Innovator Insights: Jessica Norwood of Emerging Changemakers Network
Armed with an encyclopedic understanding of the intricacies of business development, Jessica Norwood deploys strategies in the areas of capital, policy, and leadership development to transform the systems that prohibit communities from thriving in an increasingly harsh economic climate.
As a BALLE fellow, Jessica shared the experiences that led her to found the Emerging ChangeMakers Network, which she formed as a response to a lack of holistic leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As part of her own early work in the recovery, she was asked to prepare a report for the Ford Foundation. Her research included delving into the leadership capacity of organizations on the ground.
II: Based on your experience post-Katrina, does it feel like we need natural or social upheaval to reveal the deep roots of the challenges that face our communities- and society as a whole- as well as provide us with the opportunity to take stock of what we have and resolve them?
JN: There is something very powerful that happens when disaster strikes. Disaster, either man-made or natural, has a unique way of creating a situation where inequity is exposed. This exposure can lead to transition that enables everyone to see the problems, name the problems and because of the immediacy of the situation, work quickly to find resolutions. While a disaster framework provides a lot of focus and can bring community members to together, who ordinarily would not connect, it can also create problems. The built-in emergency nature of social or natural upheaval can also exclude voices, neglect culture, intact wrong policy and create an economy that is motivated by the upheaval. It’s important that leadership notices that there is a built-in tension in trying to solve deep rooted problems in the face of upheaval because during those times we want to do triage, not repair deep wounds. Deep wounds, like the ones revealed post-Katrina, require a dedication to looking at systems not just symptoms.
In Jessica’s report to the Ford Foundation, she proposed the question of how to identify “Miss Mary”: a valued community member who falls outside the purview of a traditional organization but is an integral part of the fabric of a community. And further, she asked, “How do you identify them before they become Miss Mary?” The“farm team” approach she developed — identifying emerging leaders and fostering in them an understanding of social justice and structural inequity- is the foundation of the Emerging ChangeMakers Network.
II: How do you see your approach of scouting leaders working? What are your greatest successes? Challenges?
JN: One of the best things that I ever did was created a pipeline of leaders in the deep south that understood and could work on, in various sectors, issues of systemic inequity. We have a network that is really unstoppable and immensely effective because we took the time to do the deeper dive to build relationships with the future in mind. That’s not to say there aren’t challenges to this strategy. The long game takes money and it may not yield immediate results. The larger the network grew the harder it became to provide the connection we wanted without replicating other institutions that were already pulling for resources. We understood this was a tension and so we made a decision to attach our farm team approach to existing organizations, sororities and fraternities, networks and communities. By making the decision to attach to the Urban League Young Professionals or the Delta Sigma Theta, Inc. Gems or the Black Law Association we also forfeited a deep identity to our organization. There are pros and cons to that thinking, it depends on what we wanted as an outcome. Did we want an organization that was an emerging leaders network or did we want an organization that shifted economic inequity by building a system of emergent leaders and emergent ideas? We chose the latter.
II: Paint a picture of a thriving healthy ecosystem: what does that look like? What are the necessary ingredients for getting there? In order to nurture emergent ecosystems, what has to happen? What resources must be in place? Who must be at the table?
JN: A healthy ecosystem is fractal. In science, fractal theory is a theory based on relationships, emergence, patterns and iterations. This theory maintains that the universe is full of systems, weather systems, immune systems, social systems, etc. and that these systems are complex and constantly adapting to their environment. Therefore a healthy ecosystem is non-linear, always moving and evolving. People have a desire to have things be static and motionless because the predictability makes us feel safe and settled. But in reality, a system is most successful when it is evolving as a response to a good feed back loop. In order for us to emerge new strategies, we have to get comfortable with the constant motion of the system and we have to expect that the calls for improvements to the system can come from anywhere, at any time.
II: What types of ideas in this infrastructure building are mobile? What parts of the work are uniquely place-based (e.g. can only work in Mobile, AL, or Baltimore, MD) and what portion can be packed up and used as a template to jump start idling economies in different locations?
JN: We already know that communication of ideas and relationships are being fostered using online platforms. The digital landscape is a extension of our desire to be connected. It is relationships, however, that are more important than the tool by which we connected which means that places will always matter. Place matters because they carry some ingredients that communicate culture and history and this type of data is needed to make decisions at every step of the way. Each community has different ingredients (actors, institutions, landscape) and understanding them can be extremely helpful in shifting a system. We can however, identify using digital space. These are new places, online, whereby we can create a new shared culture, history and connection point — both of which matter and both of which have are successful when they speak to our human desire for relationships.
II: What can Baltimore learn from others? In terms of taking stock of our own economy, assessing it from many angles, building up infrastructure, and supporting the people who are making profound changes?
JN: Baltimore has the best of both worlds, it’s been an innovator in industry for this country and it’s also experienced the gaps of inequity when an economy isn’t held by a wider range of people and institutions. Through this lens, I think Baltimore can achieve some critical things and underpin new systems change with policy that will institutionalize the strategies of owning your economy. It’s a multi-angle play for sure: leaders need investment, institutions have to change internal policy to reflect more shared ownership strategies, peer to peer models have to be used instead of big developments in organizational budgets, organizations have to deploy more participatory governance, culture has to be embedded not extracted and proportional risk has to be taken on everyone regardless of color and social economic background.
II: What have you risked personally, professionally to achieve what you have today? What’s that experience been like for you?
JN: I could never ask anyone to take a chance on me without first demonstrating that I am willing to take a chance on myself. From speaking out about injustice in Alabama where that is still frowned upon, to jumping out there and trying ideas that people either didn’t understand or thought were too far out in left field; I stayed the course. Sometimes, I have been too early with my vision which felt risky. I guess that’s what happens to visionaries, sometimes the path is dark and isolated. But as I walk, I know two things: the road will rise to meet my feet and if I allow my intuition to carry me forward, I will always stay connected to God.
