Building Belonging: one-year reflections
One year ago, Building Belonging was born. Our inaugural co-design cohort gathered last April around a radically simple question: can we create an ‘us’ without a ‘them’?
We used the Mighty Networks platform as a place to gather, and practice: how do we build an experience of belonging in a virtual context? We decided early that we would intentionally cultivate and grow our community through a curated cohort model, following Peter Block’s insight that small groups are the most supportive container for transformation.
I want to use this post to reflect on some of my key learnings/struggles in this first year (writing as a member of Building Belonging, not on behalf of the community), in the event they may be useful for others holding these inquiries.
Learning is a community practice
I’d been fortunate in my time since leaving my last salaried role at the Gates Foundation in 2016 to set my own learning agenda each year: essentially a degree each year in multidisciplinary study of how transformation happens. Yet there is no substitute for learning in community: we are relational beings, and theory only takes form in practice. I’ve been struck time and again by the depth and power of learning in community, and I find myself craving more. I love this line from Jes Ciacci (hat tip to Mandy Van Deven for the share):
Expertise is not the only way of approaching knowledge. Knowledge is created through curiosity and experimentation.
And: it’s hard to convey the nature of this transformation, because it’s happening every day. Several of our members hosted a beautiful birthday celebration for Building Belonging, and one of the inquiries we gathered around during an Open Space was naming the ripple effects this community has had on our lives outside Building Belonging. It was remarkable to behold: in our parenting relationships with our kids and our own parents, with our intimate partners, in our “day jobs”… we are changed by virtue of our time together, and the radical insight that another way of being in relationship is possible.
Money as barrier and untapped potential
Everything about living into emergence is difficult, in part because we don’t have any practice. As Milan Kundera said: “the only rehearsal is life itself.” All the layers are deep, but it’s increasingly clear that money is one of the deepest, most challenging, and potentially most transformative domains of practice.
I sensed at the outset that there would be a sweet spot as we launched Building Belonging: money too soon in an emergent collaborative can entrench existing power structures and impede relational fabric; money too late and it risks devolving into a playground for the privileged, or remaining abstract and theoretical rather than material. And yet: how can we engage with money inside of capitalism, even as we try to live into the post-capitalist future we desire?
It turns out that many of us who are drawn to these spaces of justice and emergence have no trouble giving: we have huge trouble receiving, and often still more trouble taking (I’m thinking here of Esther Perel’s provocative challenge around the “7 verbs” of love in the context of intimate relationships).
I’m so proud of Building Belonging for stepping courageously into this space, following the leadership of people like Carol Xu and Jordan Lyon. It’s an incredibly vulnerable domain of practice, with deep stories many of us have never had an opportunity to excavate. I listened to Prentis Hemphill’s recent invitation for us to “practice interdependence.” It seems to me money is one powerful place where that becomes real.
Struggling with scale
I joined a beautiful space recently convened by Sam Chaltain, where adrienne maree brown made this observation:
For each one of us, there’s a different scale at which we’re comfortable.
Here’s the tension I’m trying to hold: how do we remain accountable to the whole (the global ecosystem of which we are a part) even as we intervene/act at whatever scale we feel comfortable (of necessity, often the micro, community, or local). Most actors in social justice spaces are rightfully skeptical of “scale”: we tend to associate it with imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, a growth mentality that we associate with the systems of oppression we are trying to dismantle. Yet: we recognize that these systems are global in their expression, and so too must be our solutions. And of course, the scale goes both outward and inward. adrienne again, channeling Grace Lee Boggs:
How big the work is… is how deep within us we need to go.
We need to operate at every level at the same time. Yet there’s an inherent tension within a community of people comfortable operating at different scales: can we learn to appreciate each other’s gifts and focus, and practice the interdependence of our visions?
The beauty of emergence as a framework, for me, is it offers a new way of thinking and acting at scale. Yet it also has the effect of moving people toward the micro, toward the fractal: this can be a really good thing… as long as we don’t disconnect our vision from the whole of which we are a part. I still haven’t found a place that feels like it’s found the right balance here, how to live in that dynamic tension — something I continue to struggle with in Building Belonging.
Belonging requires boundaries
We want a world where everyone — and everything — belongs. And: not every thing belongs everywhere: fish do not thrive in the forest. We have committed to a cohort model for bringing people into Building Belonging… and it remains a source of great tension. Every time I get the notification telling me some other wonderful human has expressed interest in joining our Mighty Network, I feel a pang: I want to find a way to welcome them in, and of course we don’t have the capacity to welcome them all… yet.
There is no transformation without trust; no trust without vulnerability; no vulnerability without a sense of belonging. The cohort approach feels like the best way I know to create a container for belonging, and thus for transformation… yet it is paradoxically a barrier to belonging for those left outside the container.
And of course: how to move from small to large, to connect crew to congregation (in microsolidarity terms).
It’s hard to do it all
Deep thought, I know, but there you have it. Building Belonging for me started with a difficult premise, but one that seemed necessary: from the beginning, intentionally design for the necessary and sufficient conditions for transformation. That is, it’s not enough to focus on narrative and culture-change; we also need to focus on embodiment, somatics, and trauma healing. I resonated with this recent tweet from Phoebe Tickell:
And: we can only hold and practice a finite number of intentions at any one time. It’s hard to simultaneously work on my own trauma healing, upskill my narrative capacity, improve my fluency in holding multiracial space, monitor my triggers, distribute power… and continue to advance our shared purpose. And: we don’t have a choice. Whether we pay attention to those things or not, they will be there, and can be either an impediment or an accelerant toward the emergence and transformation we long for.
The aspiration I had for this hasn’t yet come to fruition. My hope was to use the Conversations on Transformation to highlight those deepest in their own practice on these core competencies, and then apply that emerging wisdom to our work inside Building Belonging. I still think the theory is sound, but we need individuals who have energy — and the capacity to share it — in each domain of practice. It’s not enough to understand intellectually the necessity for somatics… we need to practice it, individually and collectively… and be guided in that practice by those who have already attained a level of competence.
Leadership, emergence, co-creation, and structure
For me personally, this continues to be the hardest domain of practice. It’s Rumi’s unknowable art of holding on and letting go. I think of it as the difference between passive “rewilding” and active stewardship. It’s about recognizing that we humans are part of nature, and our interventions — when done in service of the whole — lead to better outcomes for everyone… rather than simply stepping back to let “nature” run its course without us. We have come to understand, as Gibran Rivera put it:
You don’t plan emergence, you create the conditions for emergence.
But of course we are not agnostic as the direction and shape of that emergence: we want liberation to emerge, not fascism. So how do we co-create the container within which we want emergence to happen… and how do we maintain momentum in the direction of liberation? Of belonging for all? I think it connects to the scale and boundaries points above: not everyone feels comfortable holding the whole container, or defining what is in and what is out: it’s the wrong scale. Yet for those who choose to operate at that scale, to take responsibility for the whole… what does meaningful co-creation — and accountability to those within the container operating at different scales— look like?
I haven’t yet experienced anything that feels quite like the right balance I’m looking for. But of course this is also bound up in questions of money, power, and governance.
I’m excited about the year ahead: we recently formed our inaugural “stewardship circle” to take responsibility for building out minimally viable community infrastructure, organizing around the pillars of purpose, governance, resource flow, membership, conflict/accountability, and social fabric. And it is our first tranche of funding (with gratitude to Cassie Robinson and the National Community Lottery Fund) that is enabling that circle to form, to allow people to commit sustained time to this essential infrastructure work.
This work is super hard, and incredibly gratifying. There’s nothing I’d rather wake up each day and commit to, practicing together with others committed to the same journey.
