I passed my exams!

Plus some helpful content on reform, resist, reconstruct, and reimagine

It has been MONTHS since I wrote. I apologize. I should be more consistent this summer, especially because I have been to some conferences where I have learned amazing things I can’t wait to share with you. I’ve been on pins and needles (along with my classmates) waiting for our preliminary exam results for the past month. Those are the exams that are supposed to prove we’ve learned the research skills and tools of the field they taught us adequately to move forward with our dissertation proposals and then research. I did pass, as did my classmates, so it’s on to the next stage. Thanks for the immense support and patience you’ve extended. (I’ll tell you more about what I learned while writing my exam another week—fascinating stuff about the history of “right to work” laws in the US!)

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There’s a tool I wanted to share with you today because it might be useful in your own community-building work, and even if it isn’t, it might be valuable for your own reflection as we all think about our place in the work of justice in this particular time of war and starvation, fear and constriction, and no small amount of urgency.

One of the really amazing partner organizations at the Oakland Peace Center was/is called “YES!” They host weeklong retreats for changemakers all over the world that they call “jams,” because like jazz, there’s a loose structure and also as the music unfolds, the people co-create something distinct and unique that could only happen in the configuration of that particular jam session.

At the North America jam I attended at least twelve years ago, we engaged in an exercise I have never forgotten and that I have used several times since because it was so impactful to how I think about movement building in spaces where we spend as much time pushing against each other as pushing against the systems and structures that harm us.

The exercise is called “the Four R’s,” and it borrows from and expands on a theory of change developed by Spirit in Action.

In the exercise (which YES! generously shares here for general use, as part of their full facilitators’ guide also available for general use, with 24 years’ worth of wisdom embedded), we are introduced to the Four R’s of social change:

Reform—that’s the folks working within or in conversation or partnership with existing systems to make things better. Think: social workers, civil servants, and actually most of the community organizing I’ve done.

Resist—that’s the folks standing in opposition to the system because it’s so harmful. While some of BLM and the Occupy movement fall into Reform with policy proposals, most of it was Resist, raising alarm bells about how violent existing systems were to many people. The WTO protests of the late 90s/early 00s would fall into this category as well.

Reconstruct—that’s the folks who aren’t working either within or against the system; they’re building a new system from scratch or building strategies to function outside the system. I have friends who have moved to lower-expense parts of the country to live in communities where they grow their own food, create systems of support for children and elders and people with disabilities, practicing the values they believe should drive community. I remember thinking about these friends and being jealous of folks in Reform when I learned this paradigm. The lead facilitator at the jam said, “Sandhya, the Oakland Peace Center lives in Reconstruct!” Creating different ways to be community and resource each other that seek to create community in new ways is Reconstruct, which can happen in a million big and small ways.

Reimagine—the poets, the griots, the musicians and artists cast a vision for what the world could be. That’s reimagine.

We were invited to think about which R our work placed us in. Then we gathered with others in our group. We talked about why we had ended up in that R, what was hard about it, what was important about it, and what we wished folks in the other R’s knew about what it was like being in our R. We did little skits to illustrate our R. Then we chose the R we WISHED we were in, gathered with others with that same longing, and talked about what we could do to move in that direction. And we talked about what we had learned about ourselves and also the other R’s.

The reason I wanted to share this exercise is because of an issue many of us have been wrestling with in social justice movements for a while (and if we haven’t, I feel like we should be). There are a lot of tensions in that world. Sometimes it’s because we get frustrated with folks in a different R because we think they’re doing it wrong, and that warrants rigorous conversation that involves a lot of trust building. But part of why those conversations can be hard and distrustful is because many of us carry a history of feeling ignored, dismissed, or disrespected by folks in the other R’s. One of the things that was so impactful about that exercise for me twelve years ago was as someone solidly in Reform, I felt judged (and maybe guilty) for not being in Resist, since Reform often ends up being mostly about reducing harm to the people we care about rather than making sustainable change for the better—or at least it feels that way. It turned out the Resist folks felt really lonely and dismissed for bringing a sense of urgency. And so on.

It’s not that this exercise is a magic bullet, but in social justice spaces, the sense of being undervalued is often under the surface when people from the different R’s encounter each other in the midst of shared work.

I’ve used this exercise many times since in mixed groups. I’ve learned things about how co-workers understand their location in the work that I hadn’t understood before. I’ve learned that fellow activists longed to be in a different R than they currently inhabited, and what made them feel the need to stay in their current R (or what opened up to them about how they could do the work differently to lean into a different R). And one of the most humbling moments I’ve had as a facilitator was at a gathering of social service providers—some running all-volunteer crisis services, some running multi-million dollar national affordable housing programs—was when I asked what people had learned, and one of the people standing in Reform (80% of the group was in Reform at that gathering) said, “I’ve realized I need to get to know the people in Resist in my own community.” I can’t now remember whether she realized they may think she didn’t know they were on the same team, or whether she realized that she hadn’t actually thought of them as part of the same team. I just remember her realizing she wasn’t in relationship with them and needed to figure out how to be.

For twelve years I’ve been talking about this paradigm with social movement folks as we think about why we’re bumping up against people in different factions. And as we’ve all listened to the post-election analysis about why we’re in the state we’re in, I saw a lot of those same divisions emerge. I’ve also heard a lot of people talk about how we talk to people who are different from us and how we build bridges among the various social movements in order to be more effective. This tool has definitely helped me show up in some spaces a little more generously than I would have five or ten years ago, so I thought you might find it helpful, or at least interesting, as you engage in work where we’re going to bump into each other in ways that feel very high stakes given the world we live in right now.

Like I said, I can’t wait in the coming weeks to share all the amazing things I’ve been learning from grassroots activists, national organizers, and social movement scholars over the past couple of weeks. Thanks for staying in community, and thanks for doing the hard work.

peace,

Sandhya