A neighbor interviewed in an LA Times article around 1993 about an elderly woman who shot a man who was crossing her yard. Her neighbor said, “Its not that she was a bad person. She had gotten scared as the years went on. She just didn’t have anyone to even up the hills and gullies of her life.”
Today I was looking for reasons to hope. I keep coming back to conversations that come from our experience, our heart, our commitments. I keep coming back to times when I had a group who understood and shared my longing for equitable education and justice.
How do you ensure you have anyone to even up the hills and gullies? While it is nice to have a friendly colleague, it is more secure to have a team behind you especially a group intentionally established to support and provoke growth and strength in your practice (and survival).
Following are lessons from prior experiences with teams that served and sustained their purpose.
- Establish foundation to be open and honest about strengths, successes as well as vulnerabilities and falling short of your expectations. Talk explicitly about your level of comfort with opening up about your work including your hopes and concerns (fears) and purpose of the group for you.
- Read provocative pieces from research, professional literature from both education and other fields and literary sources.
- Establish agreements to make it expected and possible to push thinking and experience discomfort within a context of respect and value for each other.
- You might agree that you can call on each of these individuals in between our actual meetings—so there is always someone around in a crisis. Then it doesn’t have to become a crisis anymore, because you have others to back you up and figure out what to do.
- Develop a collective understanding of what it means to be allies for and with each other, especially across the differences of background, race, ethnicity, gender, which we intentionally included in our original invitation. Discuss agreements for how you will speak up for each other; listen and ask exploratory questions when you disagree; what you will do to let things ride for a while when you can’t resolve them and still stay engaged in the relationship.
- Expect and accept times of frustration, fear, disturbance and mistrust. We are human beings and in our struggles we are not always able to behave most productively. But stick by agreements to stay engaged, listen, be brave and we share a commitment to expanding and deepening our capacity to improve education for every child in our schools. This shared higher purposes leads us to stay with the struggles and challenges of building alliances across differences in real time in real practice.
- Think about the make-up of the group. Should it be an affinity group who share background, roles, philosophy or a diverse group who will bring different perspectives, challenge assumptions and beliefs?
- Consider creating a group from outside your daily work community that could be safer to express divergence from “party line,” or to explore your concerns without consequences you might face if you were to voice your opinions to people who hold power over your employment or continued membership in a community.
- Set up a schedule for rotating facilitation. It is important that the burden and power of responsibility not fall on one or two people not only to be fair in terms of workload, but also because we had learned in past CFG’s that when we let them happen, it also becomes seen as in the hands and leadership of whoever has that responsibility.“Yay, my revolutionary papa! But remember, no one should try to do something like this in a vacuum. Rosa Parks did not just sit on that bus by herself. She had hundreds if not thousands of people backing her up and giving her courage. Go out and let people know what you are doing so you don’t feel alone.”—14-year-old daughter of Carl Chew, WASL refuser