The Heat
"Do you know what the secret of life is? It's people who change people."
I’ll tell you the truth, my favorite days are the ones where your internal body temperature and the air temperature are almost the same, a hundred degrees, a breeze, sweat blowing off you. They are the days when the barrier between you and the everything almost disappears, a feeling of having given over all of you to the air, and in that heat, anything can happen. This feeling will come back later.
The quote at the top came from Zeyba Rahman, program officer for the Doris Duke Foundation, quoting a 6 year-old boy, Jibran in a recent presentation on working with undocumented and at-risk artists at the recent Americans for the Arts convention. It was the capping quote to a week where I had spent the Wednesday morning sitting on the keynote panel for the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Leadership Conference, flown to Denver for an IdeaLab event with the amazing Youth on Record crew, and then been part of the AFTA convention. It was a week of professional highs and led into week following full with hosting a poetry reading for World Refugee Day, board meetings, and an open house and community celebration of Springboard for the Arts’ new building at 262 University Avenue West. This has been a breathless time, rolling forward.
Before the MCN Leadership Conference, I had shared that I would be on the panel, and someone had commented that they were excited to hear my thoughts, which, to be fair, I was too. In a panel conversation there are an infinite number of thoughts to share and directions to go, and the best part of a conversation with authentic, genuine leaders like the other panelists – Adair Mosley, president and chief executive officer, Pillsbury United Communities; Angie Miller, executive director, Community Action Duluth; Liwanag Q. Ojala, chief executive officer, CaringBridge; and Sook Jin Ong, director, Future Services Institute, Humphrey School of Public Affairs – is to have a chance to listen.
We had been asked to speak about what real community engagement looks like and how to lead with that frame, and there were a great number of practical points around keeping accessible hours, paying people and supporting them through food, childcare, and other needs that stop people from engaging. There were aspirational self-care goals – both Miller and Ojala don’t have work email on their phones – and inspirational stories about stepping up to the challenge of leading. But the thing that has sat with me the longest was a quote from Mosely, himself paraphrasing another leader – “We have two things to offer people living at the margins; our hubris or our humility.” Our hubris is in telling people what they need, our humility is in accepting the stories and knowledge of people, and trusting their ability to tell you what they need. There is a great concept from Augusto Boal’s theater and therapy practice about respecting the reality of the protagonist – that even if you do not believe what someone is telling you is real, you must acknowledge that they are perceiving and feeling it, and therefore it is real to them, therefore you must acknowledge it in their reality.
The two things that I had really wanted to include in the conversation, and made sure that I did, were also around openness and humility. With Anthony Bourdain’s suicide still raw, I wanted to make sure that I mentioned one of the themes around many of the memorials and tributes to the chef, that he was able to do what he did in his storytelling, and especially in his cross-cultural television work, because he was knew that he didn’t know it all, because he’d go to the kitchen and listen to grandmas, honoring their skills and knowledge, and listen deeply, taking the stories and troubles of immigrants, refugees, disempowered people seriously, and amplify those stories. We would do well by showing up in the same way, and by kicking it with grandmas.
The corresponding thought as was a quote from artist Nicole Lavelle's profound article, CODES AND QUESTIONS FOR ANYONE WHO GOES ANYWHERE, “Community is necessarily emergent. It can’t be made by outside forces. It can’t be manipulated by ingenuity. It must rise up.” I love this notion of community as continually emerging, that it is not a fixed point or place or time, but something that people are continually in the process of developing, sharing, and understanding.
That emergent sense of replenishment was underscored in Denver when the artist Sol Guy was speaking about his practice. He’s a film-maker, artist, producer – you’ve most likely seen his collaboration with the French artist JR featuring a little child peering over the wall at the US-Mexico border. In his talk, he said, “I work in cultural currency and not financial currency, and cultural currency is something you cannot possess, but increases through giving away.”
That giving is what I come back to when I think about how leadership and community should work. It is what I find inspiring in so many of my colleagues and peers, in this rising generation of executive directors, organizers, and politicians, in the politics of joy. That the approach to the work is based in giving and doing together as a way to grow power, not taking and holding on to consolidate it. It’s also no surprise to me that so many of these inspirational leaders are women, and women of color, who have historically been excluded from the closed-fisted hierarchies of power. It’s a recognition that instead of generating just enough heat to keep ourselves warm, we can come together to really set the world alight.
A little while ago I tried an experiment, as a way to test out some professional development and insight. I designed a survey with a couple questions – Based on what you know of him, what is Carl's super (or secret) power? What is something that Carl has been a part of or done that is meaningful to you? Anything else? Stuff you don't like about Carl? – and shared it via my social media networks. I believe in the power of weak ties and loose connections, and this was an attempt, in an anonymous way, to get some feedback from those ties. Obviously, there is a bias from people self-selecting in, which tended to be people who would have something to say about me, and so the overall tone was incredibly supportive and positive, although I did have a category for “Mortal Enemy” just in case.
What I was struck and heartened by were the number of people who mentioned connections they had made through me, or who appreciated the transparency and stories I shared, how it helped them see themselves in new ways, or connect to their own values. As I’ve been on a 10 year journey navigating addiction and sobriety, as I’ve tried to develop as a formal and informal organizational leader, as I’ve worked through parenthood and relationships, I’ve tried to find the best ways to be open, as the quickest way to connect. You can’t take from me anything that I would give to you, and so at high points and at low points, I will try to say to you, this is what it is, this is where I am, and let you have that.
If you haven’t watched Hannah Gadsby’s brilliant and brave special Nanette on Netflix, stop reading this now, and go do that. If you have, maybe this is also resonating with you as it has with me, Gadsby’s observations that we give power to the parts of our stories that we focus on. Which is absolutely true, and yet we also get power from what we give away, and from what we share. Gadsby’s enormously powerful storytelling has created power for her to focus on her own story in a way that won’t resolve the tension for you, but sits with the responsibility to listen to the story.
Giving the story away creates power for others to see themselves reflected back, not in facile ways, but in ways that are profound and mundane and epiphanies all at once. That’s the fire in the storytelling, that’s the light coming in through the cracks. That’s the heat, that makes us feel like we’re one, the secret of life, the changing of ourselves and other people.