Building Organizations by Building Community
[Image Description: A graphic of an illustration of bell hooks along with text. The illustration is of a photograph of bell hooks. She has brown skin and a large black afro is looking at the lens/viewer. Her hand rests on her left, rosy cheek and she’s wearing a green blouse adorned with colorful flowers on the collar. A few pink flowers surround her image and encase the text displayed above her hair that reads:
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Below her blouse the text continues, “Healing is an act of communion.” -bell hooks. The image credit is @SelfCareIsForEveryone]
My journey into liberatory organizing began the summer of 2013. Specifically, Sunday, July 15, the day following the announcement of the verdict in Trayvon Martin’s murder trial. After graduating from undergrad, I was energized by my then new politicization as a student and wanted to take a stand against racism and police brutality. So, that Sunday in the blistering Memphis heat, I attended my first protest, surrounded by hundreds of strangers who were collectively angry at George Zimmerman’s acquittal and the legacy of the state-sanctioned murder of Black people. A year later, Michael Brown was brutally killed in Ferguson. Activated by his heinous murder at the hands of a police officer, thousands of people took to the streets in Ferguson and beyond, engaging in mass actions that led to a significant shift in the organizing terrain and 21st century fight for Black Liberation.
[Image Description: An image of me at the protest July 15, 2013. I have brown skin and am wearing a dark blue shirt and blue jean shorts with brown shoes. My hair is styled in a mini black Afro, and I am smiling at the camera. I am standing on the court steps and holding a white sign with black lettering with a friend. The sign reads “Am I A Suspect?” The friend has darker brown skin and is wearing a dark blue shirt with blue jeans and sky blue shoes. Her hair is styled in black curls and she’s smiling at the camera. Off to the side are two white individuals sitting on the steps.]
Following the actions, I was determined to join organizations that were committed to racial justice and combating police violence. As with many others who came into the movement during this time period, I was inspired by the emergence of Black Lives Matter. Chapters were quickly forming across the country and taking up the mantle of racial justice organizing. Seeing the need for more Black-led groups in the Memphis organizing ecosystem, especially after a Memphis police officer killed Darrius Stewart in the summer of 2015, I went on to co-found a chapter in Memphis.
This period, following the mass mobilizations of the Occupy Movement, was marked with high intensity as people across generations were being politicized and flowing into organizations in unprecedented numbers. Within most organizations, there was an urgent task to mobilize people to target police departments and elected officials, demanding an end to police brutality against Black communities. For new folks like me, we understood it to be a life or death situation if we weren’t solely committed to this task. There was not much space to slow down and consider what was needed to build strong, sustainable organizations---a culture grounded in revolutionary values, practices and policies. Instead, energetic and consistent supporters who simply agreed to a minimal set of values were thrust into leadership roles without adequate development. New members were given significant work without thorough onboarding. There was little prioritization and effort around what it meant to actively embody values aligned with self and collective determination. Unintentionally, we were curating the perfect set of conditions for mayhem to flourish.
Reflecting as a now seasoned organizer on my chaotic initiation into movement work, I’ve come to learn my experience was similar to others who I’ve met along my journey: a person became fired up about systemic violence and oppression, attended a series of actions, became connected to an organization filled with other charged folks, and got fast-tracked into a leadership role to bring more people into the work instead of developing the internal culture and operations of the organization. I now understand how de-prioritizing organizational culture and sustainability often leads to a lack of political clarity, especially on the larger intervention an organization is positioned to make within the movement ecosystem. Ultimately this ambiguity leads to massive internal strife. I now understand how a lack of intentionality around establishing clear practices and policies to embody progressive values inadvertently leads to people reverting to dominant values around individualism, passive aggressiveness, unchecked power, and punishment.
When people in movement organizations have made mistakes, were in the middle of tense conflict (either interpersonal or political), or caused significant harm, they have often been either gravely ignored or actively pushed out. Both pathways have led to organizational implosions and organizers being alienated.
Where might we be if we interrogated the conditions within organizations that allow harm to take root and flourish? What more could be possible if we actively embodied connection and community? What could we win if we sought out concrete practices to close the gap between our professed values and our actions?
Seeing this pattern of de-prioritizing building robust and accountable organizational culture, including within reproductive freedom spaces that had become my movement home, my comrade and I decided to delve into transformative justice as a new pathway. We had a rudimentary understanding of transformative justice principles through our participation in a feminist collective that had adopted the framework to respond to gender-based violence. As interpersonal and organizational ruptures continued to happen around us, with intense impacts, we wanted to build upon our knowledge of transformative justice and explore the application of the framework in the day-to-day practices within groups. We wanted to explore how we, alongside other Tennessee-based social justice groups, could build our capacity to prevent and respond to instances of harm and violence without relying on punishment and carceral approaches. Centering our hope for care to become the throughline among organizations, we were ready to engage in the arduous work of practicing accountability and unearthing the root causes of harm, abuse, and violence.
In 2020 and 2021, during a period of historic mobilization amid an unprecedented global pandemic, we partnered with Mia Mingus on Tennessee’s first statewide transformative justice 101 intensive. To establish the infrastructure for sustained transformative justice work in the state, following the intensive in 2021, we continued our partnership with Mia and worked toward fostering the conditions for a statewide transformative justice collective to emerge. To support this vision, we launched a cohort to equip activists and organizers with the skill sets and tools to become transformative justice process facilitators.
Among the concepts that we studied in the cohort, such as giving and receiving feedback and creating a culture of accountability, we centered how to hold space for others. Together, we unpacked the stories of when members of movement organizations had caused harm and the punitive (at times inhumane) responses to these occurrences. Instead of offering compassionate feedback and surrounding the person with the support and space to lean into accountability, groups, often lacking the resources and tools to respond in a values-aligned way, ostracized the person. However, while the person may have been banished, the harmful conditions and dynamics lingered within the organizational culture.
Isolation feeds into the oppressive systems that we’re seeking to dismantle. Dominant culture pushes shame and stigma even as abuse and violence within movement organizational contexts are a reflection of systemic abuse and violence. Perpetrators internalize and replicate the practices and behaviors of oppressive structural forces. Moreover, what happens at a larger scale is transmitted and manifests within our most intimate interactions, including the spaces that are seeking to dismantle these violent systems.
As the cohort was shifting to taking on community requests to practice the skills we were learning and sharpening, a few participants noticed that a community member was being removed from organizing groups in the state. Instead of an encouragement to slow down and consider what it would look like to practice abolitionist values, even messily, the seemingly knee jerk reaction was to dismiss the community member from spaces until they took accountability for a harm they’d caused. Transformative justice shows us that accountability happens in relationship, but if connections are severed and ostracization creeps in, what then are the possibilities for accountability? How can we even know if a person is leaning into accountability if they are no longer part of community?
The group of cohort members who witnessed what was happening, including myself, wanted to interrupt this cycle. A cycle that included some of us who had once caused harm in an organization and experienced alienation as a result. Others had been in the role of passive bystander and told themselves not saying or doing anything freed them of any engagement. Conflict avoidance is a choice and that choice has consequences. Inaction perpetuates an unaccountable culture where abuse and violence are allowed to spread.
Even as we were still developing our skill sets, we made a decision to actualize values around care and non-disposability by extending support to hold space for this community member. We did not extend support from a place of pity or sorrow, but to express that we were also unpacking and growing and know that deeper transformation happens in what Pancho Arguelles of the Praxis Project calls accompaniment, “the dynamic process of journeying alongside individuals or communities experiencing the social realities we are aiming to transform and providing support, reflection, and partnership.”
We formed a support pod for this community member, meeting every few weeks for nearly a year to process the harm that had taken place, the responses and isolation that ensued, and the steps at accountability that the community member was taking. We co-created values, agreements, and concrete goals; held space for the community member to share their perspective; offered feedback; sat in a virtual Circle and each shared our experiences with conflict and building/rebuilding trust; deepened our self-awareness around personal trauma and activators and how, left unchecked, they can contribute to harm.
Throughout our time meeting as a pod, we each gained more clarity on the interconnectedness between the self-work we must embrace to undo internalized harmful systems and the organizational cultures that we must be committed to building that engender solidarity, authenticity, love, hope, and reciprocity. Cultures that are built on the belief that we all have the capacity to change and even when inconceivable acts unfold, as Mia says, “we can invite love back in and find our way back to each other and ourselves.” Though there were some goals we did not meet as a pod, as we wrapped up our meetings, we were grateful for the space we intentionally held that nurtured the conditions for strengthening relationships and practicing accountability in communion.
A little before the pod closed out, during a meeting, one of the members reflected on her journey into movement work. The beginning of her journey was peppered with nonstop actions and strategy meetings as the primary focus was putting pressure on power structures to gain some material relief in communities. When she made mistakes or perpetuated harmful behaviors, either people were too busy to notice, chose inaction, or castigated her. She said that her development as an organizer would have taken root earlier if there was someone who was able to slow down enough to offer support and feedback that was not tied to a campaign outcome or any other instrumental reason. The only goal would have been to hold space out of a desire to nurture her holistic wellbeing and growth and journey alongside her. What a gift that would have been for so many of us who were flailing until we much later found supportive spaces and comrades.
The infrastructural work is slow and protracted. Remaining in community when hard moments happen can sometimes be insurmountable. As we experience intensified political conditions and a rise in fascism, the go-to reaction will likely be similar to how I entered into this work. Transformative justice has taught me to pause, reflect, and move beyond my first reaction to consider pathways that make liberation more possible. Moving beyond the rhetoric of our values and into intentional practice is how we can press forward and strengthen the durability of our movements.