New Roots Grounding Core Values
The New Roots Race, Equity and Inclusion Series is about collective learning and listening with our whole beings. Nonprofit professionals will participate in a highly interactive three-part Racial Equity & Inclusion Learning Series that will provide a cultural, holistic, and educational experience to equip White-Led (Non-BIPOC) and BIPOC Led organizations with information and tools they can leverage to begin the work of strategic equity, inclusion, belonging and justice planning within their organizations to support the process of dismantling the racist structures and ideologies within their organizations and the communities of color they serve.
We are extremely happy that you have chosen to join us in this series and are looking forward to all of the ways in which this collective will learn with and from each other.
Community Principles and Equity Reminders
To ground us and co-create a shared foundation focused on equity and liberation, we offer up some principles and commitments that allow us to engage in principled struggle -- fortifying our relationships, organisations, and movements.
First are the Principles of Emergent strategy
Emergent Strategy is about shaping the conditions through which a group can engage in relatively simple interactions and generate many possibilities (even contradictory ones) AND then explore and try out and adapt these possibilities into actions in support of moving toward shared goals.
To put this in terms of organisations like non-profits, Emergent Strategy is a pattern of action that develops over time in an organisation in the absence of a specific mission and goals, or despite a mission and goals.
An Emergent Strategy develops when an organisation takes a series of actions that with time turn into a consistent pattern of behavior, regardless of specific intentions. “Deliberate strategies provide the organisation with a sense of purposeful direction.” Emergent strategy implies that an organisation is learning what works in practice. Mixing the deliberate and emergent strategies in some way will help an organisation to control its course while encouraging the learning process.
The Emergent Strategies Principles are:
Small is good, small is all (The large is a reflection of the small): To find deep insights, look closely into the inner workings of how you manage your daily work, from how you manage email and your calendar, to how you decide what to work on next.
Change is constant (Be like water): Invest in your capacity to adapt, expecting your work and your life to change, instead of trying to prevent them from changing.
There is always enough time for the right work. There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it. Choosing what the work actually is, and with whom you will do it, has far greater leverage than how you perform it.
Never a failure, always a lesson: Every experience you have is fuel for creative inspiration. The bigger the failure, the better the fuel.
Trust the People (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy): Learning how to trust people, and how to allow them to trust you, is a far greater source of leverage than all the productivity tips, tricks, and hacks ever conceived.
Move at the speed of trust: How fast you can move is determined by how much trust you have. And people won’t trust you unless you are vulnerable with them.
Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships: A relationship to the right person can have more leverage than a large group agreeing. Invest in that relationship because it is critical.
Less prep, more presence: Preparation has diminishing returns after a while, while presence has exponential returns. The sooner you move from preparing to being present, the better your results will be.
What you pay attention to grows: Attention is the rarest and most precious resource we have. It can be shaped and cultivated by investing attention in the first place, in an endless cycle.
This isn’t a passive set of practices and it requires Principled Struggle, which means that our struggle must be for the sake of deepening our collective understanding.
Principled struggle agreements in our context:
- All people have a right to dignity
- Systems are fundamentally racist
- Capitalism is inextricably linked to racism
- Be honest and direct while holding compassion
- Be responsible for our own feelings and actions
- Seek deeper understanding (We ask and read first)
- And consider that every space may not be the container to hold what you need to bring.
Expectations
The facilitators are committed to showing up and bringing our whole selves to this training; it is expected that all Participants do the same.
Commit to all three sessions in the series and the “Heart-work” and assignments in-between.