Triangle Community Projects

Why track what I'm working on publicly?

Well, since folks that might be keeping track of these projects might find similar stuff to connect up about and support, for one. But also, I know I personally have really benefitted from hearing about victories in change work. I feel like folks I know, well, especially young folks like me, often have battled isolation in doing change work. Community to protect against burn out is essential. But what's weird, to me, is that the only models of change work that I feel like I've seen in public involve people sacrficing themselves for the "good" of some movement. Or that change necessarily means violence. Sometimes, I feel like that's true. But I've been lucky enough to meet a number of mentors who are older, and who have life stories of change that demonstrate that you can be a sustainable organizer... at least, it's possible for some. I'd like it to be possible for me.

To do that, I find that I need to hear folks celebrate positive change publicly, involving real stories and real relationships. More and more, change work I've been lucky enough to see or be a part of has two facets - strategy, real human one-on-one relationships, and personal introspection work. I can't say all change comes from that... but since I benefit from hearing documented public stories, that are real and involve real people... not just the soundbtyes...I'll offer up the same as a way to keep folks in my network up to speed on what i'm putting energy into.

How do I choose what to work on?

Usually, organicly. That is, projects just sorta fall in my lap (and often, simultaneously, in the laps of others too). I'm a baby organizer - I've barely been at this very long at all - but more and more I love love love people. I once read a Cesar Chavez quote that told the story of an organizing training he gave over a number of days to some youth. They spent the first few days training deeply just on how to talk to one person. After a few days into it, a young person asked him "so, I'm really enjoying this practice on talking to one person, relationships and all that. But when we do we start the real work of organizing?" "This is the real work of organizing," he was reputed to have said. So a lot of these things started from conversations.

Also, part of the personal values I try to embody as much as possible is to see oppressions as systems: a web of racism, homophobia, classism, sexism, ablism, agism, etc., that goes beyond the obvious into the incredibly subtle, and ties the different ISMS together. But, both as an organizer and as a Buddhist, I feel I have experienced that gross and subtle reality is tied together, much closer than may be first apparent - without the subtle things, there would not be the gross manifestations of this ugly stuff. In Thich Nhat Hanh's words, these things "inter-are." That both makes the ISMS frighteningly visible everywhere, in the words of a speaker in the Color of Fear documentary "in the air you breathe"... and makes "next steps", in myself or in communities, much more approachable and meaningful.

Also, I don't assume I'm doing the best work out there at all. Ideally, I'd like to play a small but important role in greater change...and ideally, I'd like to develop my personal change work so that community changework comes out of that. I make mistakes, I lay unchecked privilege all over the place, and it's a mess - folks call me into account for it, which I appreciate (even if I sometimes lamely resist).

Current Project List

Here's what I've got goin' right now. If one of these things is interesting to you, drop me a line and I'll let you know more about it... I still haven't quite figured out how to best onlinify (yeah, that's a word. really!) the summary of these things, but for now at least they're updated. For projects I've blogged about (just a few at this point) check my blog posts with 'community projects' as their tag.