Category: General

I am involved with organizations that are always striving to support people growing more skills for making the world more aligned with values of justice and mutuality. We’re figuring out ways to make decisions together and share resources together and everything else it takes to build the social conditions we want. One part of this work is shedding the baggage of what we’re told in a racist, colonial, patriarchal society counts as “leadership.” That model is usually about individuality, competition, and domination. We are imagining and working to practice other ways of leading. I made a chart that I hope is a handy discussion tool in organizations that are thinking about how to live their values. I think it might go well paired with this chart I posted before about qualities of organizational cultures.

Leadership Qualities Supporting Mutuality vs. Hierarchy

Ways to use this chart:

1. Write or talk in your group about what is missing from these lists.
2. Circle qualities you see in yourself that you are working to cultivate and grow. What might help them grow?
3. Circle qualities you see in yourself that are challenging or don’t fit your values. What helps you move toward not acting out of those qualities? Where did you learn those qualities? How did they serve you? How did they get in the way of what you want or believe in?
4. Notice qualities that are prevalent in organizations you are in. What could help cultivate the ones you think are beneficial and reduce the ones that are harmful?

The Queer Trans War Ban toolkit has been updated for 2019 with new designs by JB Brager and Chris Vargas. Go and print them out and do outreach in at queer and trans events in your town this summer!

In recent years, I have been spending more of my time helping organizations doing work I care about (mostly work to end borders, police and prisons) to build their organizational infrastructure to make it work and prevent conflicts that can tear us apart. In the course of that, we often have conversations about what the organizational culture is like now, its strengths and challenges, and what they want it to be like. This semester, at the end of my Poverty Law class when we were exploring critiques of the non-profit structure and alternatives, I made a little chart to help my students think about the structures of organizations they have been part of, and to stimulate discussion of how we build organizational culture that benefits the work we are trying to do. These days I am enjoying sharing more bits and pieces of early drafts of things and things that may never be further developed here, so here is this thing!

Continue reading “Organizational Culture Chart”

In case it is useful, here is a repost of an article I wrote for Radical Teacher some years back about pronouns and about how we talk about purportedly gendered body parts.

Jen Manion’s thoughtful and provocative essay, The Performance of Transgender Inclusion: The pronoun go-round and the new gender binary, proposes that having participants in group spaces identify their pronouns to each other causes more harm than good. I disagree. For almost two decades, I have been working to address the harm and exclusion that trans people face that lead to astounding rates of poverty, criminalization, deportation, and interpersonal violence. I agree with Jen that there is a lot of work to be done to address these injustices, and that engaging in practices aimed at helping people refer to each other respectfully in group settings is one small part of this work. I do not agree that it is more harmful than beneficial, or that it has run its course and can be discarded.

Continue reading “We Still Need Pronoun Go-Rounds”