We The Changemakers: Co-Creating an Equitable, Reciprocal & Healing Storytelling Community
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks declares that to hear each other, creating space for the sound of different voices, is an act of recognition. At its core, this is the intention of We the Changemakers — to listen and to acknowledge.
This project, two years in the making, is a proclamation and celebration by and for the people and communities who are furthest away from and yet continuously moving us towards justice. As such, we envisioned this project as a tapestry, weaved together by the stories, voices, and agency of BIPOC, LGTBQ+ folks, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, and those who act in solidarity and seek to be in just relationship with communities and the land.
We believe any intentional dialogue and storytelling effort seeking to explore the concept of changemaking requires us to recognize the root causes for why change is needed — the legacies of and the unfolding impact of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, extractive capitalism, and colonization — by centering the knowledge, resilience, and brilliance of the communities who are creating equitable and healing change.
We designed this project as a process-focused and community-centric exercise in co-creation and equitable storytelling. We are not seeking to “find, collect, and tell” stories, we want to nurture relationships to honor the lived experience, work, resilience, resistance, and joy of Changemakers.
We treasure all the stories that have emerged through this relational process and we’ll only share the stories we’ve been given permission to share. Our core principle here being that equitable story-sharing is harvested through equitable, reciprocal, healing story processes.
Since 2019, we’ve reached out to over 250 organizations, networks, coalitions, student organizations, groups, and community members to ask them one question: Who is a Changemaker in your community who needs to be recognized at this moment? We curated the project by identifying these organizations and community leaders — through our research, relationships, and experience, we understood them to be best positioned to answer this question. When we invited organizations and folks to nominate Changemakers we asked them to consider the core purpose of the project and we also made a commitment to trust and honor their nominations. “Once you’ve nominated a Changemaker, we will accept your nomination and we’ll celebrate and recognize the Changemaker,” we told them.
We are now ready to start sharing the lessons we’ve learned over the last two years as well as the stories we’ve been given permission to share. As part of this story-sharing process, we’ll continuously return to another fundamental principle that has guided our work and this project: the story is the journey.
Over generations of community-led work, through the efforts of countless activists, artists, community organizers, cultural bearers, and storytellers, stories have been preserved, imagined, crafted, and told by and for communities furthest away from justice. Despite the glacial speed of systems and institutions to recognize these stories, the last decade has certainly yielded to the power of emergent social justice movements, each making their narratives and our collective humanity more visible.
We the Changemakers is an effort to recognize this journey, possible thanks to the many movements, actions, and stories that are helping to heal our memory, ground us on our present, and guide us towards a future where we can be in just relationship with ourselves, each other, and the land.
Land Acknowledgement, Recognitions & Positionality
We acknowledge the land on which this project started as the traditional home of the Coast Salish people, the traditional home of all tribes and bands within the Duwamish, Suquamish, Tulalip, and Muckleshoot nations. We take this opportunity to thank the original stewards and storytellers of this land who are still here. We recognize this land acknowledgment is a small and yet necessary act to seek justice.
We recognize, celebrate, and uplift the work of Delcine Hackley and Julia Dinh, who have served as co-curators and outreach coordinators at different stages of the project. Delcine coordinated our community outreach efforts and her work made it possible for us to achieve our first goal: receiving one-hundredth nominations for Changemakers. Delcine conducted this work before and during the unfolding impact of the pandemic. Throughout the entirety of the project, Delcine always centered the relationships we were building with Changemakers and held the project to the highest ethical and social justice standards. Julia’s work to interview and engage with Changemakers allowed us to envision the next iteration of the project. Julia’s creativity, empathetic approach, and organizing acumen have made We the Changemakers possible.
The first iteration of the project, titled 100 Changemakers, was inspired by Amplifier’s We the Future Campaign and co-created with the Youth Ambassadors Program at the Gates Foundation Discovery Center as part of the We the Future: Young Leaders of Social Change exhibit. We express our wholehearted gratitude to the teams at Amplifier and the Discovery Center for their support and for providing a physical space where we were able to gather to dream what this project could be. A special note of gratitude is owed to Cleo Barnett, Executive Director at Amplifier, for reaffirming the vision of the project since its very start. Above all, we thank and acknowledge the brilliance and power of the eighteen high school students who helped us to co-imagine and launch the first iteration of this project (Adriana, Amal, Andy, Anika, Anna, Arianna, Aarushi, Betty, Fadumo, Isabella, Lauren, Maria, Micaela, Nik, Noah, Riley, Sarah, Tejas, and Yubi). To the students: You are powerful and it was the honor of a lifetime to be able to work, dream, and build with you.
Lastly, I acknowledge I’m writing this opening statement and article through the lenses of my lived experience as a cisgender male, a Brown Latinx undocumented immigrant, an abled bodied person, a teacher and learner, an abolitionist, an antiracist storyteller, the co-curator of this project, and someone who grew up struggling with and is continuing to unlearn internalized racism and oppression in a settler-colonial context. As I seek to be in just relationship with myself and others, I’m accountable for my words, silence, actions, and inactions. My unwavering commitment is to reconciliatory truth, the co-development of ecosystems of belonging, racial and climate justice, healing, and the complete liberation of our collective humanity.
