Reciprocity, liberation, and broad-based community organizing!

by Jane Keating, Leaven Youth and Families Organizer

Firstly, I want to appreciate the Leaven Community - Alison Killeen, Cheryl Lohrmann and Terry Moe - for your support in my participation in the May five day Industrial Areas Foundation training , “Advanced Community Organizing Training”.

My biggest reason for going was to learn about ways to build real power to create lasting change.

Attending with Leavener Cheryl Lohrmann, a dear collaborator, made a dynamic training even better. It was extra energizing to have a buddy to discuss the training with a Leaven lens and with an eye on sharing back to Leaven. Our strategic plan goal of Community Organizing and Action and how to scale up this core value was on my mind during the training.

The training was in Tacoma. It was wonderful to be part of a group of @30 that was international, representing some of the Pacific Rim. There was a good showing of indigenous peoples and labor organizations, via Sound Alliance - a Washington coalition of member organizations.

I called for a lunch meeting with everyone at the training from Portland (MacG members). We met three times over the course of the training and later met in Portland for a reflection. Everyone there from MACG was associated with a church. There are lots of reasons for this. My wondering is: “Into the future, how does MACG continue to practice organizing in order to be diversified/broad based?”

During the training we all attended a Sound Alliance meeting. It had diverse member organizations. Having a dedicated paid organizer for alliances (SA, MACG) seemed crucial as SA was in a rebuilding phase.

How do we, as Leaven Community, with all of the external pressures, do this work in a financial system that doesn’t compensate organizers as they should and need to be? This also affects Leaven Community’s survival. Is it true that Leaven members feel they can’t put their personal power and attention together because they have too many individual pressures? How do we want to address this Collective vs. Individual paradigm?

A primary question I had going into the training was: In order to have a democratic society - how do we use broad-based organizing (BBO) to that end?

One of the pieces of the BBO training that stands out to me was the concept of taking on projects, issues, and a campaign around what is winnable and building power off of “wins”. Part of this is maintaining relationships through meaningful relational processes in order to continue through “losses”. What (small) issue has Leaven already recently “Won”? How might we build on it for the next bigger issue? I would posit that the continued existence of Leaven is a “Win” in and of itself.

What do we mean by bringing back organizing as part of our strategy? Where do we want to go with organizing in Leaven? 

Leaven has strong justice values. How can we use our broad based organizing skills to have strong organization to organization relationships? After the training, I see the possibility of Leaven creating a strategy around organizations we want to be in relationship with and a team of Leaven organizers, of varying experience, using the organizing process toward that end. As we move into our Fall organizing training, I see the crucial value in connecting with other organizations with Leaven and prioritizing our organizing culture. This seems like a great way to center Leaven’s organizing culture. No experts necessary. 

In this political moment, daylighting Broad Based Organizing can be a response to the manipulation toward polarization (driven by fear) in the US.

Jane’s Key Takeaways

• It felt really great to go as a representative of Leaven. Having the backing of the people and the history of the community behind all of us, is important. 

• At the training, it was vital being with people who were there for shared self interests. It was reassuring and invigorating at the same time. Organizations sharing their triumphs and pressures together, is a good contradiction to feelings of powerlessness and isolation.

• The depth we could go into to define and understand Broad Based Organizing was most useful. I was able to flesh out full picture that I had pieces of from the on the ground work at Leaven. Having the devoted time necessary for a full training of the very specific, IAF Organizing gave clarity. The model resonated with me in its elemental value of people power. Looking at our sources of anger and agitation is powerful. Having a process to address injustice together is key to living out Leaven values.

• How do we as Leaven Community keep our relationships and love publicly centered in community to change the harmful aspects of our current larger culture? Looking at the world as it is and moving toward the world’s potential for liberation is core for me as polarization tactics are employed as a result of oppressive systems with high stakes consequences. Recognizing our interconnectivity and having deeper reciprocal connections is spiritual. It allows for more joy, creativity, flexibility and nimble action. 

I highly recommend the training and am eager to talk to anyone that is curious it.

A new revelation: broad-based Community Organizing!

by Cheryl Lohrmann, Leaven Board Co-Chair

This past May, I attended the weeklong Community Organizing training with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) on behalf of Leaven with Jane Keating in Washington state. This was my second 5-day community organizing training in ten years. I left both of these training sessions with a renewed sense of awareness around my power, and with the question, “What have I been waiting for in being the change I wish to see in the world? Well, no more!” I felt levity after the first, a sense of a shift in paradigm in that I was going about change-making through guesswork and individualism rather than through relationships. 

The recent experience this past Spring was all of the above, but more refined and more dimensional, and with one key learning that I don’t think I ever truly grasped: Broad-based organizing!

Broad-based organizing is a structure for making the work of community organizing more directly responsible to and representative of its member institutions and members. This is key and inspiring, because it is bigger than me and bigger than any one organization. 

I came away from the IAF organizing training with this takeaway: Leaven needs to refocus its DNA on broad-based organizing so that there is a wider base for whom we can help to educate around it. We have been strong on teaching the organizing cycle/spiral, and we have gone deep with these practices inside our community. Now it is time to go wide so that we begin to see and value the interconnectedness of all issues and problems.

Since Leaven wants to reconnect to its organizing roots as part of our strategic plan, we can partner with other organizations through our local IAF affiliate, the Metropolitan Alliance for Common Good (MACG) for training, listening, and collaboration. Leaven is also offering our own community organizing training to Leaven members and the wider public. And of course, our relationship with other communities engaged in Sacred Organizing remain strong through our work in the Leaven Community Land and Housing Coalition.

Leaven could also innovate on ways to provide a weekly rhythm for the broad based community to engage in skill building, art making, artist nurturing, cooking and meal-sharing, all surrounded by kid centered activities. We can be building the community resilience hub through our various programs, building engagement through various channels, to support Alliance Assemblies once an issue is cut and the powers that be are aligned for a win. In this way, Leaven and others can continue our work. Leaven’s work of normalizing rest, shared meals, shared childcare and eldercare, to name a few, can go wider alongside our commitment to broaden our own organizing base, and to the people of the other MACG institutions and Leaven partner organizations as needed. 

Moving forward, I will be serving on the MACG Transformation Team to discern their next steps, and will be doing lots of one to ones in the community as a result! I would like to become a broad based organizing salesperson and reach out to my contacts in different issue-based non-profits to consider becoming a part of MACG so we can eventually cut those far reaching issues, work together for change, and win.

This Summer, Let the Light In

When my son woke me up this morning - well before 6am! - the sun streamed through the crack between the blinds and directly into my eyes. I groaned inwardly, cursing Portland’s blasted northerly latitude, but attempted a smile at the small person inviting me to play and roused my unwilling body for another round of early morning MagnaTiles. 

As we approach the summer solstice, the days can become almost unbearably bright. Our bodies are instinctively awakening and responding to the light, but as the school year comes to a close, we can be overstimulated with the pressures and endings that accompany it.

Meanwhile, the global violence, political strife, and existential crises in our wider world continue on. Even while the days are getting longer, there’s just not enough time in the day to do and finish and worry about all the things that need doing and finishing and worrying. 

But the setting sun approaches the horizon in a long and languid bow. The sun, it turns out, does not worry about what time she is going to set. She simply sets in her own good time, painting watercolor hues across the sky as she goes. 

 

A Community in Action

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on the pace that Leaven Community has been going this spring. We’ve been Organizing! Planting! Training! Grantwriting! Budgeting! Outreaching! Cooking! We’ve been working hard! 

And, as it turns out - and I’ve been hearing this from many of you - we’re tired!

We are doing all these things with a purpose, of course. We believe that building community grounded in justice, storytelling, diversity, and action is an antidote to the systems of oppression that dominate our lives. 

But what happens when we push ourselves so hard - even to organize a beautiful community - that we are denying our bodies’ and spirits’ needs for rest? Can it be that working so hard to dismantle systems of oppression in the world may actually reinforce the very systems we aim to resist?

The community organizing spiral has four (interdependent, nonlinear) stages: Sacred Encounter (Listening), Sacred Unveiling (Research), Sacred Action (Acting Together) and Sacred Pause (Celebration and Reflection). And I suspect it is time for our community to take a well-earned Sacred Pause.

Let the Light In

This summer at Leaven, it’s time to Let the Light In - time to welcome the joy, lean in to rest, and open up to love. Let’s take time to dream! Let’s make space for connection! And let’s allow what we’ve learned to settle into compost for the next season.

Check out our Events Calendar to learn about what’s happening this summer at Leaven. And in the meantime, let's allow the summer light to nourish our bodies and spirits - so that it can metabolize in our community to keep showing up for ourselves, for each other, and for the world.