How small experiments move us from grief to a joyful path forward

“Grief is one of the most beautiful and difficult ways we love. As we grieve, we feel our humanity and connection to each other.  Building the path from this heartbreaking present to a future where we center our collective existence in love and care is where we come in.”

--adrienne maree brown, “An Emergent Strategy Response to Mass Shootings

How are you?

In the United States, we’ve just commemorated Independence Day – which, as so many have pointed out, may feel ironic and painful given recent mass shootings and the Supreme Court’s attack on reproductive rights, climate change, gun control and many other freedoms.

One of The Ross Collective’s key principles of leading conversations is to name what is in the room, Zoom or otherwise.  There is no question that this -- grief and despair -- is in the room for many of us and the leaders we’re working with right now.

Once we’ve named and felt what is in the room, how do we find a path forward? adrienne maree brown says that “grief reminds us of our humanity and connection to one another.” And from there, there is a path that “centers our collective existence.” In other words, we can use our grief as a way to be more connected to all humans and all living creatures.

In this hard moment, we are finding the path forward through joy, and we wanted to share that with you.
 
Small experiments to find a path forward:

One path of joy has been teaching a new course on nonprofit consulting at Cal State University East Bay.

The course shares some exercises and guidelines for building a consulting practice, including leaning in to your strengths, clarifying one’s ideal client and services, and networking and finding support.

Our students, most of whom hadn’t started consulting yet, had one big question: “How do I start?”

So in the second session (this evening!) we’ll talk about the power of small experiments. Here is the exact assignment we’ll be giving our students:

1. Find three to five people who do the kind of consulting you would like to do, which may be strategy, facilitation, organizational development, evaluation, fundraising or human resources.

2. Request a 20-minute networking/learning conversation.

3. In this conversation, find out:

   1. What were some first steps they took to do this work?

   2. How did they find clients?

   3. What is one step you can take now to start consulting?

4. Once the students have conducted these conversations, the last part of the assignment is to put those steps – which are small experiments – on one’s calendar and do them, then reflect on what happened.

We sometimes feel that we can’t see a path toward our goal, but small experiments create little successes that we can analyze and build on. The path to consulting – and justice – is built with many small stones. We need to move beyond sitting with fear – or paralysis – and to start placing the stones, one by one.
 

Expanding racial equity and belonging as a cross-race team: 

Last week Christal M. Cherry and I led a webinar for Network for Good on Building Belonging on Boards, which was an hour of joy. The webinar had almost 250 attendees, participants were engaged with the content, and the webinar got rave reviews.

One participant said it was the best webinar they had attended so far! Another shared: “Honestly, it was great. Speakers that are super knowledgeable and having a blast = joyful learning.”

If you missed it and you want to take some time to learn and be inspired, you can watch the replay here.

During the session, Christal and I shared four questions that we are using with boards to move them and their organizations towards greater belonging. In the future, we’ll be sharing more about the questions we use in our training to build racially just organizations. We have begun writing a book about how we’re leading conversations with boards as a cross-race team.

Our work – leading these conversations – started as small experiments. Now we have a fair number of stones along the path of our work together. It feels audacious – in these times, how could we write a book on racial equity? Is there anything more to say? Yet every time we lead a session, as we did last week, the feedback we get is that these conversations are so needed and people want to hear more. The bottom line is that we feel energized and get a sense of meaning from this work.

So...how are you? And what stones are you placing right now on our shared path to justice?