Building Belonging: an intentional “future dojo”
Over the last few months inside Building Belonging an interim “Stewardship Circle” formed to take up a core series of questions relating to building out the minimum viable infrastructure to support our emergent community. One of the questions that remains most challenging is that primary starting point: purpose and values. Building a world where everyone belongs sounds great… but how, exactly, do we do that? How can we ground that aspirational vision in an actionable purpose and common set of values? Here’s an excerpt I love from the first draft of the purpose/values internal document that helps frame the challenge:
None of us have yet to see this world we seek, so we use radical imagination to seed emergent possibilities that connect us closer to ourselves, to each other and the earth.
Arriving at a shared understanding of purpose remains ongoing, and is something we’ll continue to explore as a community in the coming months. Personally I’ve found the process clarifying and helpful, alongside a range of other influences on my thinking. In particular, I recently encountered another paradigm that helped clarify for me a key piece of how I understand the purpose of Building Belonging — for me! — and I wanted to unpack it here.
Warning: theory alert! I am a firm believer theory has an essential role to play in our movements for justice; following the work of Myles Horton, Paulo Freire, and bell hooks, I conceive of “theory as liberatory practice.” This post is an update/evolution of the aspiration described in “the vision behind Building Belonging” from July 2020 (shortly after we concluded our inaugural cohort within Building Belonging). I’m going to share four different frameworks that I think get at the same idea… hopefully at least one will resonate :-)
If theoretical frameworks aren’t your bag, here’s what all this boils down to (TL;DR: my evolving thinking on how I understand the purpose of Building Belonging):
- We bring together diverse practitioners committed to building a world where everyone belongs, who themselves are bridgers
- Together we imagine/distill the design principles for the world we long for (what does it look and feel like in Horizon 3, elaborated below)?
- We practice together, within Building Belonging: a future dojo, testing and refining the principles of the world we want to live in (Horizon 3 in practice).
- Then: we experiment/practice out in the world, choosing those (Horizon 2) interventions that feel most catalytic and likely to bring us collectively closer to the world we need and long for (Horizon 3; I find myself drawn to Donella Meadows’ work on “leverage points in a system,” e.g.)
OK, on to the theory.
Bridging: Two Loops and Three Horizons
I’ve long been drawn to the concept of “bridging,” which I first encountered via john a. powell and have continued to explore and deepen in my work. It was the centerpiece of the “who” I had in mind when I shared the initial invitation to Building Belonging: “bridge-builders and connectors.” Following Gloria Anzaldúa’s work, I see bridging as a way of being (we contain multitudes) and of doing (“we make the bridge by walking.”) I want to develop here an evolution of my understanding of what it means to bridge between the world we long for, and the world as it is.
Many practitioners of social justice who see themselves as working toward systems change have come across the “Two Loops Theory,” popularized by Deb Frieze during her time with the Berkana Institute:
The graphic offers an intuitive way to understand both the general life cycle of living systems, and this current moment of global polycrisis: an old system is dying, a new system is being born… and we are in the interregnum, with no clarity on which new system will emerge.
While I loved the framework, something felt missing to me: it’s not clear how to make the jump, how to get from Loop 1 (dead end) to Loop 2 (new beginning). And I was quite sure that most people would not be willing to make the jump, to trust in emergence. It’s the central quandary of how to move from “communities of practice” to “systems of influence” that I discussed here. So I was pleased to encounter a framework (hat-tip to Alnoor Ladha) that might help me bridge that gap, as I was diving into the “3 Horizons” model of systems transformation developed by Bill Sharpe and Anthony Hodgson:
Horizon 1 is status quo; Horizon 3 is the world we long for… within Horizon 2 are the interventions to transform the system, to bring about the necessary phase-shift from Horizon 1 to Horizon 3. While both this and the Two Loops model depict the same general idea, what I like about the 3 Horizons framework is it makes more clear how to get from the first to the second loop: it defines the terrain for intervention. It’s the bridge from the first to the second loop.
That bridge was perhaps always envisioned in the Two Loops theory, but rarely explicitly spelled out (the notion of “wave-riders” doesn’t quite capture the intentionality I think systems transformation requires). Here’s a graphic I like from Bob Stilger inserting the bridge:
Here’s the thing: I don’t think we ever make it to Horizon 3 without Horizon 2. Without the bridge, we never reach the world we long for; we never achieve systems transformation. And: without Horizon 3, Horizon 2 is a bridge to nowhere.
Designing from desire (from necessity?)
My own reading of the social justice/systems transformation landscape (part of what inspired me to pursue Building Belonging) was that we didn’t have nearly enough visible/accessible efforts at building/defining the new world, at dedicated investments in Horizon 3. Without that aspirational vision, all of us who are desperate to leave Horizon 1 and try things in Horizon 2… are aimless. Our efforts are too easily co-opted by the status quo (clean coal!), or locked in perpetual opposition to it, never actually getting us closer to the world we long for.
I saw a need for more radical imagination, but imagination grounded in practice, in a commitment to effecting material change here and now. I’m not interested in utopia (etymologically meaning: “no place”). I’m interested in what Erik Olin Wright calls “real utopias”: new ways of living accessible and practiced in the here-and-now. Updating this October 25th to add a nice hot-off-the-presses definition from Mary Annaïse Heglar; she calls this “world-building”:
World-building is what it sounds like: the process of creating an imaginary world ... It’s the practice of taking the ideas in your head, the sensations from your imagination, and allowing people to see what you see, feel what you feel. It’s as much about creating new things as it is about destroying old structures and assumptions. It’s an art, not a science.
I remember a graphic I encountered via Movement Generation that I can no longer find online; this version from 2008 is the closest example to make the point:
If we see these three circles as the three horizons, the critical point here: not all Horizon 2 interventions are created equal. Some serve only to perpetuate (are co-opted by) the status quo; some lead us closer to liberation and the world we long for. Sharpe and Hodgson distinguish between “Horizon 2- and Horizon 2+” to make this point.
And the reason anchoring in Horizon 3 is so important is because it’s the only way we can know whether our Horizon 2 interventions are leading us closer to or farther from the world we long for (or as Movement Generation rightly puts it: the world we need). If we anchor in Horizon 1… we are likely to get pulled back there. Not utopia, but dystopia. How to know the difference?
An example to make this a little more concrete: I remain active in gender justice work, specifically focused on post-patriarchal futures. My own sense of things (elaborated here) is that in the liberated world I long for there is no definable concept of “masculinity.” Horizon 1 is toxic masculinity, a world that is dying. Horizon 3 is post-masculinity, a world trying to be born. So what are the best Horizon 2 interventions to bridge from here to there? That to me is an exciting space of inquiry… one with real implications for our actions.
There is a growing discourse around “re-imagining masculinity,” the “sacred masculine,” “healthy masculinity” or “conscious masculinity”… all well-intentioned (and much-needed!) Horizon 2 interventions. While it is always necessary to build some scaffolding to bring people along, I fear that these efforts lend themselves to co-optation, once again reifying the very categories we need to transcend. A more promising avenue (in my subjective judgment) are efforts that allow men to find aspirational identities that aren’t rooted in masculinity at all. ALOK remains the best I’ve found at this… and is a good example of the types of “Horizon 2+” interventions I think we need more of. But we can’t make that assessment without a shared sense of what Horizon 3 looks like.
The connective tissue between micro and macro
All this to say: for me, Building Belonging is an intentional intervention to build the world we long for as a microcosm… a fractal: to make it visible, tangible, and accessible. It is an unapologetic bold commitment to Horizon 3. But of course, none of us have lived in such a world, so it requires not only imagination, but also practice: unlearning harmful patterns we’ve been socially conditioned into, trying to develop new habits and ways of being aligned with the future we desire. As Mia Birdsong eloquently put it:
There is a tension between existing in one world while trying to live into another one…We get to the future we want by practicing it now.
Yes. This to me is what I mean when I talk about Building Belonging as a “future dojo”: a place to practice the future, the world we long for.
I want to bring in one more lens here, another way of thinking about bridging. I really like this essay from Dominic Hofstetter (hat-tip to Evelyn Thornton for sending it my way) “in defense of the meso,” speaking to the vital importance of connective tissue between the macro (large scale, systemic, abstract) and micro (local, immediate, tangible). It’s another way of affirming what in Building Belonging we call “I, We, World”: recognizing the fundamental interdependence of all levels of transformation.
One way I think about the aspiration behind Building Belonging is to occupy that “meso” space: to bridge between micro and macro, between local and global, between individual and systemic. As Dominic observes:
In the absence of effective micro-macro bridges, ambitious policies remain empty promises with no large-scale uptake, while ingenious innovations remain beautiful exceptions that never scale beyond their original testbeds.
In other words: it’s not only about Horizon 3 (let’s call it the macro). Focusing on Horizon 3 is part of the theory of transformation; it is not itself transformation. Without the bridge, without Horizon 2 (the meso)… there is no systems transformation. It remains utopian, an escape from systems rather than a commitment to transform them.
This is where the bridging piece is so important. The “who” of Building Belonging for me is this: people who are actively trying to build the new world (focused on Horizon 3) AND who remain committed to bridging to the old world… action in Horizon 2. None of us without all of us. And while everyone has (I suspect) a primary orientation (toward micro, meso, or macro; toward I, We, or World)… the commitment in Building Belonging is that we value all of them and strive to connect them to each other. To help the system see itself… the requisite precondition for transformation.
Anyway, this idea has been bouncing around my head and crystallized (if you can call something this abstract “crystal” :-) during a solo backpacking adventure last weekend around Oregon’s Three Sisters Wilderness (the photo that kicks off this post). I wanted to put it to paper here to see if it makes sense… does it? Curious what resonates, what doesn’t, and how else people are applying these frameworks to guide their practice.
