially they’re offering dignity. And sometimes the worker who doesn’t articulate this very easily has more awareness than the professional organizer. The civil rights struggle, the equality struggle or whatever you want to call it, is just one part of this continuing struggle for dignity.”7 Ultimately, the work that seems to be about fixing the world ends up being about finding our purpose and place within it.
Ultimately, the work that seems to be about fixing the world ends up being about finding our purpose and place within it.
That’s why it’s important to come into social change work with some idea about how you want to grow personally. The problems facing our society and planet are enormous. But, like Angelina, each of us has permission to make our own development a priority. In Faith in Action, community organizers work with volunteer grassroots leaders to write leadership development plans that spell out what the leaders want to learn and get better at doing. Given that fear of speaking in public is so common, it’s not surprising that people often say that they want to learn how to talk in front of a room. But plans can include anything from running successful meetings or advocating for your child at school to trusting people more or deepening your faith. Some people gain the skills and relationships to run for office. A good leadership development plan sets goals that are ambitious but achievable and can be measured. It identifies specific activities that will help you achieve these personal goals, such as speaking at the next meeting or attending a weeklong leadership seminar. We all need coaches to keep us on track. And we need to be in environments that take our growth seriously, which is the focus of the next section.
Using Our Emotions to Bring the Most Out in People
One social-change superpower that we all need to nurture is the ability to channel our emotions. We can use this power not only to shape how we’re feeling ourselves but also to shift the emotional state in a room or in a relationship. We can create human environments that make people more open to reflect on their purpose, learn, grow, and develop strong and trusting relationships with one another. This makes it possible for people to take risks together. Our emotional power is the main tool we have to lead people, organize events that engage and energize people, and construct effective organizations.
Two facts about how we’re wired as human beings make this possible. One has to do with the inherent way our brains default to mimicking one another. If you and I are talking across the table, we are exchanging thousands of tiny bits of information (which makes being face-to-face so powerful, compared to communicating by phone or e-mail). If I rub my forehead for a moment, chances are that you’ll do the same. If I lean forward slightly, you will too. Within a few minutes, without either of us noticing it consciously, we may synchronize our breathing. Indeed, the word conspire comes from the root words meaning “breathing together.” We’re subconsciously influenced by and adopt each other’s emotions. If people are dejected from losing a fight, and I walk into a room with a sense of resolve, my emotional state can shift the feeling in the room.
You cannot make someone stop or start feeling a certain way. Nor can you argue with an emotion. Telling people that they don’t feel sad—or worse, that they shouldn’t feel sad—is never a good idea. It always backfires. And we cannot override the pain or anger that people experience by telling them to be happy or think positively. But we can use our emotional state to shift and channel how people around us are feeling—if we’re intentional about it.
Psychologists call this “priming.” This is the second brainrelated concept that facilitates leadership and collective action. Given how our brains work, we can be primed to feel certain ways. This happens when we are exposed to images, words, and thoughts that our memory associates with a feeling we’ve had in the past. Simple experiments involving colors and words demonstrate this. For example, people who are shown a yellow card and then asked what they’d like to eat are more likely to choose a banana from among other options.8 This is how advertising works: it can get us to buy a product by associating it with a memory that made us happy in the past. You can use language as a priming tool to encourage a mind-set in others that disposes them to work cooperatively to build power. A simple example is asking someone to share what she or he feels grateful about. Just saying the word grateful and having to articulate that emotion can help take the edge off stress or a feeling of being overwhelmed in the face of so much injustice.
The same basic idea applies to reading the emotional state of a room. If you’re facilitating a meeting and running into a lot of conflict and confusion, you can stop and ask people how they’re feeling. What people say will shape how others are feeling and influence what the group can get done. But if there is underlying tension, it’s almost always best to get it out on the table, so people can figure out together how to move forward. This may take a lot of effort, since part of the reason for the tension is that people are uncomfortable giving voice to challenging subjects (as Rosie’s example illustrated). Similarly, at times of stress or crisis, having an agenda with more structure is better. It gives people a sense of where things are going, increasing trust levels.
My friend Carlos Saavedra, who told the story recounted in chapter 2 about undocumented immigrants donating blood, is a great teacher of organizing. He says, “state before story,” which means that you have to start by establishing the right emotional state in the room. Then you can go forward with sharing your story, taking the other steps to get organized, and creating change in the world. Part of what makes Carlos an effective organizer is his ability, like an actor, to bring strong emotions to the surface by tapping into a reservoir of powerful memories.
These ideas have practical applications for the choices we make in facilitating meetings and organizing events. What we do to shift the state of a room can be as simple as moving the chairs around. An iron rule of organizing is that if it is physically possible to arrange a room so that everyone can see one another’s eyes, you ought to take the time to do this. Even if the chairs are arranged in rows when you arrive, rearrange them into a circle. That way, we don’t just say everyone needs to be seen and heard, we make it possible.
If you have hundreds of people in the room, put them at round tables so they can spend some time working together in small groups. People need to not only consume what’s being said upfront but also process what they’re learning and share what they know with others. And try this: ask people to stand up and put their hands underneath the edge of the table. Count to three, and then ask everyone to lift at the same time. Boom! We just had a physical experience of acting together. And we felt how light the tables were when we acted in unison.
The tactile experiences are often the most powerful. When I was in Chile, almost every meeting or training would begin with a dinámica (a game of one sort or another) that got people moving and working together in a playful way. Activities included seeing how long a group of people keep a few beach balls up in the air and seeing if people could pass an orange or small ball from one to another without using their hands. These kinds of games shift the state of the room by triggering all sorts of feelings and memories—mostly positive. They’re not just activities—they give an experiential taste of a different way of being in the world.
Sometimes what makes all the difference for a group is to go for a walk. I was once in Flint, Michigan, in a church hall, where people were debating what to do with an abandoned apartment complex nearby. Should the church buy it to redevelop into affordable housing (the pastor’s idea)? Or push the city to tear it down? Or demand that the owners renovate it? We decided what to do only when we left the church, and walked over broken glass, to see, feel, and smell the state of the buildings.
Sharing a powerful story works as well (something we’ll talk more about in the next chapter). But sometimes the simplest step that you can take is to ask a question: What are you feeling grateful for this morning? What was a moment in your life when you felt included? Or excluded? One breakthrough for the marriage-equality movement was shifting from telling people about the right to marry to asking people when they first fell in love. Another simple but powerful state-shifting tool is to ask people to share what they appreciate most about the other people in the room. These “appreciation circles” can be especially helpful when groups have experienced tension. The questions can feel a bit corny when you ask them, but they almost always work.
My colleague Alvin Herring uses a Wall of Truth to prime people for honesty and compassion in trainings about race and racism. He gives people sticky notes and asks them to write down things about race that they think but don’t say out loud and then put them up on a wall. What people write is often mind-blowingly honest. Afterward, people walk up and read the notes, and then the group can discuss some of the most challenging or perceptive truths. Effective multiracial racial-justice organizations develop out of hard and honest conversations. These can happen only when we intentionally create spaces where people can say not just what they think but what they feel.
Activities like the Wall of Truth and appreciation circles make us better teachers, trainers, facilitators, chairpeople, and all-around good people to have on teams. When we repeat them, they become rituals. Those rituals shape the culture of our organizations. People come to expect that participation will involve being challenged to think differently—even if it is uncomfortable. At Faith in Action, we begin most meetings with prayers or reflections and sometimes song. I’ve worked with other organizations that use readings, music, spoken word, and chants to center people and connect them to a larger purpose. We know how central music was to the civil rights movement and to so many other struggles. All these approaches and activities come back to inviting people to bring their whole selves to the table, which is what organizations that follow the framework in the next section do.
Building Organizations That Treat People as Ends, Not Means
We want the small group, larger organization, or mass movement to which we’re dedicating our time and energy to treat us as ends, not means. We want it to be a small version of the kind of society we are trying to bring into existence. The work may be difficult and uncomfortable at times. But it always needs to come back to our well-being, learning, and growth. Building this orientation toward people into organizational culture can be done in many ways. One approach is to think about purposeful organizations as four-dimensional: they teach, trust, reflect, and face outward.
Teach
Organizations develop their members into leaders when they dedicate time and resources to teach people the knowledge and skills necessary for leadership. A lot of research has been done on education reform that highlights the importance of designing schools as places where teachers are constantly learning.9 If the teachers aren’t learning, then students aren’t either. The same applies to our organizations. If organizations aren’t places where people are learning and growing, they’re less likely to be able to make change in the world. Yet people in our organizations often tell us that we rush them into action. We don’t adequately explain the context or teach them the skills they need to succeed.
Here are three practices that nurture learning in organizations: (1) explicitly describe what skills and knowledge are being taught and why (don’t make people guess why they’re attending a training); (2) before teaching adults something, ask them what they already know about the subject; and (3) regularly ask people what they are learning and what difference it’s made in their lives. If we don’t tell people why, they won’t know where we’re going. If we don’t validate what they know, they won’t feel that we respect them. If we don’t ask whether it’s working, they won’t know we care about their growth.
Trust
Investing in people goes hand in hand with trusting them with big responsibilities. This is the difference between telling someone to come to the next activity or do a small task versus laying out a big goal and sitting down together to figure out what that person’s role is in achieving it. If we don’t invest relentlessly in people’s development and trust them to lead, we end up replicating racial and class inequality inside our organizations and movements. Some people—often White men—get to be heads, making decisions and developing strategy. While others—people of color, women, those with less formal education, volunteers—are hands, receiving instructions, showing up, and doing the work. We ask too little of people who are prepared to give so much.
We ask too little of people who are prepared to give so much.
Reflect
The third dimension of a purposeful organization is a commitment to reflect on all significant action. Every meeting, training, and event should include some reflection and evaluation. We need to set aside time to figure out what we’ve learned from taking action together. Too often, people spend time gearing up for a big showdown, and then, win or lose, they go silent or move on to the next task. This is especially true when different organizations come together to work on a larger campaign. They may have been able to coordinate their work, but they don’t necessarily have a structure to process it together and figure out what comes next. I once talked to a friend who’d been involved in a successful effort to raise the minimum wage in his city. Months later, he told me that the groups that had led the effort still hadn’t set up a meeting to reflect on the campaign. They hadn’t made an effort to look honestly at how they’d worked together, what they might do differently, and how they could build on their success. If we’re creating people-based organizations, we can’t afford to miss a chance to learn and get more real with one another about what we’re doing together.
Face Outward
The fourth dimension is facing outward—actively reaching out and engaging people through direct contact. People want to belong. But all groups, large and small, have tendencies to become cliques, to slouch into oligarchy. Organizations say that they want more people to be involved but send out the opposite message or allow long periods of radio silence. In college, I wanted to become involved in the movement on campus to end South African apartheid. But I couldn’t figure out how. It seemed like the cool kids all knew one another and that there wasn’t a clear way in. Later, once I’d figured out how to be part of the group, I was at a meeting where people were complaining about how hard it was to get people involved. Now, whenever I’m in a conversation about how to increase participation or about why more people don’t show up, I remember that moment. I remind myself that what’s important is not our stated desire for people to join our group but the messages people are actually hearing about whether we want them. People remember how you made them feel. Are we faced inward, talking to one another, feeling special and chosen? Or are we turned outward, communicating the feeling of inclusion, measuring our days by the purposeful conversations we’ve had with people who’ve waited so patiently for us to knock at their doors?
When I saw people pouring into the school auditorium on that night of the first public meeting organized by the parent group, it felt like an epiphany. Organizing wasn’t so hard. If you could get enough people to show up and ask for something, you’d get it. That was an experience of the Utopian Flaw, an idea I learned from the Jesuits. When we’re building something new, we put an almost idealistic hope in it. We convince ourselves that reaching the top will solve all our problems. The truth is that bigger mountains lie beyond the one we’ve just climbed; the hardest part isn’t scaling the first one. It’s making it through the valley that follows. That capacity to keep going rests on the strength of the relationships we’re able to build with other people. And that starts with sharing our story.