Healing Solidarity’s Ocean Is Churning

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मंथन Transliterated version: manthan पुल्लिंग
1. मथना, बिलोना।
2. मथानी (जैसे—समुद्र मंथन)।​		Churning, stirring, deep pondering over something, reflection through study, a hallowed place to create knowledge, molding of minds, brainstorm, introspection, realization

See also the Samudra Manthan, or the ‘churning of the ocean’ Hindu creation story.

In January and February of this year, Healing Solidarity’s Advisory Board held four Manthan मंथन, or collective discernment sessions about the future of the Collective. We wanted to come together with our members, willing to be guided in our choice making. As our invitation to these four sessions offered,

“The truth is, we do not know what to do next. But we do know that vulnerability and transparency around decision-making are key aspects of re-imagined leadership in a churning world.”

So for a total of six hours, we sat with our members, our mentors, and some key questions:

  • Session 1: What re-imagining does the ‘international development’ sector need in this moment?
  • Session 2: How do you, our members and communities, want to be supported in the re-imagining and bringing into being of new ways of doing things?
  • Session 3: How can Healing Solidarity best meet this moment, given what the sector needs, and the ways in which our members and communities want to be supported?
  • Session 4: How can we sustain/resource the work of Healing Solidarity going forward?
Firstly, gratitude

We want to extend our gratitude to those feminist leaders we admire who held and facilitated our discussions with such love and wisdom. Thank you Theo Sowa, Hope Chigudu, Shawna Wakefield, and Lisa VeneKlasen. And thank you especially to all of the members of our community who arrived in a true spirit of collective discernment as we showed up with non-answers and left non-committal to what happens next.

What we heard and shared (in a nutshell)

Firstly we were bolstered to hear from those in attendance that Healing Solidarity is valued and recognised for its contribution in the sector. We deeply appreciate this encouragement for what Healing Solidarity has offered since the beginning of its first online conference in 2018: our reimagining and modelling, invitations to pause, healing spaces (particularly for BIPOC-identifying people), focus on practice, i.e. how we do things again and again, reconnecting with others, consistency without rigidity, the “feeling whole again”, and being “a lifeline” or respite from the day-to-day of organisational/institutional life. As one member shared (paraphrased):

“It is an oceanic task, to challenge institutional structures, to fight like hell to create new understandings within our institutions, to bring it up in staff meetings. It won’t always be perfectly articulated with the right language, without silencing, [but] I am doing my best. The fire is within me. It is so great to have a space where I can be at peace and be at home without the fear of losing myself in the demands of an [aid] structure that does not value healing to change the world.”

By the fourth and final session, with input from the previous sessions, the Healing Solidarity Advisory Board shared the following six options for the future of the Collective:

Emerging options under consideration

  1. Pause and fundraise
  2. “Pay to play”: Healing Solidarity spaces and resources all become funded by collected offerings or fee/cost-based
  3. Seek individuals’ support: Crowdfund + member drive
  4. Organisational accompaniment (invest in deep/long-term consulting) and focus solely on this
  5. Close/sunset and archive and share our learning
  6. Reconceive Healing Solidarity as an organising force within the global development sector: To be determined, what would a Healing Solidarity movement look like?

While having the options laid out for us, many of which already represent a piece of our organisational strategy thus far, the Advisory Board met after the sessions to create some criteria with which to weigh these options:

Criteria for decision making among options

  1. How do we keep our current part-time staff in place as long as possible?
  2. How do we manage our contractual obligations with the current capacity?
  3. How do we keep focus on ‘ideas’ which we have the energy, time and resources to make happen?
  4. Can we aim for clarity on timelines + LOE (Level of Effort)?
  5. How do we offer true relief/alignment to Mary Ann who has been holding a lot of the operational pieces?
  6. What do we as the Advisory Circle have energy for? How do we as the Advisory Board stay connected/keep working together?
  7. Are there partnerships/platforms to consider that would expand the reach of Healing Solidarity to more people within the sector?
  8. Whatever decision we make, how do we “transition” those who have come to rely on Healing Solidarity?
  9. Are there people who want to take on the work and our roles?
  10. How can we keep the “content” or spirit of Healing Solidarity alive?
  11. How do we continue to “model” what we believe the sector needs?

The questions we continue to grapple with

With the options and criteria laid out, we as the Advisory Board still find ourselves caught up in a loop of attempting to balance the realities and practicalities of our available resources (or lack thereof) with where our labour and effort might be most strategic. This particularly relates to the labour of those doing the background operational management, and the responsibility of coordinating and engaging our members. As we weighed the options against these criteria, we uncovered that taking any decision as a next step, even a decision to sunset Healing Solidarity, will require some intention and energy.

We wouldn’t have attempted this process in any other way, and yet the logical conclusions we’d hoped for have yet to arrive. Collective discernment requires more time and patience that many of us have been taught to expect or plan for. (Thanks “Imperialist White Supremacist Heteropatriarchy”.1) We continue to notice our own conditioned “find a solution” mindset and how it relates to a sector characterised by self-imposed/inflicted culture of immediacy and constant connectivity. We have brought our best “good thinking” and “strategic dialogue” and…we still don’t know the ‘right’ or even the ‘best’ answer.

We wouldn’t have attempted this process in any other way, and yet the logical conclusions we’d hoped for have yet to arrive. Collective discernment requires more time and patience that many of us have been taught to expect or plan for. (Thanks “Imperialist White Supremacist Heteropatriarchy”.1) We continue to notice our own conditioned “find a solution” mindset and how it relates to a sector characterised by self-imposed/inflicted culture of immediacy and constant connectivity. We have brought our best “good thinking” and “strategic dialogue” and…we still don’t know the ‘right’ or even the ‘best’ answer.

We offer this as a first reflection back to our community, and the sector as a whole. The processes which provide more chances for voices to be heard and equity to be built, for deeper reflection, require space to breathe and to live longer with the unknown than we are often comfortable with.

We are also finding that these processes are also running up against the limitations of un-embodied meaning making, let alone connecting with people in two-dimensional ways. Healing Solidarity started as an online conference and its platform is Zoom and Mighty Networks. We are at a stage in our evolution that requires more – for our leaders to be in the same room in order to dream and to disagree.

When we are not together physically, when we are relating to each other through stacked rectangles on a screen, there is only so far we can go, and this is a dilemma facing many ‘global development’ organisations today: How can we initiate and sustain vibrant, active communities, projects, and programs – with context and clarity – if we are not in the same room? We are therefore hoping to be able to get together soon and to ground ourselves together in space and anchor plans for Healing Solidarity moving forward.

Thank you for coming with us so far on the journey. We ask for your continued patience, support, and encouragement as we, the Healing Solidarity Advisory Board, move towards each other – literally – in this decision-making process. With humility and hope, we assure you there is more to come!

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​1 And thank you forever bell hooks: https://www.democracynow.org/2021/12/17/bell_hooks_legacy_beverly_guy_sheftall​

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FURTHER INFORMATION

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Manthan मंथन: Discerning our next steps together

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Start 2023 in Solidarity

Over January and February, we invite you to witness transparent and vulnerable leadership across four liberating open strategy spaces as the Healing Solidarity Advisory Circle reflect in “real time” on the future of this work in conversation with YOU our members and mentors.

Please register for the events using the links below. You can also find more details on the  Healing Solidarity collective. 

▶️ 15:30-17:00 GMT ▶️ 21:00-22:30 IST ▶️ 18:30-20:00 EAT ▶️ 10:30-12:00 EST
Hosted by Theo Sowa

 Click here to register for this event 

▶️ 15:30-17:00 GMT ▶️ 21:00-22:30 IST

▶️ 18:30-20:00 EAT ▶️ 10:30-12:00 EST

Hosted by Theo Sowa

 Click here to register for this event 

▶️ 07:30 – 09:00 GMT ▶️ 13:00-14:30 IST

▶️ 10:30-12:00 EAT ▶️ 2:30-4:00 AM EST

Host tbc

 Click here to register for this event 

▶️ 13:30 -15:00 GMT▶️ 19:00-20:30 IST

▶️ 16:30-18:00 EAT ▶️ 8:30-10:00 EST

Hosted by Hope Chigudu and Lisa VeneKlasse

 Click here to register for this event 

▶️ 13:30 -15:00 GMT▶️ 19:00-20:30 IST

▶️ 16:30-18:00 EAT ▶️ 8:30-10:00 EST

Healing Solidarity started in 2018 as an online conference about re-imaging ‘international development’ that to our surprise 1500 people signed up for.

Our online space the  Healing Solidarity Collective  was created the following year as a place to gather around the work of challenging injustice in our practice & support people working to re-imagining international ‘development’ and to support members to resist the working practices that overwhelm and exhaust us.

Well over 3,500 people have engaged with our work over the past four years.

Healing Solidarity has always been a place for practitioners trying to do things differently, to re-imagine ‘development’.

But we want to ask the question, how can we best do that now in 2022?

We know that many more conferences and events are now centering conversations about transforming the sector and decolonising it, about building anti-racist practice and doing things differently. In a way, the thing we started with, has now been taken up by the ‘mainstream’.

But we still sense a need to support practitioners in the process of actually doing things differently and to help one another undo the working practices that overwhelm and exhaust us which we know are part of what keep us locked in a cycle that works against much needed change.

Since 2018 we have offered annual online conferences, a free collective space and regular events and paid courses and consultancy at the intersections of these questions. We’ve also formed an advisory circle and a group of consultants who support this work and registered Healing Solidarity as a Community Interest Company in the UK.

But we want to ask you, our members and communities more about what you think Healing Solidarity should do, be and offer next – and we are also open to hearing back that our work is done and that we should wind down this initiative.

Please take a seat in the inner circle…

Rather than sitting alone in a ‘board room’ to figure this out we are instead choosing to create the opportunity to step into a liberating collective space of inquiry. Using the  fishbowl  process where listeners can become participants in the conversations we start, we will seek to draw forth the power of our collective thinking to inform the next steps for Healing Solidarity at this time.

There will be a series of four sessions that make up this alternative process of reimagining the future of this project. You can join as many as you are able to, but joining just one is fine too.

Give what you can..

These will not be ticketed events. Instead we invite you to consider joining us as a  sustaining member . Whilst we do not know exactly where we will land from this process as Healing Solidarity – you will be supporting us to resource these intimate and powerful discussions and to sustain our  collective healing space . We acknowledge economic insecurity and therefore only ask you to give what you can.

See you there..

Bring your voice to the circle, be part of our decision making and the future wellbeing of the sector. We look forward to the Manthan मंथन, a Hindu word offered by Roshni meaning: churning, stirring, deep pondering, reflection, a hallowed place to create knowledge, molding of minds, brainstorm, introspection, realisation.

If you have any questions, please email us at collective@healingsolidarity.org

With love,

Esua, Swatee, Mary Ann, Roshni and Jennifer The Healing Solidarity Advisory Circle

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GETTING OURSELVES TOGETHER: HOW WHITE PEOPLE CAN SHOW UP FOR ANTI-RACISM IN #GLOBALDEV: A POP-UP PRACTICE GROUP – november PRACTICE GROUP

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Nov 10th, 17th and 24th 7-9 pm UK time, 2-4 pm ET

GETTING OURSELVES TOGETHER: HOW WHITE PEOPLE CAN SHOW UP FOR ANTI-RACISM IN #GLOBALDEV

Joining form

Please fill in a few details below and then make your payment. Once you have filled out this form and made a payment your place will be confirmed by email. No refunds will be given after the start of the practice group. Please note that this practice group may bring up difficult and challenging material for you. We will support you during the sessions as challenges arise but please do choose for yourself whether this is the right work for you to do at this time.

£200

You’ll be redirected to PayPal at submission to complete this order.

We are looking for someone to join us as our new Creative Community Builder & Co-Ordinator

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We have an exciting opportunity for someone who is passionate about building community around our work at Healing Solidarity. You will be our first staff member at an invigorating moment when we need more help to sustain and build our online platform and events.

This position is offered on a part-time consultancy basis for now and is focused particularly on our online community and events. However, we are looking for someone who might be interested in growing with us and potentially in the future taking on a role that coordinates and helps to lead all of our work.

We are looking for someone who shares our vision for change within the international development sector and who is eager to support our growing community to bolster people working in the sector to create that change.

You will need to enjoy building our online platform, the Healing Solidarity Collective, and engaging people on it. You will be able to work virtually with the Directors to co-ordinate online events and our other activities.

We’d love you to get us organised – in a way that works for you and us – and contribute your own passion to developing our online community and events. You’ll need great communication and IT skills and be able to flexibly manage multiple tasks and to help organise us.

Please download the Full Job Description here and read it before you apply.

How to Apply

To apply, please send your cover letter stating why you are interested in this piece of work, CV, and a list of 3 references (names, position, relationship, and email address) for the attention of ‘The Directors’ at admin@healingsolidarity.org with the subject line “Creative Community Builder & Co-Ordinator” by the 16th July.

Black, Indigenous, people of color are particularly encouraged to apply. We also welcome applications from anyone who has experienced other kinds of systemic oppression.

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As feminist leaders, movement makers and worldbuilders how do we source and manifest the vision, relationships and transformative power needed to usher in a new era of peace, thriving and interdependence? At its best, feminist leadership is rooted in fierce love and purpose, radical connections, liberatory cultures and collective empowerment. It enables us to access spirit, transform our communities and evolve us all towards wholeness. 

Join us on April 15, 2021 for conversation and embodied practice with feminist leaders from around the globe who are leading this (r)evolution of being. Come ready to participate, dream and connect! 

9 am San Francisco /10 am Central America/ 12 pm New York / 5 pm London / 6 pm South Africa / 9:30 pm Delhi / 11 pm Indonesia and South East Asia / 3 am Sydney – Check your time zone here.

Brought to you by Root. Rise. Pollinate! and Healing Solidarity.

Please use the link below to register for this webinar:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oXlTm4ftSBOxY5XxXNLVWA 

Speakers Participating in this event

Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez is a fourth-generation Tewa traditional potter from San Ildefonso Pueblo in northern New Mexico was well nurtured by matriarchal ancestors Maria and Julian Martinez. Not only was she nurtured in the art of the distinctive black ware pottery, but also in modeling the heart centeredness, the lived narrative of generational wisdom sharing, seeing the world from a holistic lens envisioning how a beloved community can be dreamt and become possible.  Elder Kathy is currently the Sayain Circle of Grandmother’s Coordinator at Tewa Women United, a member of the National Council of Elders and among the Spirited Aligned Legacy Leaders.

Shereen Essof is a Zimbabwean feminist, activist, popular educator and is JASS’ Executive Director. Shereen’s work is grounded in her engagement with womxn in social movements and community-based organizations. She strives to understand the roots of oppressive systems, how they interesect in shaping our world and from that understanding to imagine and organize towards sustainable futures.

Jessica Horn is a feminist practitioner with an inclination towards digging deeper, inspiring activist alchemy and asking ‘where next’?  Her work is situated politically in Pan-African feminism and practically in interventions to affirm women’s right to live pleasurable embodied lives-free from violence, to resource activism, and build the scaffolding for feminist futures. 

Alli Finn is a queer feminist advocate, organizer, facilitator, and writer from NYC, working at the intersections of labor rights and immigration justice. From 2016-2020, she advocated for migrant domestic worker rights with the Anti-Racism Movement, a grassroots feminist organization in Beirut.  Her organizing and writing is deeply informed by transnational feminist movement spaces, and her experiences of queerness, migration, and dis/ability.

Root. Rise. Pollinate! are Rufaro Gwarada, Shawna Wakefield & Kristen Zimmerman

Rufaro Gwarada

Rufaro is committed to a world animated by unhu (ubuntu) – the understanding that collective and individual well-being are one and the same. She is a writer, facilitator, and organizer, with 10+ years working for gender justice, migrant rights, African-led solutions for Africans, and utilizing art and cultural expression as conduits for healing, liberation, and joy. She co-founded ThriveAfrica.us, Wakanda Dream Lab, and reset, and worked at organizations including CAMFED, Global Fund for Women, Africa Speaks 4 Africa, and Power California. Rufaro is home in Zimbabwe, Oakland and Sacramento, California, with Sangha, on the dance floor, and among creatives and those who strive for liberation of all peoples.

Shawna Wakefield 

Shawna is committed to cultivating joyful, trusting relationships that create true collaboration. She is a facilitator, strategist, and leader who has worked on gender, racial and economic justice for 25 years, increasing feminist leadership, transformative programming, and cultures of care and equity. Shawna has been a Gender at Work Associate, Oxfam International’s Senior Gender Justice Lead, Oxfam Gender Advisor for Southeast Asia, Researcher with Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) in Afghanistan, Program Specialist with UNIFEM, and a yoga instructor in Brooklyn, NY. She weaves her dedicated practices of Buddhism, yoga and somatics, and love of nature into her support of activists’ and survivors’ wellbeing.

Kristen Zimmerman

Kristen is committed to bringing about a world rooted in our fundamental interdependence. As an artist-storyteller, strategist, coach, and facilitator she has three decades’ experience integrating creative and mind-body-spirit practice into movement building, community, and social transformation efforts. Kristen co-founded groundbreaking projects including Movement Strategy Center, Community LORE, Youth In Focus, and Decolonize Race. She trains in Zen Buddhism, storytelling and nature-based practices, and her son Jonah helps her keep it real. Home are the places she’s experienced beloved community, including the redwoods near San Francisco Bay, the shores of Lake Michigan, and the foothills of the Himalayas. 

Ditching the charity and saviorism of this year’s #givingtuesday campaigns once and for all

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What your gut is telling you is actually true. It doesn’t feel good for a reason – let’s talk about what that reason actually is. Let’s talk about the colonial pathway that development organisations follow. From Healing Solidarity’s 2020 Conference

When you look at your organization’s #GivingTuesday campaign, designed to get people in rich countries to open their wallets, do you feel uncomfortable about the way the work you do is being described? Or do you see your values or the values your organization represented?

The way we communicate about the work we do in the so-called ‘global development’ sector and how it needs to change – to become more just, equitable and inclusive – is just one of the many topics that we at Healing Solidarity have been questioning over the past few years. 

And so if those #GivingTuesday fundraising tactics weigh heavy on your conscience, we want you to know…you are not alone. 

If you want to see our whole sector communicate more honestly, there is a home for you at Healing Solidarity. At our monthly #GlobalDev Communicators Connect gathering which takes place within the Healing Solidarity Collective and is for people who want to tell our stories differently. We warmly welcome you to find kindred spirits and resources that will help you ask questions inside your organization, explore alternatives, and to help you challenge the idea that “whatever strategies get money through the door are justified, since the resources are going to a good cause.” 

We know that relying on old notions of charity and saviorism in our communications, let alone our programming, is not good enough. Healing Solidarity believes that in the global development sector, we need to deepen our analysis of the problems at hand and our role within a global “culture of charity”. 

#GivingTuesday was a campaign created to help the nonprofit sector fundraise following the U.S. “shopping holidays” of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, to imbue generosity into the consumption. It was initially created by New York City’s 92nd Street Y in partnership with the United Nations Foundation in 2012. Last year nonprofits raised almost US$2 billion on #GivingTuesday. This giving “holiday” may indeed make people feel better about all they bought in a manufactured frenzy of hyperconsumerism. But it’s part of a system in which governments and politicians prioritize the extraction and exploitation of natural resources and labor to feed wealth accumulation, with brazen disregard for the human lives upon which our global and local economies depend. 

We know it’s not possible for the one-off donations or the actions of one individual or organization to “change the world”. Rather we need to admit how complex it really is to create change. 

Healing Solidarity exists to keep pushing beyond savior mentalities, acknowledging the ambiguity, disappointment, and discomfort inherent in this work that has fueled isolation, burnout, a lack of creative thinking, complicity in unjust systems, and values/ethical misalignment in our sector.

At Healing Solidarity we believe it doesn’t have to be this way.

In this new reality that 2020 offers, the global development sector has an opportunity to concretize – in practice – our notions of interdependence, of care and consent, and of trust. Now is the time that leadership and individual actions within complex systems can challenge and transform hierarchical structures and dominant culture ways of working. 

Now is the time to tell a different story about global solidarity – to risk the honesty of how complicated it is to liberate ourselves from oppressive global economic systems.

Since 2018, Healing Solidarity has been offering an online platform, an annual conference, and ongoing events to create a space for us to connect and support each other in making the changes our sector needs. It’s also been a place to have more honest conversations about racism and healing, and where we imagine the new world that is becoming possible. 

It takes money to do our work – coordination, speaker honoraria, technology to give just three examples. But we’ve been operating on a shoestring budget, dependent on thousands of volunteer hours, a small grant, and member donations. 

We are not asking for a #GivingTuesday “click” to assuage any feelings of sadness, pity, guilt, or shame in response to the world’s suffering. Instead, we are asking for financial contributions to our work as you reflect on the deeply-rooted and connected issues in our sector, which have been laid bare in the wake of the #AidToo sexual abuse scandals, the global COVID-19 pandemic, and the #BlackLivesMatter uprisings around the world. 

Healing Solidarity wants to continue to help people across the sector to challenge the status quo and so we are asking you to become a sustaining member and support the work of Healing Solidarity this year in recognition of the energy, time, skills, money and effort needed to offer spaces like the Healing Solidarity online platform, annual conferences, regular events, and ongoing practice groups.

Becoming a sustaining member of Healing Solidarity means committing to rethinking, reimagining, and reshaping the future of our sector. We start by aligning our values with our dollars. Together we can promote healing from the past, generate a new narrative, and establish new ways of working. 

Jennifer Lentfer is a farm girl turned international aid worker turned writer/poet, writing coach, and communications strategist and a member of the Healing Solidarity Advisory Circle. Given that her hometown of Bruning, Nebraska, USA has a population of just 248 people, it’s no wonder she found her true calling in accompanying small, local groups to be strong forces for social change, which she writes about on her blog, how-matters.org.

Why we are offering PoC-only spaces during this year’s Healing Solidarity Conference

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Healing Solidarity is a space designed to connect to one another and to resource ourselves for doing things differently in global development, humanitarian aid, and international philanthropy. This includes building cultures of care and developing skill sets that model:

  • challenging injustice in our practice and re-imagining our sector, 
  • resisting the working practices that overwhelm and exhaust us, and 
  • reflecting and sustaining ourselves as people. 

Healing Solidarity exists to be part of rethinking, reimagining, and reshaping the future – to promote healing from the past, generate new narratives, and establish new ways of working. Together, we are inviting people and organisations on a learning journey to avoid replication of the harm that has been done in and by our sector. This means supporting people to tackle some deeply challenging issues – both personally and professionally – which we see as long-term work and which we hope will happen in partnership with many others. 

Within this, we recognise the need for multi-racial spaces and leadership as we try to model this in Healing Solidarity overall. Also, we recognise that dedicated spaces for Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour can provide the opportunity for healing, support, mirroring and affirmation, and that this must happen away from the white gaze. In our consultancy work with organisations, Healing Solidarity also offers dedicated ‘cohort’ spaces that help people explore the lenses through which they see and interact with the world and how their personal/family/cultural identities interact with their professional identity and access to resources. The cohorts are then re-joined to bring what emerges into shared space, focused on concrete actions and practices. This is long-term work we believe can be a helpful support in us all building anti-racist practice over time. 

In our 2020 conference, we are offering three Black/POC only spaces. One is hosted in partnership with Diasporic Development, and two opportunities to explore creativity and its healing power, one utilising spoken word poetry with Nikita Shah and the other using collage with Takyiwa Danso.

For the purposes of our work and of access to these events, we include within people of colour Black, Indigenous, and all those identifying as a person of colour. We know that people of colour are not a homogeneous group but also recognise the value of spaces dedicated to those for who have been oppressed by the burden of racism and the ways in which that is manifest in our organisations. 

Neither of the white members of our Advisory Group, Jennifer Lentfer nor Mary Ann Clements, will have access to these spaces or to recordings of them. These are held by the other members of our Advisory Circle, namely Esau Goldsmith, Pontso Mafethe, Roshni Nuggehalli and Swatee Deepak, who also run a dedicated space within our online Healing Solidarity Collective called Bearings: People of Colour Collective, which only People of Colour are able to join. (We would also draw your attention to the Gender and Development Network Women of Colour Forum and the BOND People of Colour Working Group.)

If you are white and feel uncomfortable in any way about not being able to access these spaces, we invite you to consider that this discomfort is nothing compared to the burden of experiencing racism for people of colour. The privilege of access to any space we choose is very often a benefit of whiteness and of white supremacy culture, a global system of injustice that always privileges whiteness. We know that many of us who are raced as white experience other forms of oppression, but privilege in relation to the colour of our skin is always afforded to us. Healing Solidarity runs a practice group for white people working in the global development sector to support them to reflect on and develop anti-racist practices without overburdening the Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour with whom they work alongside.

Putting Diaspora back in Development

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We are so pleased to welcome this Guest Post from Diasporic Development to the Healing Solidarity blog.

We are in *queue overstated phrases *unprecedented times, more than 100 days into lockdown, masses proclaim that Black Lives Matter, DFID and FCO are merging and the Conservative government are actively ensuring that we don’t spend a penny over the 0.7% aid budget (as heaven forbid we support anyone without a red.. or is it navy passport?). Everything we knew and understood of the world as of January 1st 2020 seems to be up in the air, and yet one thing remains critical – representation, equity and inclusion for Black professionals working  in international development and the wider charity sector. 

Allow us to introduce ourselves, we are Diasporic Development. A community of Black people working and interested in the charity sector in the U.K. and beyond. We want to see Black professionals leading change and being represented at all levels within the sector. 

Diasporic Development came about quite organically, as five friends lamenting the challenges at work, and solidifying it through a shared idea of the change needed within our sectors and the power of social media. Descendants of immigrants have witnessed the quiet ways in which their parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents have carried out their sense of duty to those back home. We represent a demographic that straddles two worlds, effortlessly juggles multiple identities and seeks to connect those interested in developing their ties to their other home. We want to promote the sector as a viable and worthy career path. We want to rebrand, rehabilitate and reverse a generation’s worth of negative imagery and shameful programming branded into our collective psyche. We want to unlock the vast potential, resources and nuance that the Black diaspora can provide in enhancing and helping to better deliver social justice.

As people who work within the sector, we connected via the recognition of the mutual challenges of getting your foot in the door, staying in the room and progressing through the ranks.  At a time where organisations want to “out statement” each other to show their commitment to racial justice;Diasporic Development exists to push for radical change, not simply performative public statements.

Since our official launch in February 2019, we have created safe spaces where unfiltered conversations have flowed with our members. This has taken the shape of panel discussions, featuring professionals in Comic Relief, Action Aid, Shelter and more, intimate dinners, joining our friends at The Advocacy Team for their careers fair, partnering with Forward for this year’s International Women’s Day event and most recently virtual events, including a panel discussion with Devex and BAMEID unpacking hiring practices within organisations.  Although a global pandemic was not part of our 2020 mood board, we plan to adapt and continue providing a much needed community, whilst also engaging organisations within the sector to ensure diversity and inclusion is more than just a buzzword.

As encouraging as the recent public statements have been, we fear much of the commentary is lip service with activism not extending beyond quaint Black Lives Matter tweets or a black square on instagram. The charity sector does not seem ready  to engage and have the necessary, honest conversations, such as who holds power and why, and how power is resourced and shifted equitably. Until we, as a sector, do this and more importantly, ensure this progresses into real, tangible action we fear that 20 years from now we will be having the same conversations, and People of Colour, specifically Black people will still be excluded.

While the sector has made many strides over the years in alleviating poverty and contributing to long lasting change, we at Diasporic Development believe we can go further and faster if we meaningfully (and mindfully) engage the Global South and its diaspora. The diaspora, which we like to think of as the missing infinity stone, with the knowledge and sensitivity that comes along with this identity, could hold the key to truly snapping ourselves out of a job. After all, that is the goal, right? 

Diasporic Development also aims to help demonstrate to graduates and those younger that 1) a career in the charity world is a thing and 2) that there are a multitude of ways to get into the sector (death to unpaid internships!). A notable and common experience that we at DD and our members have shared, has been the feeling that a career in International Development simply wasn’t for us. Growing up it was not something we could envision doing, it wasn’t a career path that was easily accessible or even visible in the same way as other professions.  

Beyond physical and now virtual events, you can connect with us at www.diasporicdevelopment.org and on social media (@’s below). We also have a careers thread on Twitter which we regularly update with roles and opportunities, and where we can,  will support with applications or find you someone in our network who can! We recognise that diversity without inclusion is ineffective,  so our wider aim is to hold organisations accountable, challenging them to not only question why their senior team/board is homogenous but to also take action and create inclusive spaces where Black people, and all People of Colour can bring their full authentic selves to work. 

What’s next for Diasporic Development? We have some exciting things coming up, the country is rapidly opening, but for the immediate future we will continue holding online events, like our virtual socials. Black History Month is fast approaching, and the pressure is on for us to hold an event on par with last year’s sold out panel, and we think we have done that. To find out more, subscribe to our newsletter (by going on our website), and follow us on socials. 

We are now at an interesting juncture. 2020 may not have been the year we all foresaw, however, what we do know, is that the old normal did not work. It did not work for the world, it did not work for the Global South, it did not work for the Global North. Let us now envision and put into action a new normal in which International Development is equitable… and eventually obsolete. 

No person, or charity, or government department can do this alone. Similarly, it cannot and should not be done without the diaspora. Our insights, care, passion, and interpersonal connections are an asset that the sector should no longer exclude.

Website: www.diasporicdevelopment.org

Twitter: @DiasporicDev

Instagram: @DiasporicDevelopment

Email: hello@diasporicdevelopment.org

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/diasporic-development

HEALING SOLIDARITY: WAYS TO BE IN ACTION AGAINST ANTI-BLACK RACISM

by

Originally posted in the Healing Solidarity Collective and on How Matters.org on Monday 1st June 2020.

You will by now have heard about the protests across the USA, and spreading across the world, in response to the extrajudicial murders in May of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, Tony McDade in Florida, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, George Floyd in Minnesota, and the subjugation of Black bodies for centuries prior. 

The #BlackLivesMatter Global Network is calling for ‘an end to the systemic racism that allows this culture of corruption to go unchecked and our lives to be taken.’

It’s time for all of us to be clear about the side we are on, in our work and in our activism. Black and brown people have been murdered by the state both in the US, the UK, and other countries around the globe for far too long. Global economic and political systems and societies are racialised, as much as they are gendered. Imperialism and colonialism has created a global system of white supremacy, and that system is alive and well in our work in international ‘development’ and solidarity. It is still dominated by large global or white-led entities holding all of the power and resources, while building their organisational “brands.” All the while the communities they claim to help – destabilised in the past by colonial violence and exploitation – continue to receive little genuine reparation for harm. Instead their knowledge, energy, and ideas are disregarded, or worse, extracted and exploited by larger, more resourced “players” in global development, despite any good intentions.

Colonial practices and mentalities persist today in so many global systems and the ‘development’ system is not immune from this. 

When up against systems as entrenched, resilient, and interdependent as white supremacy, capitalism and the patriarchy, we must start right where we are.

We are either in resistance to white supremacy, or we are upholding it either overtly or by our silence or inaction in this moment. In “social good” spaces, let us find all manner of ways to call for an end to racism and the injustices perpetuated by inequality and discrimination. 

This is a moment amongst many, but it is a moment calling for clarity and action. Overturning white supremacy will likely take generations and yet – right now – there is an opening for dialogue, change, and transformation. 

So what can you do? Below are ways to support the broader struggle, to bring about change in your workplaces, and guidance for your personal care and reflection. You’ll also find resources below from here in the Collective to support your learning and connecting the dots. 

There are many ways to be part of the broader struggle:

In your work: 

  • Call for an end to all white boards and all white leadership. Highlight the lack of representation and real decision-making power of Black people, other people of colour, Indigenous peoples, and others with diverse lived experiences in your organisation. Be clear when leadership does not reflect the profile of the communities and societies where your organisation’s work is happening. Be clear about how this reflects on the mission and values of the organisation. 
  • Call attention to whose knowledge, expertise and experience is undervalued. Question whose voices are being heard and respected most in the organisation overall, and do everything you can to follow the knowledge, leadership, and experiences of Black people. Make different hiring decisions and working to close the gender and race pay gap.
  • Be an unapologetic advocate for the redistribution of financial resources. Far too many funding decisions are being made in international headquarters and far too much money is being spent there also. Do everything within your positional power and realm of influence to channel more resources – in more dispersed and unrestricted ways than ever before – to people with the lived experience of the issues on which you are working and involve them meaningfully in your decision making processes. These people will likely be Black and brown. Invest directly in locally-driven and female, Black, and minority-led organisations. (And for goodness sake, get them their grant payments on time!)
  • Be an unapologetic advocate for communications that do not center whiteness in the world. Africans and people in the Global South have been calling for the white savior narrative/industrial complex, and bridge characters to be retired for eons. This matters because this is how stereotypes, generalisations, victimisation, exploitation, and heroism are exposed, challenged, and healed. Our organisations must no longer see communications as a means to a fundraising end, but a fundamental part of our impact strategy. 
  • Examine how you live your organisational values in every aspect of how your organisation is run. Ensure those who clean your buildings, make your deliveries, collect your rubbish, provide your administrative services (most of whom are women) get proper representation, respect, good pay and benefits, proper working conditions, and a say in how things work in your organisation. 
  • If you identify as white, ask other white people to learn about their unearned privilege and how we recreate the systems created by colonialism and imperialism within our global development organisations. It shows up in our ways of working in harmful ways that maintain the status quo.

Healing Solidarity resources are here to help you to think through and challenge the ways in which all of this shows up in our organisations. 

The previous conferences are available to download here. The 2018 conversations are also available in the Collective. In particular check out: 

  • Angela Brue Raebrun (2018)
  • Pontso Mafethe (2018)
  • the special conversation with Desiree Adaway in the Collective, 
  • Edgar Villeneuva with Pontso Mafethe (2019)
  • Marai Larasi & Neha Kagal with Pontso Mafethe (2019)
  • Women of Colour speak about Racism in Philanthropy (2019) 
  • Racism, Equity and Care – What can white people do?  (2019)

There is a reading list for “Anti-Racism & Decolonising Resources” here.

Consider signing up for Getting Ourselves Together, our practice group on engaging with Anti-Racism for people raced as white. 

In your personal and professional care and reflection:

‘The times are urgent, let us slow down.’ ~Bayo Akomolafe 

Bold action requires us to be fully resourced. So take care of yourself and others, first and foremost. Black people, please do whatever you need most right now – run, yell, cry, sing, or let the pain be.

As much as this is a time to be in solidarity with the broader struggle, it’s also a time to make sure that we continue to do the inner work so that we may show up for what’s most needed and urgent at this time. 

  • Explore the parts of ourselves that support white supremacy as a system, and that draw from mental models of dominant white culture. We all play a part in upholding this system or we choose to be part of ending it. 
  • Let the self-compassion flow. Accept that you will upset people and you may make mistakes when speaking up. When standing up for justice, there is no failure – only learning and un-learning. (Note for those who are raced as white: Do not center your feelings in multi-racial spaces and discussions about racism.)
  • Gather your people…because no one can do anti-racism work alone. The support and challenge offered by our trusted advisors and friendly critics is what can help us develop the self-knowledge and understanding of our own pasts, which we need to be able to make change together. So find a friend – many friends in fact. Find groups that can offer feedback, support, and resources.
  • For white people, keep learning about other people’s lived experiences. Just because you are part of the global development sector, you are not given a pass as ‘one of the good ones.’ Here’s some authors to consider reading/following:
    • Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad
    • Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
    • So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
    • and many, many more! There’s so many google-able resources to explore and ways to hear directly from Black and brown people about how systemic racism impacts their daily lives and how you can use your privilege to interrupt harm.

Be in touch! Reach out to people in this space. Healing Solidarity – in action – is why we are here. 

Compiled by Jennifer Lentfer. Gratitude to Mary Ann Clements, Esua Jane Goldsmith, Shawna Wakefield, Pontso Mafethe, and Swatee Deepak for their feedback and guidance on this joint statement. Washington, DC·