Rebeca Velázquez-Publes, MA (Brigham Consulting) [Starting at 04:57]: We are so happy. We’re so happy to be here. This was a great experience for us the last time we were in this community. And it’s just, it feels like, yeah, we’re back.

We were just talking earlier like, ooh, this is a fun space to be in. This is a great space to be in. So you’re going to see us smiling hard and happy, because not only is this our life’s passion,  but we love to be in community with others who are also on their racial equity journey and walking alongside them.

So we want to offer some things for you all here as we’re in this space together today. You know, oftentimes we come into virtual space and in-person spaces, and we forget that we’re human beings first. We forget that we are in your space and that we are sharing this virtual space.

And so we want to offer some of those reminders to center our humanity. So when we say take care of yourself and listen to your body, if you need to stand up, please stand up. I have, I like to call it my trick hip. And so if I have to stand up, my hip sometimes falls asleep. And so, I’m like, ooh, I need to stretch this out.

Just listen to your body. Also, listen to your body for moments of discomfort in this conversation and note that. We ask that you mute yourself unless you’re speaking, and we also ask that if you’re going to take a little break, no problem, just put a little BRB right there and we’ll expect you to return at some time.

We want to make space for our families, and our fur babies. We usually are, I’ll be in my space if this was if I was in my home office, you would see my daughter. She would come on the camera. Naturally. She has, she’s in every meeting. She would introduce herself, give me a little kiss, and be back about her business downstairs as she’d be coming home from school.

So we want to honor that too. Keep your video on as much as possible. We want to see your faces. It gives us energy as facilitators. And also while we’re virtual, it does give us some connectivity. It does a little connection, virtually to one another. We also just want to say that if you have something to write with, even if it is your computer, just have something close by that you can kind of take some notes on.

And take a moment for thought and reflection. And again, back to that first one. If you’re feeling something in your body, take a little note about it. We encourage people to do that. Just kind of think about that a little bit later and be one of the things to reflect on. We’re going to share our objectives next.

And so, you know, this is what we’re up to today. We are up to discussing powerful frameworks for producing humane relationships. We are going to provide some frameworks and tools for holding tension. We’re going to hold some tension, okay? We’re going to make conflict productive.

And we’re going to talk about how we do this in our day-to-day practices and making sure that we lend the practices that we share today to creating humanizing relationships and spaces for all of us, especially as we’re creating and working within our giving circles.

So with that, something about Brigham Consulting is that we know that words are powerful and words are important. And so when we find beautiful words, we always like to share them. We like to hold them, we like to share them with others. So the title of this session is “Foundations for Addressing Conflict Harm and Developing Human Humanizing Relationships and Spaces,” which is like a mouthful.

Like my tongue is getting tired just saying it. But I want to also offer that as each of you is building your giving circles, it’s not lost on us, that you’re building community as well. So as you’re working and building this legacy of your work, you’re also building community. And so we wanted to share this quote.

“Community isn’t always synonymous with warmth and harmony. Politeness is often a veneer for understanding, when in reality it masks uncovered territory… It is important to remind ourselves that real community is forged out of struggle. This is the crucible from which a real community grows.” Linda Christensen.

So we’re going to be talking about tension. We’re going to be talking about conflict. We’re going to be talking about how we hold that in a relationship, not only to one another but to our work. And also just want to hold that it’s okay, it doesn’t have to be polite and that it’s all right, and that it’s okay, to struggle a little bit with the conversation.

And so, with that, we want to provide you. We love frameworks. So for us, frameworks are a way for us to have mirrors. And for me, it’s a tool that I always kind of reflect on and be like, ooh, where am I in this framework? Or what am I feeling and how is that relating to what I’m learning?

And so when I first learned about the productive tension model, I was like, oof. Right? Like tension, oof, you know, tension is part of life. We have tension with our partners. I had tension with my partner last night. My husband’s an actor and I needed to record something. And he’s like, you’re sounding like a robot. And he’s giving me direction.

And I’m like, why am I feeling this certain way when my husband is giving me direction? There was some tension and he quickly addressed it. He’s like, this is the tension. This is what you’re feeling. I want you to do your best. And so listen to my direction. And I was like, okay, let me get over myself and listen to his direction.

And it was the best, it was great. But there’s tension. We hold tension in our relationships. We hold tension in lots of our work and a lot of that, a lot of times we try to avoid it. We walk around it, we don’t name it, we swallow it or we pretend that the tension doesn’t exist and we keep moving about our day or our communication or about our relationships.

You know, one of the things that we want to offer is that we all come to our relationships with our own experiences, and one of the things that we’re not good at is utilizing our tension to benefit our humanity. And how we might work together in our relationships to do better. So, when you’re looking at this model here and us as racial equity practitioners, our role is to help our clients, partners, and community hold tension.

Because when we talk about things like race, people are like, eh, even now people are like, eh, when you say things like white supremacy culture, we talk about privilege. People are not always accepting of the conversation. And so there’s some tension there and it’s our job to hold it. It’s our job to have a conversation and it’s also our job to help provide strategies for interrupting it.

Because what we’re able to do is to interrupt the racism that we’re experiencing in our communities. And so we use the production, a productive tension model like this. So you see these dual tracks, I wish we were in person, kinda, I’d be like pointing to the dual tracks. So we see the dual tracks and the dual tracks you see are green on the top where you see ideating, and then you have the red on the bottom where you see naming.

Now both of these are very important and if you can pull your eye to the middle you see vision on top with a little line that says current reality next to it, connecting them to the two places. Oftentimes our current reality is what is pushing us to be on the green line, to be creative, to think of a new imaginative way to solve something that we have not yet interrogated or discussed.

And so, when we are looking at both of these things, we often say that on top is that creative place. It’s the visionary place, it’s the, I call it the fun space. It’s where you’re imagining and you’re ideating. And the green space is where you have these emotions. And one of the things I want to offer is that oftentimes we go to a solution and we’re solving for something without addressing why we’re solving for something.

And then, the conversation that we have, because some people are situated in a space in which they’re so they want to solve for something quickly and they can’t. What we want to offer here is we want to offer that, in order to hold productive tension and conversations in relationships, we’re going to have to hold both.

We’re going to have to think of imaginative ways to have these conversations, but we’re also going to have to stay in our current reality of where we are, where we’re holding tension and why we need to imagine a new way and a new space. So creating and repairing lead to transformation, but transforming is not a static state of liberation.

And I want to share that it is a revolutionary, an evolutionary act. It’s always evolving. And so that’s why we give frameworks as tools to come back to, to practice these things. But we often need to reflect on our current reality and determine how it impacts the way we’re able to reimagine our conversations and our relationships with one another.

Now I get to do the virtual high five to my homie Nadia.

Nadia C. Brigham, MSW, MPA (Brigham Consulting): Good afternoon everybody. So all of us here have our dear, ancestor mother, Maya Angelou, saying that  “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we go as we are and not to be questioned,” right?

All of us desire to show up and just be. But in our society, as it stands, many people can’t show up and just be, instead, we’re sort of socialized to show up in ways that are acceptable to the existing structure. So even in some of our informal settings, there’s often no space to show up.

And when it comes to giving circles, even, I would imagine for some that part of its allure is not only to work with community members in empowering ways to impact residents, but also to have the power to do so in giving circles in a way that allows us to show up more fully. But as is the case, most times, even in some of the more informal settings, we take on dominant structures and cultural ways that end up reproducing the very elements that cause us to create giving circles in the first place.

Right? Or we create new hierarchies that in many respects resemble the old ones. And so, as our beloved mother says, we ache for a home to be, and without question, now we’re going to back our way in because I know somebody, at least one person is like, what are we talking about? I thought we were supposed to be talking about how to get into conflict.

But it is critically important to us, for us to stay in that imaginative space, to imagine what if structures were built correctly from the get? How would we interact and engage with one another? So we’re going to backdoor our way into conflict by starting with the kinds of structures that are more humanizing, by starting with the kinds of priorities that are more humanizing.

So what if we created the home that Mother Angelou suggests? And even more, what if we use love as a precondition for the relationships of the spaces we want to create with other human beings?  And I’ll offer you her work in just a second. Shiree Tang says, “Love is a threat to systems and institutions that rely on disconnection. Love weaves connections that are amplified in order of magnitude,” right?

If we operate from a place of love, we get a really powerful, different way of being. So I want to, I want to slow it down again because this may represent like, a needle scratching on the record for some folk. I have a DJ coming to our wine and jazz bar tonight, so I’m thinking about albums and vinyl.

You all joined this webinar to talk to Beca and me about addressing conflict and harm and we’re suggesting love, which is counter to more organizational work. Shiree Teng makes the case. She says, and we agree with her. She suggests that love is a precondition for the work you’re doing in your giving circles.

It’s the basis of philanthropy. It’s foundational for having capital to deal with conflict as it arises. And that’s what we believe. Love gives you capital. So that, and notice I say when conflict arises, not if, when conflict arises, you have a bank to draw from. In addition to love being necessary for justice, which is how Ms. Tang is capturing this, it’s also critical for healing and it’s critical for creating more humane spaces.

And so let’s go, let’s look at these four dimensions of love. In the four dimensions of love, I understand that Sara used to work with Shiree Tang, in her former philanthropic work.

This is just a beautiful piece which will, a link will show up in your resources for you to take a deeper dive. She has much more beautiful artwork surrounding these four dimensions of love than I could ever put together, but she characterizes love as emergent, transformative, catalytic, and a radical form of resistance.

And so I offer, we offer you this as a foundational piece for how we attend to attention and conflict in our giving circles. Love of self, love of others, love as a community practice, love fused with power. Now let’s dig a little bit deeper. Let’s go to the next slide.

So there’s an interesting dance in our society, in our current context, in our current societal context around self-love. Not self-indulgence, not selfless. But true love and loving one’s self is not a selfish act. And for many people, depending on how they’re situated in society, it’s an act of resistance to love oneself.

To be confident, to believe in oneself, to take time, to take a break, to take a nap, to eat. And sometimes something that has to be, this self-love has to be taught, it has to be relearned if you’re looking from an ancestral lens or a historical perspective. And it has to be diligently practiced.

So when we think about this act of self-love, and we’re talking about the consciousness that we bring to the integrity of the values that we say we hold, it’s like, okay, well what are my values? And am I acting in accordance with them? I say I love myself, but how long has it been since I worked out? How long has it been since I’ve taken a nap or gone to get a massage?

Because that, or just taking a day where I didn’t think about, oh, let’s not try a day, because that feels like a long time. Let’s just take 30 minutes, right, where we don’t think about service to others. Taking care of others, but we’re just trying to provide ourselves some self-care – that is revolutionary in many respects for some folks, depending on how they’re situated.

And it is a practice that has to be attended to. Self-care is revolutionary. And how am I doing it? How am I doing it in the giving circle that I’m aiming to serve and give to others? How am I loving myself?

Then there’s this notion of loving other people. Love doesn’t stop at the self. And that’s that interesting dance. Like, it feels like a whole lot of people are just thinking about themselves these days. That’s not necessarily love. So don’t misunderstand what we intend to mean by love or what we interpret Shiree Tang’s meaning as love. But when we love ourselves, well, we love ourselves.

Well, it opens up room for us to extend love to other people, but that love requires deep listening, not the listening that aligns with what you already think you know about a person or a group of people. Right? It pushes beyond that. It’s about compassion and understanding, which means that what you are hearing could be foreign.

It could be counter-cultural for you, and you might even disagree, but you’re willing to lean into the kind of love that can listen with understanding and sensitivity. Love also requires forgiveness. That’s an acknowledgment that there are no perfect people. If you’ve met them, please let me get to know them as well so that my life can be made better.

But I’ve not met any perfect people. We misstep. Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes we just make bad choices. Sometimes it’s unconscious and unintentional, and sometimes it’s conscious and intentional. But when we are loving others, because we have loved ourselves, we have forgiven ourselves, we have forgiven ourselves for the bad choices as well as the unintentional ones, and then it’s reciprocated.

Or it’s reproduced for others. There’s an openness to provide that opportunity to get it right for the other person. Now, the first two, love of self and love of others, are the prerequisites for being part of a giving circle. Beca and I were talking about like, what is it? I get all of the reasons why people come together and they want to form giving circles.

Some of them are pure and righteous, others of them, like, okay. But I’m going to go with the purest, most righteous form of a giving circle that I can think about. And, one of the things that comes up, or two of the things that come up for me when I think about those kinds of giving circles, is that these people must have some level of love for themselves and each other and their community, which is the third element of love.

Love as a community practice, is a collective space, when the giving circle comes together to do the work together. You formed the giving circle by organizing a group of people who believe in a similar cause, at least. You shared the vision and the hope for what kind of impact you want to see in the community.

And then there’s this challenge. The challenge particularly, because of the role of philanthropy and how it traditionally has done its work is to fight for material change. Are you fighting for material change together? Is this transformational or is it transactional? Kids can’t read, give ’em books. The kids can’t read.

So I was studying and had the opportunity to be a part of a group that was from the University of, I want to say Eastern Illinois. And, a group that was studying men, Black men in particular, Black men and boys, and they were studying literary societies of the 1800s.

And in these literary societies, this community came together. Again, remember these were in some parts of the country. These were places where they weren’t supposed to be reading, but they came together and they would have these literary societies. And what would they read? They would not read, like, “Look at Jane Run.” They didn’t read, you know, the latest People Magazine.

What they read were policies. Their idea and their purpose was to learn the master’s language so that they could impact change that they wanted to see for themselves, their children, and their community. They were going after material gain, material change, and transformational change.

It wasn’t reading for reading’s sake, it was reading with a purpose and an intention. It’s a form of a giving circle, but a literary society with that particular purpose, because they were loving their community and they were using reading as a practice.

Love fused with power. Oftentimes we think about love and power as polar opposites in the way that power is particularly conceptualized in the space of justice. When we’re talking about self-love and the impacts of self-love, love for others, and the community, there grows this sense of power within oneself.

And there’s this idea of owning one’s power, and materializing that power towards something greater. There’s this idea of sharing power, having just come from perhaps a journey where there wasn’t self-love, there wasn’t love for self, there wasn’t love for others. There wasn’t this community expression of love.

The idea and notion of sharing the power, sharing the love, is this notion of love fused with power. And then building for something beyond the self. There is a powerful, and we’ll come, we’ll come back to it later. There’s this powerful notion of ubuntu, “I am because you are, and I cannot be if you aren’t.”

The other is the flip side of that. So if I am, because you are, I am trying my best to get to the best, most powerful, collective liberation for us, all that I can. It requires love. It requires love.

Now let me tell you my thing about love, my journey with love. I grew up, and there are points in my life where I can pinpoint what I felt about a particular man. In third grade, I was enamored with him and proud, for whatever a third grader conceptualizing proud as. I was sad, and motivated. So that’s in third grade. By the time I got to my teenage years, I was pissed at him. And I was embarrassed. I’m ashamed to say today, I was embarrassed and I looked at him as weak.

Now you keep rolling through my twenties and thirties, I’m going to wrap this story up. Let me make sure I’m on time. There we go. By the time I got to my adult years, and had children, I loved him again. I fell in love with him all over again, but deeper with much more understanding and wisdom, because he understood love fused with power.

And the man that I’m speaking about is The Reverend, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I saw him owning his power in a way that allowed him to serve to the end of his life. I saw him love in a way that helped me to understand the power of love in ways that I hadn’t before. Right? Like for me, I was like, give me justice, stop people from killing us.

All of these things. And I didn’t understand how to use power, the power of love as a strategy. If you want a book, there’s a book about the life of Dr. King and Malcolm X, and it’s by James Cohen. And their lives cross paths, not with each other, but philosophically and how they exhibited.

It’s the most powerful book I’ve ever read about the two of them because it shows you how one took the streets as their university. The other took the academy, and by the end, they were crossing paths. Where Dr. King was becoming more militant, unto death, when Malcolm X became much more understanding of peaceful strategies and love as a strategy.

It was not suggesting that love, fused with power, is unto death. What I am suggesting is when one is building power for collective liberation, the love is stretched to, it’s integrated into the service of the community.

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: Woo, everyone just exhale with me quickly. Just one breath in, one breath out. We want to open it up to you all. Maybe you’re noting a little bit how you’re feeling about the conversation. We’re talking about love. We should be talking about conflict. What are these, what’s happening here?

Just open it up a little bit and we want to just take a beat to ask you. To what extent do you show up in your giving circles centering love as a way of being? Or do you? We can take notes in the chat. We can, you can unmute yourself and speak. You can take a moment to think about it.  Nadia and I love to hold space.

We can be quiet for a very long time. But think about it. How is it showing up? Is it showing up?

Participants shared their stories via video or in the chat, talking about nontraditional sources of love and support, understanding people in their communities, and feeling love and community within a giving circle.

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: Well, thank you for sharing. Use that question as a prompt for yourself too, as you move through your work. Think about it as we move through some of the other tools that we’re going to provide. Just be thinking about how you can tie that to your work and into your giving circle.

I told you we love quotes and as we move from space to space, we want to provide you with that. And so, Adrienne Maree Brown says, “Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue pulling back the veil.”

And we offer that because we understand that part of having hard conversations. Part of holding conflict and tension is a discourse that you need to engage in the conversations that we’re having, how we’re having them. And we need to understand that narratives reinforce what we believe about our experiences and how we show up and form our conversations.

And those things oftentimes are what is at the core of our conflict and our tension and our communications and in our relationships. And so we’re going to move to the next slide as we offer another concept for you to consider. And we call this discourse, well, a Discourse 1 and 2, and we’ll get to a little bit more about that later.

But discourse is really like how we talk and how we frame problems, how we define our success or failure. And that’s the cultural piece of it. And the technical piece of it is, you know, how we organize our time and our work. What does that mean and how does that impact the culture? And those two things together can produce one or two things.

They can reproduce or they can transform, they can reproduce more attention, they can reproduce more conflict, or they can transform the way that we interact with one another.

And so when we talk about discourse, we also want to understand that some of the discourse we have stems from our belief systems. How we enter, again, how we enter into space together.  It is at times something very based in our opinion. What do we think, what do we believe? Why do we believe that way?

And a lot of times we find ourselves in, maybe, contentious relationships or contentious conversations, because of the way that we show up in space with one another. And so, when we talk about discourse in the way that we have conversations with one another, it is a critical piece of the puzzle as we are looking to transform the work that we’re doing.

It’s a critical piece of the puzzle when we’re talking about how we want to make an impact in our community. And so, we just want to consider that as we start to move through our conversation here, in discourse we want to provide you. The next slide is an image. And the image we want to provide is, you know, everyone’s seen the iceberg.

The iceberg is like, you know, from the early two thousands. Like we are still pulling this iceberg through, but it still works. So we’re still going to stick with it because it still works. And what we want to do is just provide another way that we’re seeing this. So when we’re talking about discourses, really, what’s bubbling up?

It’s our beliefs, our assumptions, our discourse. Like my assumption with my example that I gave you earlier, that my husband’s trying to tell me what to do and he knows better. Like we are in a relationship for a lot of years. He knows better than to try to tell me what to do. That’s the assumption that I’m making. That’s the discourse I’m having in my head.

And so my behavior towards him and my actions towards him were like, uh, you’re not going to do that. And so our beliefs and our assumptions about a person, about how they’re coming into the conversation, their background, their orientation, their position, power plays a role in that too.

These are all playing themselves out in the discourse in our conversation. And one of the things that we want to look at is like, what are the actions and the outcomes? What does that produce? What is that producing? And one of the things that we want to kind of think about is that oftentimes it produces tension.

Oftentimes it produces a conflict because we’re coming to our conversations with preconceived notions or, you know, maybe we had the conversation after the conversation at the last meeting, and now we’re bringing that stuff into here because we’re not addressing what we need to be addressing in the discourse, in the conversation.

And so, what we want to think about is, how do we transform that? What is the shift that we can make? And so as you’ll see on the next slide, is that we’re going to present two framings, two ways of thinking about our conversations with one another. One, it’s going to continue to produce the same thing. And that’s what we see on the left side. And we usually call this Discourse 1. It’s just this dominant way of thinking, managing, maintaining, and reproducing the systems and the work that we’re already doing.

So when we come into conversations with one another, and we are coming without,when you see the productive tension model, we want to think about new ways of having the conversation, but we’re using old tools. That’s not going to work. We want to move ourselves and our conversation over toward the right hand where we’re talking about transformation.

This is engaging and questioning things like the status quo and questioning the way that we have conversations and the narratives that are associated with the conversations that we’re having and the narratives that are associated, that we continue to reproduce. So, really pushing for deeper understanding and deeper interrogation and inquiry.

We use interrogation a lot and that makes people feel a certain way, but interrogation in itself is just a deeper look, putting it under a microscope and just really wanting to name that that’s going to be uncomfortable. So whilst we’re offering this conversation around moving from a reproductive conversation to a transformative conversation, there is going to be some tension in that, because we’re questioning the status quo. We’re questioning the way we’re having the conversation to begin with.

And so we want to provide some examples of how discourse shows up. We’re going to jump into a Jamboard, which is our favorite thing to do. So thinking about your giving circles and about the way that you have conversations within your giving circles, when we talk about the left side of reproductive conversation or Discourse 1, it is in a singular way of thought.

It’s in a singular way of doing things. It is the normal way that we do things. Like this is what it is, we’ve always done it this way. We always have an agenda. And on the agenda, we always follow the agenda. We always start at 10:05. So, thinking about how there’s not just a singular way or a singular truth.

And if you look on the opposite side, we’re talking about interrupting that. How do we interrupt that? On the reproductive side, we’re talking about things like where we are, where we post blame, and where we are blamed, whether it be in the conversation one-on-one or the overall conversations.

Why do we continue to have that same narrative in our conversations? Also, are we going to unconsciously perpetuate stereotypes in communities or within our giving circles with one another? And looking for silver bullets, or quick fixes to things, instead of thinking about digging down.

When we talk about tension and conversations, oftentimes you see, like I said earlier, we circle around it. We don’t want to name it. The practice is naming it. So when we go to the right-hand side and we talk about the transformative way that we might have a conversation is by thinking about, and interrogating, the root cause of the problem.

On the productive model tension model, that’s that interrogation at the bottom. It’s that red piece of the work, interrupting conversations and narratives that we hear when we perpetuate. How do we interrupt those things? So, you know, while we are going to get some tools on how you create that space, we also want to challenge you to create tension.

Discourse is going to create tension and we are encouraging you to create tension because you need to practice it. It’s going to give you a tool and the space to practice it in a way that is, you know, we call it the brave space. But it’s also, it’s necessary to evolve our work to not be reproductive, but to be transformative.

Oftentimes we find when we’re asking people to hold tension in conversations, what I notice and what I see is that, the moment has passed, and you need to come back and practice it the next time. Oh, I noticed that I didn’t hold tension in that space, or I didn’t question it. I didn’t interrogate it. I didn’t see the complexity and the problem. There are these things that I did not address.

And then you come back and you practice it next time, because then you’ve recognized in that space that you have missed that moment. So there’s a practice component to this as well.

So one of the things that we want to offer is to practice this. So what we will do is, we’re going to drop a Jamboard link in the chat. The Jamboard is open, and what you’ll see in the Jamboard, we’ll open it up and see who’s in there.  Are we going to ask who, who’s the unicorn? We’re always looking for the unicorn. I don’t know why, but me and Nadia have a little challenge.

What are the reproductive narratives that live in your giving circles? And if you were to redefine them, what would they be? How would you change those? How would you disrupt those narratives?

And so if you haven’t used a Jamboard before,  on the left-hand side there’s a little post-it that looks like a little paper with a little thing. Post-Its. Yep. Thank you. And you can type right in there. You click it, you can type it, you can make it whatever color you want if you’re fancy. And then, you can just post your comments and we’ll be able to see, and it’s all anonymous, so we don’t know who’s saying what.

But the challenge here is for you to think about, what are the narratives that are being reproduced in your conversations, or the way that you go about your work? And what are some ways that you can transform those, or interrupt those, with new language or new narratives?

Nadia Brigham: So, one example could be, think about the iceberg. And beliefs and assumptions, discourse, and then actions, and outcomes. So in that belief section, if you believe that poor people are poor because they’re bad managers, then the discourse around poor people is aligned with that belief. And, that discourse is more than a conversation in a meeting.  It ends up being the basis for things like policy.

So if poor people are bad managers of money, then what does the action step become? If folks are bad managers of money? Well, you give them financial literacy courses, and we know that that’s not entirely true, that they’re poor managers of money. As I grew up, my mother said, “Zero from zero equals zero.”

I don’t have, I don’t have a problem adding and subtracting. I don’t have enough money. I’m not getting paid enough. Right? So we blame the people. Remember, Beca’s list. We blame the people instead of the system. MIT just put out a recent report about how people need like $103,000 before taxes or after taxes in order to meet their basic needs.

But we put the burden of blame on the people who are poor. That would be one example. Is that helpful? We can’t do anything political. Everything you do is political. I don’t know. I don’t know what that means. Everything we do, where we choose to shop, where we choose to live, who cuts our hair, what we choose to wear, what brands we support.

I’m just reading them off. No shade to anybody, but, everything we do is political. We only have, absolutely, we need to measure results. If you look at the document that Kelsey sent about dominant culture, which comes from the white supremacy culture.

And, this whole quantitative, numbers, and measurement [thing] is part of that dynamic. Certain types of organizations or work are too risky – for whom is the question, right? So in my mind, because I’m, you know, I’m a practitioner, Beca’s a practitioner, our mind automatically goes to these places that question the status quo.

Like, it’s on the tip of our tongue. Anybody can come. Someone says, you know, the sky is blue outside. How do you know? Did you experience it? Is that what the folks who are walking down the street are also experiencing? That’s how we roll, but the idea is, how do we get you all to begin to question what’s reproductive?

If I structure this meeting in this way, if we set up our grant-making structure in this way, are we reproducing the very things that we’re trying to undo? For those of you who were here last month, we talked to you about a client that we have that is setting up a fund that is supposed to be focused on equity, but all of the stipulations and eligibility requirements that they’ve put in place are maintaining status quo and keeping them from what they aspire to be about.

Right? Because they haven’t dug deep enough yet, I believe. I think they’re on their way deep enough to like what’s underneath the assumptions and the beliefs about what it is you’re trying to do. And underneath you’re interrogating it, the interrogation of it. Underneath some of these assumptions is like, we need measured proof because we don’t trust people.

We don’t believe you. Like when we’re talking about getting to belief, we’re talking at that level. We don’t believe you. We don’t know you, we don’t trust you. That’s what the board is saying when they say, show me measurable results. Right? And so that’s what we’re trying to transform. What would it look like if we just believed people?

There is no stipulation for philanthropic dollars except for 5% of your corpus, and if we just believe that we’re going to do good, our organization’s mission is to do good, and we’re going to give people dollars. And we’re going to, they’re going to tell us in one sentence or one video 30 seconds long, they’re going to tell us what they’re going to do and they’re going to tell us how they’re going to know that they’ve gotten there.

Not how are they going to prove it to us, but how are they going to know? Those would be examples of how that would work out.

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: I just want to offer that, so we see these narratives on the left-hand side and anyone can respond to any of them, but how do you start to use language that transforms those?

That language, like how nonprofits don’t know how to run well. Well, why? Do they have the capacity to interrogate that? Why? Or could the narrative be that nonprofits are under-resourced, generally speaking, and they need resources that aren’t available to the other ones? Strictly programmatic, changing the asset.

Nadia Brigham: I love the transformational moves that you guys are making.

I want to say this, not to put anybody on the spot, but, someone is directly messaging me and talking back to me. Let me know if this is helpful and if you’ve figured out a way of putting your piece out there.

So then the question why do you only have, what do you believe about what you don’t have? Right? Why do you believe you only have what currently exists? Those are the kinds of questions that’ll get you to the transformative side. What do you believe about, say, we only have a certain amount of money?

Why do you believe you only have that certain amount of money? Say you don’t believe that you have, like, you don’t have enough diversity. Why? What do you believe about the people who aren’t currently a part of your circle?

I truly believe, yes, not the socially acceptable things that we say to ourselves about what we believe or the things that are acceptable for us to say out loud about what we believe, but what do we truly believe about other people? Do we believe that I just don’t know them, so I’m afraid or I’m uncomfortable? Or, you know, do we believe that there’s a threat to ourselves or what we’re trying to accomplish?

We’re pulling that thread about love. When we say we know what’s best for the community, how are we honoring the love that they have for themselves and they have for their own community?

Kelsey Barowich: In that vein, I would love to share an example. So before joining Philanthropy Together, I worked for an organization that was doing stimulus redistribution. We were essentially a cohort of grassroots leaders that brought together nonprofits and anchor institutions, like organizations that weren’t 501(c)3 status.

And we had a specific formula, right, where we would ask them what they were trying to raise, where they were to their goal, and we would try to distribute all of our funds with an abundance mindset, recognizing that our community is going to come through to fund these organizations.

Originally in the starting days of this fund, we did have specific ideas about the way those funds had to be used. So we asked for organizations to just use it for direct aid, whether that was getting groceries and delivering those, or, you know, giving direct monies to their groups and their people. That was fine.

Then we had some grassroots groups that came to us who were like, we need our organizers to be able to pay rent. And they’re struggling with that right now. And the way this fund is set up, we can’t do that with this money, but that’s where this money makes the most sense for us. And when we met as a steering committee to discuss that in one of our final rounds, we just decided on unrestricted funding.

It aligns with our values. We trust these organizations. We know that whatever work you’re using it for, is going to go towards building back and addressing COVID needs, and we trusted that our donors expected that of us as well. I started as a donor and came onto that, so it was a really interesting conversation. But, you know, that’s an example of reproductive to transformative.

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: I’m sure there was a lot of tension in the conversations throughout that process.

Kelsey Barowich: Surprisingly, given the group, everybody was very like, yes, let’s do it. Let’s go. I think leading up to it, those were the conversations I wasn’t privy to. Sure, there were pieces of like, how do we make sure folks get what they need? Particularly since it was, this came up during the start of the pandemic, during lockdown. A lot of stress. A lot of these conversations start in moments of high stress like that.

Nadia Brigham: That’s tension.

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: All right, we are going to pull back from the Jamboard. We’re going to go back to the slides. We’re going to move forward. And all we want to offer here in the next 10 seconds is just as we move from discourse one, where we’re producing conversations, what you’ll see is that outcomes are no longer part of this model.

What you see is actions and the action is to listen and connect. And when we move towards discourse two, where we’re listening, because we’re asking more questions, deeper questions, we’re connecting differently. And we’re not reproducing what has been given to us, but we are questioning the status quo.

We do learning, listening, and there’s a deeper connection, and that’s our shift towards Discourse 2.

Nadia Brigham: So I hope to show, you know, in the first part, love as a radical tool, centering ourselves on love as the foundational way to be, and then giving you a discourse framework so that you can tell when the conversation is off course and moving you away from love as a radical tool, and when it’s moving you towards something that’s much more impactful.

That can happen at the production level or the technical level of your circle, if you will, the work that you all are doing together. But it can also happen at the relational level.  And so we, in our practice at Brigham Consulting, are always looking at how individuals are impacted by systems and vice versa.

It’s always like, what does this look like, systemically and structurally, but also what does this do to human relationships? So for us, we constantly use all of these frameworks for individuals,  and their relationships with the self and others, but also for the work that they’re trying to do in the world.

Okay. So if that isn’t clear, I just wanted to make that explicit because now we’re going to move into day-to-day practices around how to resolve tension. And we’re going to offer you a few elements, again, with the understanding that we center humanity and use love as a foundational and radical tool for engagement.

And so we want to offer you three different tools that can help you address conflict when it arises. And the first is one of the basics. We use this in our practice.

We use it day-to-day in our work. It’s called Conocimiento to Ubuntu. “Conocimiento” is loosely translated from Spanish to me, “to get to know.” And “Ubuntu” is Zulu, which means, loosely, “I am because you are.”

We create open spaces for each other to be. That home space that Mother Maya Angelou talks about, we’re trying to create those spaces so that we can be in a relationship with one another. Again, we are human beings, not human doings. And what we tend to be, or what we tend to do is treat human beings as a noun as opposed to a verb.

And so we forget the intention that it takes for us to act our way, and live our way into these spaces. Our belief is that the more we create space for us to get to know one another, the hope is that we begin to see each other as extensions of one another. Tied to love, the radical love tool. Can you see that connection?

The purpose of the practice of Conocimiento to Ubuntu is to build collective and deepen those relationships. It also acts as a reflective tool to sit with some discomfort and to explore further. But it’s also about listening, constructive listening in service of the person that is talking, listening to your body to see like, okay, that just hit a nerve.

What is that about? Where did that come from? Right? Reflective listening in terms of hearing and feeling, being a whole human being. Being a whole human being is critically important for us. And that means not discounting your emotions at the door, but bringing your whole self in. And then it’s also about believing in ourselves, but also believing in others.

And so the protocol that you’ll see will have that particular piece in it.

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: What we’re going to offer is yet another tool for you to use. And this is one of my favorite things, and it is developing community agreements. Oftentimes we come into a meeting and we have our agendas and we have our things, but we don’t talk about how we are going to be in that space with one another.

What is our engagement? How are we going to show up for one another? What does that mean? And when I first started using community agreements in all of our meetings that I knew were going to last a long time, or engagements that were going to last a long time, it offers people to bring their humanity into this space.

And it offers an opportunity for us to say how we’re going to show up for one another, what’s acceptable and what’s not. And it starts to set the culture for how you interact with one another and giving circles, like, that’s legacy work. So what is that culture that you’re setting now for when you’re no longer there and you’re just a donor to the giving circle or you’re not participating in the same way as you do?

And we have seen community agreements and like, again, you’re going to have a protocol that goes along that kind of tells you what to do and how to do it. But things like ELMO: “Enough already, let’s move on.” It’s a nice way to say, “Hey, we’re getting distracted. Let’s get back on course.”

Attending to power, who’s in the room? Who are they, and what are the dynamics there? How do we attend to that in that space? Bringing in your authentic self. Like there, there are different ways that you can go about it. And, you know, just being very clear and in the protocol, it’ll give you the directions to do it and the why, why it’s important, and how it can be useful.

One of the things that we want to make sure [you know] is that there’s a process to creating them, do it collectively, and that you’re engaging everyone into this, into the conversation.

And it might take a whole meeting session, but that’s okay. Please invest in it, because what it does is it not only helps you build deeper relationships with one another, it helps you build trust. So when you need to hold tension, you can go back to your community agreements and say, we trust one another and we’re doing this. And, we need to have tension in this space because of A, B, and C, and it allows you to have some framing to have some very critical conversation.

Nadia Brigham: So the third one, not to be confused with a giving circle, is a sacred circle.

A sacred circle is an ancient and cultural, purposeful circle. They’re indigenous, they’re ancient, and, traditionally, circles were held as a way for spiritual and cultural work to take place, including healing and handling tension. So it’s a space where all four dimensions of the self, the physical, the mental, the emotional, the spiritual, are at play and they’re welcome.

And it’s a space that represents, in many ways, no other space. There’s no other space like a sacred circle. Its purpose is to move us closer toward living with the fullness of what it means to be human, move us to wholeness and healing, and also move us collectively. And so, unless we transform the hearts and minds of how we relate to one another, we’ll find ourselves perpetuating this same harm of difference, or indifference, and separation.

And so you’ll see this in the protocol next slide, about, you know, what a sacred circle is. But what we wanted to do is kind of give you a picture of it, because it is so steeped in culture. And it is a place where anything could happen. Tears and songs – like, everything can happen in a sacred circle, and we don’t want people to walk away with whatever assumptions. We wanted to kind of provide some guidance and prime you for what it looked like.

And so again, the sacred circle is about bringing your whole self. It’s about inviting everybody. It’s about forming a certain actual circle. Identifying a circle keeper who has the role of ushering people or holding the space, which is different from a facilitator. The facilitator is trying to keep you on track for a particular program. The circle keeper is just trying to hold the space.

Acknowledge that it’s sacred. There’s an acknowledgment that this is not a meeting, this is not, you know, the boardroom. This is a sacred space for humanity. There’s usually some sort of a centerpiece. A lot of times it’s constructed of like, scarves, or something that’s woven because you’re trying to signify the weaving of people together, or the weaving of the different components of the self. And then there’s usually a talking stick that sort of garners people’s expressions.

Now there is nothing that sort of, I want to say “contains” the circle, but there might be a very, very general prompt, but once you have the talking stick, you go for, you know, for what’s on your heart or your mind, or in your spirit at the time, which could be unrelated to what’s happening for other people, what’s happening, why you guys came together.

It’s about creating space for everyone. Right? I’ve seen these done very well in traditional, New Mexican Chicano circles. I’ve been a part of Hawaiian circles. I’ve been a part of, I’m sorry, native Hawaiian circles. I’ve been a part of African American and African circles. I’ve not been a part of white circles. I’ve been a part of cross-racial circles, but not all white circles.

And because the majority of you on this call are white, yhe caution there is to just be, and you’ll see this called out in the protocol, just to be careful if you are holding this space about crossing the line into cultural appropriation, by perhaps aligning yourself with a teacher or someone who can support your learning in this space, okay? And your desire to make use.

We are backing our way into that. So all of the measures that we’ve shared with you are for preventative use. If you are intentional about relationships, you don’t get married first and then go back and develop a relationship. You develop a relationship and then decide what work you’re going to do together or how you’re going to do that work together.

So that’s why we decided to take this approach. Now the last thing I’ll leave you with because it’s just real, is like, okay, but what do I do when there is tension? What do I do when there’s conflict? And I just want to offer you just a few things.

The first is just to notice your body and your emotions during tension. Like, what is this about for you? Sometimes, I mean, Beca gave a great example about her and her husband. What am I holding? What’s the belief in the assumption I’m making? Sometimes it’s an assumption at the moment. Sometimes it’s a held belief that has something to do with when I was five.

So what is that? What’s coming up for you? And identify that. At the same time that you’re identifying the source of tension, which is often what we’re guided to do, we’re not as often guided to identify a source of power and love. We’re centering love. So what is our source of power and love that keeps you in it?

This person may have made you mad. But in that moment, hold on. I know he loves me. Let me get myself together. That’s your source of power and love. Assess what relational capital you have with the person and assess your cultural intelligence because oftentimes we’re missing each other because we’re from two different places.

We don’t say certain things. Like when you come from where I come from, you don’t just walk up and start talking. You say, good morning. How are you? That’s where I’m from. And if you do it some other kind of way, if you just start talking to me, I believe that you don’t care about me because that’s my belief system.

And in the same way that I have belief systems, the 72 people I come in contact with every day, they do too. And we start to clash because we haven’t said, you know what? I need to tell you something about me. As I was growing up, I hold this belief that blah-blah-blah. Then we allow the other person to say, oh, that’s interesting. Thank you for sharing that. I hold this. Now let’s come to some agreements that Beca shared about how we want to bring that together.

Orient yourself around your intention. Is your intention just to be right? Or is your intention to build a bridge, to be expansive? Call colleagues in for discussion. Don’t call people out. Call ’em in. Ask them if it’s the right time to call them in. Maybe today is not the day. I already lost the dog. My kids were late for school. The boss is asking for a deadline. Today is not the day to call me in, but let’s schedule a time for us to call each other and have this conversation.

And then focus on the goal, the ultimate goal of the collective work that you all are trying to get together and trying to do together.

Nadia and Rebeca closed the conversation with a few discussion questions for participants to use with their circles. These included:

• When there is tension, how does your giving circle handle it?
• Is there something from today that you will commit to trying?