Let’s unpack that idea about ‘working across difference’ in systems change

An interview with The Systems Sanctuary Co-founder, Tatiana Fraser

As the field of systems change grows and emerges, we want to support the capacity of ecosystem level work to decenter dominant systems and engage communities who are seeking equity and justice.

In our experience, action around this needs to be built into the foundations of any ecosystem building activity. How do we do this well?

Where does your interest in working across difference come from?

When I co-founded the Girls Action Foundation in 2002, we set out to create the opportunity for all girls to have access to spaces that addressed empowerment and justice in their lives. The dominant way girls were seen in terms of policy and discourse, was based on dominant white, middle class norms.

We knew that this was problematic and that girls who grew up in poverty, girls who were racialized, Indigenous or who were differently situated based on sexual identities or abilities had different experiences, challenges and strengths around being a ‘girl’.

We were working for systemic change — addressing issues related to culture, violence, health, poverty and discrimination. Our question became — “how would we build a network that would be relevant in terms of its reach across Canada and be relevant to the diverse contexts and communities?”

What did you do?

We used a network model and complexity approaches to scale our work and build communities of influence.

We convened our network and offered trainings, retreats and leadership programs — both nationally and regionally. All of these convenings brought together people from diverse communities and the issues they brought to the network were reflective of that.

When I say diverse — I mean diverse in terms of region; including northern, rural, urban — coast to coast to coast; and diversity in terms of social location including being racialized, Indigenous, francophone, economically marginalized, LGBTQ2+ etc. We had to create a space where people could show up and be able to participate.

How did working across difference play out in your network?

I can give you an example, in the context of facilitating a workshop about unpacking challenges and experiences that girls deal with: An urban young black woman in conversation with a white francophone from rural northern Canada — is sharing her experiences about racism. The Francophone has lived life as a minority francophone and faced discrimination, exclusion and bullying of her own — but she is unable to acknowledge racism and feels attacked.

Or — communities working around the sexual exploitation of girls and young women — negotiating very different approaches and politics. One — young women who work with communities and advocate for harm reduction and decriminalization. The other — a woman who advocates for abolishing sex trade.

The exchange is challenging and emotions are high. When we come together to support social change — these political positions or lived experiences can often lead to divisiveness and rupture. Facilitating this kind of conversation and holding the space for diverse experiences as we worked towards collaborative action- required the capacity to create conditions to work across difference. We were always pushed to our learning edges in every gathering.

We did this over 10 years.

What strategies helped you work across difference?

One size did not fit all

We scaled out our approach to creating spaces for girls and young women and we scaled deep. We shared min specs on what were the essential how to’s and approaches for success, but we knew that initiatives needed to be context specific, grown from and rooted in communities. In the end, the ways in which work was being done was very different based on the community in which it was embedded.

Leadership that reflected our network

90% of our network came from racialized, Indigenous, economically marginalized, LGBTQ2+ communities. The board, staff and the leadership reflected our network — we built out the organization to be intentionally representative of diverse communities and experiences. People who designed and facilitated our process were also representative of the communities we were engaging.

Time spent on outreach

We spent a lot of time doing outreach and building relationships to get past the usual suspects and mainstream organizations. We had a full time outreach coordinator who worked to engage communities and people who were not on the radar. We prioritized participation from diverse communities and we subsidized participants who faced economic barriers to participation.

Anti-oppression training for all

We always started our gatherings with an anti-oppression training so all participants were aware of their social location and had literacy and capacity to show up and understand privilege, power and hold space for challenge in conversation. It was important to do this groundwork, so participants had shared language and understanding of how racism, colonization, sexism, heteronormativity, ableism are rooted in the systems and structures we are working to shift. It was never perfect and there was always room to do more.

Facilitation team who were trained

Facilitators had to be highly skilled at holding a conversation across difference. We had a strong facilitation team who were trained in anti-oppression and anit-racist work and could watch for and facilitate through potentially harmful exchanges that might occur. This required an ability to name the power dynamics in the room, to thoughtfully call out harmful exchanges and to name when racism, or discrimination was in play. Skilled facilitation would allow the room to learn from the exchange and move forward.

We had regular team debriefs to be sure that we were capturing learning, acknowledging and addressing missteps, paying attention to the energy of the group and responding to undercurrents.

Diverse cultural and change practices

We used arts based and embodiment practices as a way for people to connect; for example we worked with theatre, dance and hands on activities. We always brought diverse cultural practices into the space by inviting network members to lead workshops and share their practices and expertise.

Being aware of trauma

We had to get good at being self-aware of and understanding individual and collective trauma, so we weren’t recreating trauma. We had to be able to recognize and draw the connection between individual experiences of trauma and the systemic experience of structural violence. A large part of this work is reframing internalized violence (racism, sexism etc) into an understanding about how systems and cultures create and maintain the conditions for this violence.

We all have trauma to heal. And when you are addressing and working with young women who have experienced systemic or sexualized violence, we have a collective responsibility to recognize and hold space for this reality and at the same time, to not rip open wounds and retraumatize people.

This meant that we needed to create the conditions for people to show up human, for good design and facilitation that included space for many different forms of expression and healing practice. It also meant that we held boundaries and did not inappropriately try to be therapists or make assumptions about what people needed. We had to have appropriate supports on hand for any sort of personal follow up people might require.

Our network supported collaboration that moved to action, but we couldn’t get to action without grounding ourselves in the lived experiences of our communities and members. And we had to think about what language we were using. To reflect on- are we alienating people? Do people have access to the support they need if we get into difficult subjects? Can people show up as human beings?

Collaboration & shifting resources

We collaborated with network members to create projects where they led the work and leveraged our ability to access funds. We supported their leadership and learning where appropriate and did our best to support their capacity to resource their work. We also collaborated with network members to build knowledge tools based on what was emerging in the network.

One example, an Indigenous organization that had been part of the network for a long time — came to us and said they wanted to partner. They were having a hard time getting funding because they were seen as too radical. So they collaborated with us to access funds. They led the project and we were the back end infrastructure and the interface with the funder.

Our role became to get resources for the work, to support from behind and then to get out of the way, to amplify and shine light on the work coming from the young women leading and the community.

Always reflecting and learning

We were constantly de-briefing, learning and adapting because everything was a learning moment. Our aim was to create a space where all participants could lead and share learning with other communities. We made mistakes but we took the learning and kept going.

We held these annual gatherings for more than 10 years and built a network of 300 organizations across Canada.

How does your experience in feminist organizing influence the way you think about working across difference?

We have a lot to learn from the feminist movement. The feminist movement has been in the trenches of this work for over 30 years with a commitment to centering people with lived experience in creating solutions. Like other community based work, it’s a wealth of learning and practice that can support emerging fields like systems change and social innovation.

Using intersectional frames

A feminist approach is intersectional and is aligned with systems thinking in so many ways. Both approaches value ‘feminine’ or relational leadership, diversity, bring a holistic perspective and see interconnectivity between issues.

Intersectionality means that we recognize that people do not experience systems in the same way. It is not just a question of equality between men and women. Peoples’ experiences are informed by intersecting and interlocking identities including race, class, Indigenous identities, sexual identity and ability. (Many) feminist practices have always been systemic as it has worked to undo the roots of white, patriarchal and capitalist dominance. This approach recognizes that people experience systems and structures in very different ways based on their histories, cultures, identities. In systems work, we pay attention to the intersections and in between spaces to identify opportunities for change. In these ways, feminist practice and systems practice are resonant.

For girls, the dominant narratives have been created around the experience of white middle class girls. This dominance is mirrored in policies, systems, programs, the media; who is valued and who is invisible. Systems discriminate against racialized girls, poor girls, Indigenous girls. Feminist intersectionality recognizes difference and nuance in experience and centers the voices and experiences of those marginalized by our systems to inform action and ways forward.

Locating yourself in the system

One of the biggest things I have learned is that you have to show up with some social and political awareness, know where you come from and know your privileges and challenges to the point where you can share honestly and not get defensive.

As a white, educated, cisgendered woman, I have access to privileges. I also grew up with a young single mom who faced economic insecurity, violence, discrimination and stigma. This also shapes me and is part of my story.

Locating ourselves in the systems we are working to shift and the ongoing pursuit of self awareness is a steady learning process. I have learned to be OK with being uncomfortable with my own edges as well willing to do the work and embrace the learning.

Shifting power

Systems change requires shifting power and resource flows. We often see interventions attempting to address dominant powers directly by trying to engage from the centre of the system, for example, policy advocacy aimed at changing policy makers’ decisions. Feminist practice offers a lens of analysis to locate and understand dominant cultures and structures and to intentionally center the margins. Feminism also offers tools to analyse power, which is often the elephant in the room, especially around a systems change initiative.

A feminist or critical power analysis will trace the connections between the individual experience to broad social, political and cultural structures and systems. This approach offers a lens to challenge individualistic notions of success and failure and to understand the construction of power, domination and oppression in systems.

Feminist learning about working across difference

The feminist movement has spent a long time working out identity politics and the destruction that can fall out from here. The second wave of feminism is well known for achieving important women’s rights on a number of fronts that helped to get women out of the domestic and into the public spheres. However, it was predominantly in service of white educated women and it left many women out. Women who are differently situated by race, class and sexual identities who have also been working to advance equity have had to fight hard to be heard in dominant spaces. In my experience as a young activist, I saw, many times, the ways in which racism, identity politics and infighting undermined important work.

Our work at Girls Action Foundation was inspired by a desire to do things differently. We were practicing (attempting, failing, learning) how to work across difference. We tried to create space to practice moving past these limits to discover how to be in solidarity and allyship across diverse locations and to build from this place. This required us to do the deep healing work individually and then collectively, and to practice compassion and to hold each other accountable as we found our way forward.

There’s so much amazing work that’s been done to create the conditions to move forward together.

Feminist leaders and particularly young feminist leaders are trailblazing here. Creating new narratives and influencing culture, facilitating healing in their communities, shifting conversations from the idea of the individual to truly understanding and acting collectively to shift systems.

What dynamics do you see happening in the fields of social innovation, systems change and social justice now?

It is well known that the emerging systems change field is dominantly white, western and academic. Systems change practice values convening diverse actors in the system to help make sense of the system but in my experience, there is still a lack of capacity to effectively work across difference in the systems change field. While there has been a lot of focus on working across sectors and paying attention to what it means to work with the so-called ‘bad guy’ or ‘enemy’, there is a lack of capacity to think about and to take good action on issues of race, class and systemic exclusion, especially when these overlap. There is a real need to centre issues of equity and to have conversations about how to address the system level blind spots in the work.

In our work at the Sanctuary, we hear a lot of systems leaders grappling with issues of power and inclusion in their work. Here are some of the patterns we see:

Relationships over accountability

In systems change, it is often said “relationships are everything”. Building relationships is an important systems leadership capacity. Taking the time to create connection, trust and depth required to truly collaborate towards change is very challenging in a dominant culture that is working at a high pressure fast pace.

When we work toward systems change — we need to get very transparent about resources, and access to power in order to actually shift power. Systems change practice often lacks the ‘know how’ to analyze power and bring this into the conversations that are convened for systems work. Oftentimes, systems spaces defer to ‘relationship building’ — which is important and necessary — but when this approach lacks power analysis, it risks reproducing power structures that maintain the status quo. Worse yet is when this work lacks accountability to the communities it is working in service of.

Lack of real listening

When the dominant center is challenged by and can’t hear people from the margins, they can become defensive and people are hurt. What is sometimes missed is that marginalized communities that have been invisibilized, are just trying to be heard. And because maybe they’re not performing in the dominant norms that are familiar to people in power or because they challenge the status quo, it is easy for people in power to get offended and for these perspectives to be dismissed. The cycle continues, marginalized voices are silenced, the gap widens and division grows. From my perspective, people with lived experience and people who are located on the margins are critical actors in ecosystems. People on the front lines of harmful systems have the perspective for how to change them. They should be at the centre of systems change work.

Token ‘superstars’

Community organizers — leaders — who are doing movement and systems change work in the margins are everywhere. There are people who have been doing this work for years and may not be invited into emerging ecosystem level work. People in very different places, who have a ton of experience to bear on systems change work, but may not call it that.

Sometimes, there are a few superstars who stand out, get asked to every event, and can code switch and perform to ‘fit in’. Sometimes, they are brought into initiatives and tokenized and this recreates harmful situations. Often we hear their experiences of burn out from being invited to speak everywhere. Saying no becomes an important strategy to get their work done.

In the end, the systems change or innovation space can choose to dismiss people who are living the harms of the system and to decide who gets invited and who doesn’t.

Opportunities for sharing and weaving

In social justice fields there can be a tripping point around identity politics, where there can be a competition for who’s the most oppressed or the most ‘woke’. There is also a sense of exclusion and a feeling that practices that community have been doing forever — are appropriated and packaged and sold back at a highest cost. Or that community has been doing this work for a long time and will continue — regardless of the systems change field.

But there are ecosystem initiatives, frameworks and financial resources that come from systems change that can serve community efforts and at the same time — there is a lot of learning and leadership from community that can contribute to collective systems change efforts.

Our work with Girls Action was rooted in feminist, asset based community change and popular education approaches, but we benefited from complexity theory and systems tools that were emerging. These approaches informed how we did our work, built our network and helped us to be successful. There’s lots to learn by connecting these fields of practice and these system actors. I think we need each other to achieve the systems change we are all seeking. We are all actors in the systems we are hoping to change.

What do we need now?

There is huge opportunity for these fields of practice to learn from each other and to center systems leaders working from community and traditionally marginalized spaces.

At The Systems Sanctuary we are trying to work in a way where we don’t simply value the expert teacher. We want to create the conditions where practitioners are experts and can start from where they are already doing this work and exchange and learn together from there.

We see a need for a place where people who are traditionally marginalized by dominant systems — and who are doing systems change work can just be together with others who just get it. Where they can connect, they don’t have to perform for the dominant systems and translate all their experiences, where they can draw strength and learn from each other and build the learning together.

We also see a need to support people in the system change fields to work with their power and privilege, to support shifting resources and power and to decenter from dominant cultures and actors.

Our next steps

Interrogating Whiteness

We launched Interrogating Whiteness for systems leaders in the fall of 2019 — a virtual program and a deep dive for systems practitioners the thick of de-centering whiteness & decolonizing practices. We will offer again in the fall of 2020.

Sanctuary Learning Labs

We are collaborating with Be The Peace Institute in Nova Scotia Canada to pilot a gender equity systems change learning ecosystem. We will convene a cohort of ecosystem actors who are working to end domestic violence. The learning lab will bring together a gender and systems lens to build capacity for systems leadership and facilitate collective learning across the ecosystem.

An exploration into the practice of ‘Bridging’

In our work at The Systems Sanctuary, we see a pattern with two kinds of ‘bridgers’ in and around the field of systems change practice that relate to the issue of diversity, equity and inclusion: 1) Institutional Bridgers who are working in dominant systems group and are trying to ‘bridge’ across difference and specifically with communities marginalized by our current systems and 2) Community Bridgers who are working in context of marginalized spaces, identities and communities and act as a ‘bridge’ across communities and to places of existing power and influence across the incumbent system

We believe that building a deeper understanding of the nature, challenges and opportunities faced by these bridge builders will help us support the fields’ capacity to decenter dominant systems and engage communities who are seeking equity and justice. We will be launching peer-learning Cohorts, one for each of these groups, to host a peer-learning process designed to share inquiry, key learning and practices.

This will be a chance to dive into the most significant pain points experienced by participants, so we can develop new strategies of support that create the highest impact.

The first one starts this Fall. Find out more here.

Sharing what we learn

By documenting what we learn through these inquiries and processes, we will be able to share these insights back to the field of practice so they can be shared widely. They can be used to inform our collective strategy about how to strengthen the ecosystem of systems change practitioners. Stay tuned for publications on Interrogating Whiteness, Feminist Systems Change and Inquiry into the Role of Bridging.

If any of this resonates with you, please get in touch:

tatiana@systemsanctuary.com and rachel@systemsanctuary.com