Leila Tamari, This Place Works: I wanted to start by saying I’m particularly thrilled to be here because the topics we’re going to cover today around place and race are really deeply important to me and rooted in my lived experience. So it’s really an opportunity for me to share more of myself with you all. So I’m just really grateful that you’ll be here to listen and witness that.

Before we dive in, I just want to also start with a little bit more of a deeper acknowledgement and expanded acknowledgement, as I call it. And as I share, I would just love for each of you to really reflect on who and what and where you are acknowledging today. You don’t have to put it in the chat. I just want to invite you all to think and process as I move through it.

In terms of who I want to acknowledge, I have to start with Kelsey. And really thank you Kelsey, so much, for this opportunity to share and meet these amazing people, to be introduced to your wonderful community of practice. It’s a real privilege and honor, and I want to acknowledge you for giving me the opportunity to develop some of this thinking.

So thank you. I also really want to acknowledge Joelle Riffle and Kendra Danowski, because they really helped create the tool that we’re going to be working on today and using. And most importantly, I want to thank and acknowledge all of you because without you, I wouldn’t be doing this. If there’s no audience for it, then there’s no reason to create the thing.

So, really grateful for you showing up. In terms of the where, I want to acknowledge the place that I’m in and that is present day San Diego. It’s the place that’s been cared for by Kumeyaay people since time immemorial. And today it’s a major site of US imperialism and the military industrial complex, something we are all witnessing in real time right now as war continues to rage on. The US Navy is based here. I do live less than a mile from the fourth busiest land border crossing in the world. In the world, and that is the Tijuana-San Diego port of entry. And to continue in this spirit of acknowledgement, I want to dive in. We’re a small group and I just want to dive right into some reflection time for all of us.

For the next few minutes, Leila encouraged participants to respond to the prompt, “Think of a place where you have a meaningful connection that you can imagine moving resources to. Describe that place and why you feel connected to it.” 

Leila Tamari: And because we’re here talking about money, talking about giving circles and how to move money, think about a place that you can imagine moving resources to, not just a place you have a meaningful connection, but a place that you believe could benefit from receiving resources. As you’re thinking about this place, I want to reinforce what I mean by place.

I mean a geographic location: that could be a block, could be a neighborhood, could be a region. And as you’re sifting through your place Rolodex, you might be struggling to just focus on one place.

If that’s the case, try focusing on where there’s authentic connection. What do I mean by authentic connection? That could be a place you’re from, a place you’ve lived, maybe a place you’ve worked. Maybe it’s a place where family or loved ones are from or located. Now, just take a moment quietly to ground yourself in connection to that place.

Take about 30, 45 seconds.

Hopefully the place is in your mind now, and if not, maybe this next prompt will help you find it. I want you to start considering the stories of your place, the history, the histories that aren’t recorded. The events that took place there or take place there, and really try to engage all your senses. What do you remember seeing or hearing or tasting, touching, and what sticks out to you about this place?

I invite you to think about the feelings that live in that place, and think about, just notice what you’re feeling. Are you noticing any tension or hurt in those memories, or are the feelings really freeing and joyful, making you want to go back, back to that place?

And just sit with maybe one story or one memory, or one feeling.

For the next few minutes, participants shared their responses to the prompt.

Leila Tamari: Awesome. Well, let’s transition. I thank you so much for jumping right in with me, y’all. That was really, really powerful and great. Thank you for sharing your stories. I want to transition into what we’re going to do for the rest of the time together, what we’re not going to do, and I think then I’ll be able to give my little TED Talk portion of this, where I give my thoughts about why this is important.

So, congratulations. We’ve already kind of started on the first part of what we set out to do, which is to take stock of place. The tool that I’m going to be sharing with you all, it uses creative reflection and that’s how we’re going to be spending most of the time today.

So, similarly to having moments to ourselves to just reflect. I’ll play some music and then we’ll be able to share. In a little bit, I’m going to offer some connections between place and race, which I’m going to ground in my story. So, more of who I am, and I will also invite you all to reflect on some more questions about that.

And finally, we’re going to get to the money and I’m going to walk us through how we might start to do some high level strategy mapping to move from feeling to doing. But like I said, be prepared because we are going to be spending a lot of time in the feeling space and the mindfulness of it all.

In terms of what we’re not going to engage in today, but hopefully there will be a part two for all of this and continued relationship with all of you. A lot of what we do, what we’re going to cover today, is the what, and we’re not going to get to the how, which is very important in terms of how you do this work.

But what’s different today is that we’re not doing deep dives on how to implement a place-based approach to move money. We’re here to understand how we have to really embody a certain skill set that this work requires. And I’ll share what I think some of those are, but this isn’t the training for that.

This isn’t the training where you’re developing those muscles. It’s more just for me to allude to what I think is important. This is also not the place where we’re going to be able to workshop ideas, about what you’re giving circles already doing around the place or what more they could do. But, TPW, This Place Works, my consulting business, is available to consult with you on all of that. But that’s just not the work we’re going to do today in this webinar.

Before we move into a deeper dive on place and race, I also just want to make sure we’re going over some agreements. We are a small group today, so I think it will still be relevant and we will see how much we rely on this.

I created this visual as a reminder that working agreements are actually centered around care, so you’ll see that in the center of these concentric circles. And care is really just as much about ourselves as it is others. So that’s why you’ll see “protecting our energy” is at the center of the circle.

And what I mean by that is, just do what you need to support you. It’s as simple as that. Take your bio breaks, get your water, stretch, get off camera. Do you protect your energy?

The next ring, the intentions portion, which is surrounding care, is really just to be present and forthcoming in this space. So you’re all really busy people, but you chose to be here on this call today. And since you’re here, I just hope you’ll give yourself the gift of presence. And in the spirit of being forthcoming, if something happens in the space that doesn’t work for you, please just share. You can share with me first.

And if you want to just type in the chat, or when we’re in a moment, we can definitely do this. No problem. And finally in the outermost circle, we have the ways we’re going to act on the intentions and care we established. We’re going to begin by listening deeply to what folks are saying. That’s what “one diva, one mic” means. Whoever has the mic, we’re giving them the attention. And then if we want to speak out loud, I actually don’t think we’re really going to need this because we’re a small group. But normally what I encourage for larger groups is that when we want to speak, we just say “stack” in the chat.

And that way we can keep an order and know, and I don’t have to look for who’s about to speak or who’s turning off their mute. We can still do it, but I also believe that we can manage being the small group that we are. So, we’ll try both ways or we’ll see what works.

And then, content warnings are very important. If you’re going to bring up anything that relates to violence, please just let us know. People can be very triggered by that, and we wouldn’t want to harm anybody, so just give people, we’re going to just put violence content warnings in the chat, or we’re going to say out loud, “Hey, about to talk about violence.” And really allow for like 10 full seconds for people to transition and think about if they want to receive it or if they want to go on mute or not listen.

And then finally we’re just going to maintain confidentiality. That’s what’s meant by taking the lessons, not the stories. Okay. So what we share here today is between the five of us. And because we’re limited in time. I know we’re a small group, but we’re already limited in time. So I’m just, I’m not going to workshop these with you. I’m just going to ask you to, for your trust in this, and we’re going to move forward. I hope that’s okay. Nods, great. Thank you so much. All right.I never underestimate this portion when bringing people together, because we don’t all know each other, so thank you for giving us the space.

All right, well, why am I talking to you today about the place? It has to do with these maps. These maps show you where my family is from and my ancestors are from places that have changed very significantly over 500 years.

In my family, we were colonizers, we were settlers, and we were slaves. And from an early age, I really struggled to reconcile all of those roles, and how my body was a manifestation of both colonizer and colonized identities. So I turned to maps because they gave me a language that I could understand and a language I could point to when I was explaining who I was.

I love that maps weren’t static, that they could visualize the passage and history of time all in one. And ultimately, they helped me better understand just who I was and they were an entry point for my interests in place and in belonging. My current understanding of place is visualized in this very simple diagram.

It’s where the natural and the built environment interact with people and systems. So place is different from location or coordinates because it’s not just about geography. It’s about how we as humans create ways to belong or not belong, which all of you have shared, in one way or another. And it was in the same way that we just reflected and described the places that were meaningful to us.

They were meaningful, not just because of the buildings that were there, but because of our experiences, right? Yeah. More to say about that, but I think some of these examples can do justice to also further explain what we mean by place. Because place can tell us a lot about who belongs, or not. And it can tell us a lot about who is still being harmed. And we know that oppression manifests in the built in natural environment. It exists in what Kelsey, you already alluded to, in redlining and things like highway expansion and urban renewal, inequitable infrastructure pollution, climate injustice, and so much more.

Thank you so much for dropping the link to this article where literally we saw how race was mapped onto place, in COVID. We’ve also just heard that zip codes determine life expectancy, and we know that families choose alternative mailing addresses to get their children into well-performing and well-resourced schools.

Places are like mirrors in that way. They reflect what is in and around them. I also included a quote from our dear Angela Glover Blackwell, who will be at the We Give Summit: “Where we live determines whether we have access to high-quality schools, good jobs, banks, healthy food, and reliable, affordable transportation. Although laws prohibit many of the overtly discriminatory policies of my youth, address continues to be a proxy for race. Patterns of racial segregation of decades past overlap almost completely with patterns of poverty and opportunity today.”

Just this idea that address continues to be a proxy for race, that these things are totally connected, is important.

So how does this connect to money? What does this have to do with money? Lately I’ve been really curious about how the system or tool of money can be used to create belonging or not in relationship to place. And there is a new movement or trend to create micro reparation strategies, as a way to address previous harms, particularly racism.

Kelsey’s going to share some articles for further investigation around each of those I refer to here and another one as well. But between the land back movement, gifting home ownership, and many other strategies, people are thinking about how to move money with repair. And I believe that money is an excellent tool for these reparative ventures, but money in and of itself is not a means to an end.

I believe we need to move the conversation from the movement of money being the goal to transformation being the ultimate destination. And that’s really why I’m interested in place, because place can be a tangible way for us to connect to each other and find belonging, and reconciliation and ultimately transform.

So that’s the spirit I’m entering into this conversation with. And now we’re going to turn reflection mode on back to all of you all. Now would be a really good time to get something to write with as I share another resource with you all.

During the next exercise, Leila played some background music while the participants responded to the following: “Place is a wide angle lens that helps us see the fullness of life. Recall the experiences that define your place. Draw a map of who – and what – defines your place. When drawing the map of your place – don’t worry about accuracy; instead focus on lived experiences, stories, what you know about this place’s history and where it is located.” 

When the drawing time ended, Leila asked participants to rank the exercise on a scale of one to five, with one being “the most difficult” and five being “breezy and fun.” One participant, who regularly draws, ranked the exercise as a five. Another person gave it a one, because they didn’t feel like they “belonged” to the place they were drawing. 

Leila Tamari: Thank you so, so much for sharing all you did, because everything you’re talking about is exactly the questions and the thoughtfulness that is needed to do this kind of work. So you realize all of these things and notice like, what is my connection to this place? Or what is the lack of my connection to this place? It’s like you did the webinar already! So thank you, for bringing up all of those things, and I think that is so valuable to hear like, ooh, this was not easy.

Because when something is not easy, it forces you to reckon with, like, is this a place? What is my connection there, and how does that either need to change and evolve? Or how do I find a connection to another place? So you’re asking really, really good questions and I’m really excited to dig deeper. You’re totally doing this right, just so you know.

Wow, you all are such wonderful people. I’m so grateful for how you’re sharing and showing up. There’s a second part to this exercise, and it’s a really hard part of the exercise. For some of you, actually, for some of you this might be really easy, and for some of you it might be really hard.

We’re here because this is about racial equity, in a community of practice. We’re all here because we’re interested in what race and the place and money all have to do with each other. And so this next exercise is asking us to add some layers.

Some of us were talking about how we’re not really connected to our place, where we don’t feel a sense of belonging, but there certainly are aspects of racism that exist in the built environment. And others were talking about how we do feel super connected to this place that might even in some ways feel idyllic, or was this an incredible experience for us?

And so it’s going to be interesting to see how this exercise, what it brings up for all of you, because sometimes the ways that racism layers onto communities is not always totally visible by the eye.

Because sometimes we have to think about displacement and who’s no longer in the place. Like, what are the things that we don’t always see the results of? So I’m going to ask us to be really imaginative here.

During the next exercise, Leila once again put on music while participants reflected on a prompt:

“Place reveals where people experience harm, or care. Locate the sites of racism in your place. Refer to the map you drew on the previous page – mark where racism has done harm in your place. On this page – for each mark you made, describe those harms and who has been impacted.” 

Leila Tamari: I know that was not enough time. I just want to acknowledge that. And there’s a few other things I want to get to, so before we close today, I just want to invite everybody to take a breath. Recognizing and addressing harm in place can be really difficult. I don’t want to take that for granted.

You don’t have to speak out loud if you don’t want to, but maybe just chat so I could see, if you could not locate any racism on your map, if you put like a zero, could you just basically type the number of places you marked? If you marked zero, put zero in the chat. If you marked one, put one, two, so on.

So, normally when folks might put a zero, it might be because they’re unseen things that they’re not like accounting for. But you all are sitting present with that. So, thank you for noticing and acknowledging that. That means you’re already doing some good work, honestly.

I know that we are coming up on time and there are a few things I want to get to. We’re not going to be able to do the rest of the exercises today, but this, it’s perfect because this is just a starting place for you all. I want to go through the rest of what this tool is, just walk you through it, and then I want to go back and tie everything together for you before we close.

So, the next part of this is really about how we move money. And I don’t want us to take for granted like all the things that we did. We can’t get to the question about how to move money until we really investigate these questions about place. So that’s what I’m trying to model for you all.

This is like a money wheel, essentially, and there are three wedges. The first one here builds off of the exercise we just did. So y’all put three or more. And then, the hard thing that you have to do in some ways is narrowing down. A lot of folks want to do everything. The problems are so big and expansive and we can’t put our arms around them.

And what this tool is asking you to do at this stage is just to try to focus on one for now. You could essentially do multiple by doing this exercise for each area of impact, but start with one and really reflect on the map, reflect on the areas that you marked, and then what you would do is, just see which ones you gravitate to.

What comes up for you feeling-wise? And notice that, and notice that when you’re choosing. Once you choose the area of impact, what the next step the money wheel asks you to do is to identify where resources are already flowing in that particular direction, thinking about the networks of care and support that already exist.

Who are the informal groups, the institutions, all the folks who are doing that? And I ask you to do that because that is part of, that’s honestly part of community organizing work and what giving circles can do too. They’re organizing principles in and of themselves. And then, the idea is once you’ve done some of that research, once you understand who your people are, who you want to gather and walk alongside, you can see, “Hey, do I want to add to those efforts? Or are we noticing that there’s some gaps? And can the resources of my giving circle address those gaps? Or do they want to bolster the efforts that people are already doing?”

And that’s a choice point for you to make, that you could identify, and then allow you to move the money to that area. So this is like a high level strategy map. The next page is really just a workspace for you to be able to do that if you print it out or decide to work in it. And I know I mentioned that we wouldn’t get to the how in this webinar, but I just wanted to share a high level assessment tool to reflect on some of the prerequisites that are needed for this work.

I just really want to stress the point that I think it’s very important for us to shift the conversation from the movement of money being the goal to transformation being the ultimate destination. And the only way we’re going to do that is if we focus on the values and our growth areas.

This part of the tool really helps you get to that. But there is so much to unpack here. Every single one of these points could literally be a webinar in and of itself, and a lifelong practice.

So we just went through this process, beginning to figure out how to fund in a place, and in order to tie everything together, I want to talk about what I perceive to be the benefits and the challenges of a place-based approach and why I think it makes sense for giving circles. And I want to start with the synergy between giving circles and place-based approaches.

You all already know this, but giving circles are rooted in relationships and similarly trying to make the connection. I’m trying to make the connection, right, that if we center care in our work, if we center community organizing and all of these things, our place-based approaches are also rooted in relationships.

Right? In some ways, I’m kind of just saying that authentic relationships are a prerequisite for funding in place, in the same way that they are for having a great giving circle. Because giving circles are rooted in relationships, accountability has to be front and center in how you do your business. And when you give money in a place, you have a shared stake in that place.

And with that becomes a shared sense of responsibility and of course accountability. And I see that value being held in giving circles. Absolutely. You all are in community with each other and figuring out how to cooperate, which requires a lot of self-reflection, a lot of self-accountability, in your actions.

Not easy work, but you’re ready. Which is good because it’s like, oh, you’re already doing the hard work, in some ways. I’ll also offer that the earliest versions of giving circles were born out of necessity and ultimately self-determination. So, the concept of ujima I bring up here, which is around collective work and responsibility, that’s what giving circles thrive on. They thrive on distributed leadership and interdependence.

And there is a connection to place-based approaches here through things like community organizing, and funding a place. Kind of what you were saying around systems change, like all of that work happens in place, and funding in place can be a pathway to fund the grassroots people power that is rooted in these principles of ujima.

There are a number of ways that choosing a place-based approach will help you reach your racial equity goals. We talked about a lot of that today. We even tried to embody some of that, and fostering belonging. One of the first things you talked about is probably, I think, one of the greatest and sometimes underrated aspects of racial equity work, honestly.

I personally have been really moved by Ida Miriam Davis. She founded Decolonized Design and created the Belonging, Dignity, Justice and Joy Framework. It’s an alternative to the DEI – diversity, equity, inclusion – framework and Ida shows us that belonging really goes hand in hand with dignity.

And I add, of course, my own layer to this because I think that place is one of the first units of belonging that we experience as humans. Of course, I’m biased. I told you my story and why I believe that, and I’d argue further though, that our lack of connection to a place is not accidental.

It’s really rooted in the story of settler colonialism. It’s really rooted in racialized capitalism, which are all things that need to break if we are going to in fact break racism. And I believe that the work that we need to do around decolonizing or re-indigenizing needs to take into account our connection to the place, absolutely.

And I believe that if we do that, we can of course accelerate our sense of belonging, connection to others, and move towards reconciliation and all of that good stuff, which we’ve got to do. I also think that place is a container for shared experiences that are multidimensional. I kind of shared this already when I was talking about a place being a container that holds so much.

But if we start with the big container as opposed to the sector – like education, for instance, I’m just picking that randomly – we’re able to see a fuller picture of a whole individual, of a whole community. Place is a way to see that fuller picture. And to go even further, I think, place is a way for us to shift from hyper specialization, which also has its roots in white supremacy culture.

Using a wider angle lens to witness people’s whole lives can really encourage us to just think more out of the box. Right? And it’s again, related to some of these re-indigenizing practices that I am referencing. My thinking of this has also been very much shaped by Aph Ko, an incredible thinker and new media scholar.

She talks about doing un-disciplinary thinking, because she talks about the disciplines themselves being colonized, which is super interesting. I didn’t share resources with you, Kelsey, to share with the group about these two incredible women. But I can, and you can also just share their names and Google them so we can follow up on that.

Finally, I believe why else there’s a really high reward for engaging place, because it offers a pathway to transformation. The transformation happens for the person giving, not just the person receiving. I think that’s really valuable. I think that might be missing in other approaches.

Okay, this is all great, but then also, like, it’s so hard, so I don’t want to gloss over that. I’m not saying this because I don’t want to encourage people to do this. Of course I do, but I think it’s very important to be real, because with high reward comes high risk. If relationships become sticky or tense, and things don’t pan out how you like, how are you going to show up? How will others show up? You can’t control that.

I just want to acknowledge that it can be really painful and painstaking work. Because of that, it requires a lot of commitment, in both time and energy, and patience. You know? This is not work that happens overnight at all, by any means. And the truth is, a lot of people don’t want to do the hard work of transformation.

And that’s not a judgment, honestly. Like, life is hard enough. I really mean that. Life is really hard enough. But I think it’s important to note that this is not the easy path. Living our values is hard because we don’t have our society that doesn’t like to help us value making mistakes, for instance.

So that’s why the work is also hard and makes it even harder. Nonetheless, I think the reward is so worth it, it can be really worth it, for what you go through with transformation.