Bridging Generations in the Movement for Black Lives
“Are you in it for the long haul?” This is the question organizers ask of each other, themselves, and their allies. As an incredible rise of energy and activism swelled across our country’s communities this summer we heard activists share both their desire for cross-generational collaboration and a concern if newcomers were going to be in it for the long journey ahead.
This was especially top of mind for Blaze Lightfoot Jones-Yellin — strategist, activist, urbanist, and Openbox studio member — who saw new activist groups form and established organizations invigorated in his hometown community of New Rochelle, just north of New York City.
In addition to new energy, he also saw a challenge that was happening:
Different generations were generally organizing among themselves without a unified community agenda. As I got more involved, it became clear that individual leaders were not connected to each other.
Inspired by this community challenge, we set out to explore the role of design in catalyzing connection across generations of community organizers. Specifically, we wanted to better understand how our design practice can hold space for activists of different ages to come together and how we can do so while being physically distant.
Facilitating a different type of conversation
We invited four New Rochelle activists of different ages and life experiences to get to know each other over the course of a week in a facilitated, group chat. The group spanned six decades of experience organizing for social justice:
- A college student organizing to call out anti-Black experiences in the public school system,
- A new leader in his late twenties leading the largest March for Black Lives in New Rochelle,
- A grassroots organizer recently elected to the school board,
- A key organizer who has been active in New Rochelle for the past 40 years.
Our team sent daily prompts to encourage each participant to share their story with others in the group. These prompts included video narratives of their experiences, photos of proud activist moments, and text threads further discussing their submissions with each other. We wrapped up the week with a roundtable reflection on Zoom.
Instead of being highly action-oriented, which organizing can often be, our goal was to hold space for a conversation focused on how to better understand and build relationships with one another. Over the course of the week this space allowed people to better understand each other’s perspectives and to observe any tensions between them.
Generations miss the moment to see eye-to-eye
Three themes emerged around how younger and older activists have a hard time coming together:
For youth, activism needs to create impact now. For elders, activism needs to build relationships that last. We heard younger activists perceive an expectation to produce impact in order to be acknowledged as an activist. For them immediate results were their badge of belonging. Meanwhile, elder activists focused more on the overall length and durability of an activist’s commitment to the cause. Instead of specific results, it was about building long-term relationships and sustained effort.
For elders, the urgency is to avoid past mistakes. For youth, the urgency is to change past outcomes. Younger activists felt new tactics were needed and that older generations had done their best but came up short. Older generations wanted younger activists to avoid the pitfalls they experienced in the past. For example, we heard the different generations pushing back on each other about their different learnings from the same lesson.
Where elders see respect and ritual, youth see exclusion and difference. Different cultural expectations of how the young and old are supposed to interact undermine intergenerational trust. Older activists spoke of the need for respectability, patience, and the importance of community practices in organizing spaces. Entering the same spaces, younger activists felt silenced, excluded, and their desire for action unheard.
Our takeaways
It was so inspiring for us to work with this group of committed activists and to harness the power of intentional conversations as an avenue for shared growth and change. Right away, our participants appreciated the shift from typically fast-paced organizing meetings and enjoyed the time and space to reflect and share more deeply. And by the end of the week, they left feeling more confident and inspired to explicitly take on the challenges of working across generations.
One cultural insight for us were the different unspoken communications practices across generations. As the week’s chats unfolded, some participants felt disappointed when others did not respond right away, while others who were accustomed to responding more sporadically and thought nothing of it. Expectations around what could be done by text, by voice, and by video not only varied, but were persistent sources of miscommunication among different participants. Lastly, we found that assumptions on tech skills and age simply didn’t hold up. In our group, it was the youngest participant who had to install WhatsApp and our eldest who earned the nickname, “the Queen of Zoom.”
Overall, we confirmed both the necessity of intentional intergenerational work as well as its complexity. Designing for meaningful and transformative conversations (even remote ones) can be a powerful approach to supporting social justice work, especially in a movement that calls for sustained persistence, collaboration, and inclusion.
To learn more about our work with communities and our remote research methods, send an email to hello@opnbx.com
