Governing for Collective Thriving
Reflections from an Inspiration Session with “inspirators” Aparna Shah, Jessica Horn, and Srilatha Batliwala
As we consider what a (r)Evolution of Being looks and feels like in and across our places of being, a central theme emerging has been around the big shifts we need to make for our people and planet to flourish and thrive. How we govern for the collective, from a place of love and life giving power, rather than one of domination and authority has been a central question.
We called our first ‘inspirators’ — Aparna, Jessica, and Srilatha — into a virtual kitchen table to explore some guiding questions::
What if we practiced governance as if it were essential to creating conditions for collective thriving in our families, communities, organizations, and movements?
What if we considered governance as a way of being?
How could leading with love on the local level — even in the midst of conflict, transition, grief and anger — be a microcosm for governing at scale, with love?
In this session, inspirators — chosen to inject breath and life into our inquiry — shared intimately from their hearts, reflected on the need for new and reclaimed narratives of governance, and offered new possibilities for remembering and creating governance that serves the whole — our children, our elders, nature, even the dreams of our ancestors.
Governing From Where We Live
“If you can succeed in raising a child or children, I think it is bigger than being the president of a nation. It’s bigger than Gutierrez [UN Secretary General] in terms of responsibility and dexterity required” — Jessica
We began from the conditions we live in daily, and how we respond to them, as individuals and relational beings. Inspirators shared that in their roles as mothers, grandmothers, daughters and partners we navigate what it means to uphold our own wellbeing even as we manage, and often prioritize, material and human resources for those we care for: the true functions of governance.
Parenting itself has a magnitude of responsibility that is often under-acknowledged, yet includes everyday efforts at home and the changemaking work we do in our communities, and as policy makers, to keep young ones nourished, safe and secure.
“There is grief for the world we thought we were in, and the world we thought our kids and our grandkids and blood and chosen family were going to grow up in.” — Aparna
As care takes place in the context of existential crises, the magnitute of responsibility feels bigger than ever. Caretaking comes with undeniable rewards and satisfaction, and exhaustion too, as we navigate providing for basic needs, nurturing hopes, dreams and memories of young and old. Just as important as caring for our young, is reinvigorating cultural practices that ensure our elders know they are valued, and that they too feel safe and secure.
As we have learned from organized domestic workers across the world: before we are able to talk about movement for change out there, we must visibilize the labor of caring for children, homes, elders and beloveds that makes all other work possible. This is where we learn our most important lessons about caring, governing, for the whole.
The Power to Imagine New Ways of Governing
“When we have had to fight for our most basic rights, for everything, and come from a place of very deep trauma and exploitation, what does it mean to pivot into a stance of visioning and planning and unleashing? A stance of liberatory collective governance. How do we support it? What is the infrastructure we build? What is the individual healing and repair required”. — Aparna
Agitating from a place of trauma and harm hurts our individual and collective bodies, minds, spirits and capacities to respond most strategically to harmful expressions of power and authority. As changemakers have spent a lot of time building organizations, we have many stories of how these dynamics reproduce inside of them. But what if we imagined new ways of governing, from inside these spaces — and were not limited by these structures? Wherever we are, we have the power to create communities that nurture wellbeing, belonging and thriving over fear, isolation and competition.
Carrying forward a seven generations practice taught by Norma Wong, Aparna engaged in ‘strategic navigation’ with domestic workers in California. In this process workers visioned as far out as they could imagine, defining a north star, values and milestones, visualizing their team, milestones, and how they make decisions. This process catalyzed a worldview shift from a primary focus on the dominant practices, deep structures and uses of ‘power-over’ often seen in policy-oriented campaigns to a strategy that prioritized the agency and wholeness of workers as real people, as leaders and as a movement. They shifted from a stance rooted primarily in fighting and resistance, to one of building together.
Srilatha reminded us that there is also much to re-imagine, and to adapt for today, from the wisdom of practices that existed in pre-patriarchal communities and Indigenous communities across Africa, Asia, the Pacific and elsewhere. We can experiment with new ways of caring for and stewarding our groups and communities, remembering ways we have cared for each other for generations, by focusing less on changing the failed containers of governance, and more on attending to the real needs, aspirations, and relationships in our communities. Some of the promising governance innovations of today, are based on very old traditions, such as community and culture agreements, decision making in circles and organizing in a bottom up or very collective way.
Invoking memory and imaginations of real-world building practices of the past and present enabled our inspirators to share what uplifts and motivates.
A Cycle of Creating and Celebrating
“Let’s create alternatives in smaller spaces. And let’s figure out how to make them work there. My mantra for organizations with whom I’ve been privileged to assist on this journey is you cannot be perfect. But your goal is how can we become the next best version of ourselves?” — Srilatha
In these conditions, how do we build momentum to govern for collective thriving? We stay focused on our vision and purpose, we find and work with kindred spirits, we channel our energy and agency into creation, we celebrate our advances, even as we face the flawed systems that have enormous power over most of our lives. As emergent strategy wisdom teaches us, we must create systems in smaller spaces and in our everyday interactions, if we are to transform larger systems and structures. Indeed, we must start with honoring the humanity within ourselves in order to have humanity to govern in ways that work for all with love and dignity.
One way to do this is to create and practice new ways of governing, and then celebrating and supporting them when we see them in action. Fascinated by the new wave of Afro-descendant women organizers from Costa Rica, Colombia and Brazil, who came out of collectivist community practices, and are now in senior positions in government, Jessica said: “They come from a different tradition of power and sitting in mainstream governance. We need to support them This requires critical mass and support, care and grounding, how does this for them as they try to challenge the heart of mainstream power relations?”
A Radical Reording of Power
Our inspirators shared challenges and hopes for how we have, are and will catalyze a (r)Evolution of Being in how we govern. We need to be able to be with the discomfort of power as it is, even as we practice ways to do right by each other. Creating spaces to share experiences across borders and generations is an important way to help us to see past our current ways of being. Exchanging our stories of governing for collective thriving, and conspiring across borders of all kinds, provides potential for mutual visioning, practice and transformation across our communities. When we feel less alone in that work, if we transgress borders, we have more power with energy — at all the levels. We practice this by:
- Investing time, energy, and resources into breakthrough innovations that enable us to let go of some of the baggage of formal organizations and create structure rooted in the wellbeing of people and planet.
- Learning from older systems of collective decision making, governance and reinvent them in our current contexts.
- Experimenting with more democratic and collective mechanisms that address internal (organizational) culture and societal norms.
We close with an invocation for governance for collective thriving seeded by participants in our session.
Radical Reordering of Power
We reimagine governance to center our agency to support wellbeing in our families, communities, and across borders.
We remember the wisdom of our ancestors and dreams for our grandchildren’s grandchildren when we are in conflict.
We extend patience and express gratitude to the ones with courage to lead differently.
We grow our own capacities to imagine new ways of governing — and to lead with love.
We:
Relinquish top down, dominance and control in how we govern.
Release power over and individualism in how we lead, and extractivism in how we steward land, water and animals.
Let go of grief and rage that close our hearts to the ways we are interconnected.
Let go of limiting concepts that governing is about control.
We commit to:
Taking care of each other with generosity, as a radical act of joy and belonging,
To seeing diversity as beautiful and necessary for creating new ways of being,
To move with love and courage through our fear of the unknown.
And as we do, we may surprise ourselves by noticing a renewed trust in each other, an expanded ability to tell and listen to each other, to guide each other in this revolution of being.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article is part of our new initiative: Reports from a (r)Evolution of Being.
In late 2023 Root. Rise. Pollinate! held our first two Inspiration Sessions, ‘Governance for Collective Thriving’ and ‘Embodying Love And/With Power Within Our Organizing and Organizations.’ Inspiration Sessions are space for feminist changemakers to come together to learn and share new developments and exchange narratives that shape understanding and strategies for transformative feminist praxis. This work is part of our project, Reports from the Revolution of Being — a place to tell stories of the future, the big transitions we need to make, and how these transitions are unfolding now.
This article is part of a series of posts, over the next few weeks, draw on reflections we shared with participants after each Inspiration Session and also highlights new reflections and invitations into transformation drawn from the wisdom and experiences of our ‘Inspirators’ who currently call home India, Kenya, Puerto Rico, South Africa, the United States, and Zimbabwe.
