Any podcast with Kelly Hayes is worth a listen: her voice is like silk, her insights are brilliant, and her empathy is radiant. Her podcast, Movement Memos, is one of my favorites of the 30 or more podcasts that I listen to every week. Kelly talks openly and honestly about how hard the work of change really is.
Her episode titled From Burnout to Breakthroughs, Weary Organizers Can Come Back Stronger is one of her best. I have been feeling worn out, even burned out. At the beginning of the show she talks about how there are seasons to our work. We have seasons of summer when the energy is full-out. And we have seasons of winter, when we hibernate, recuperate, and regroup. This described my current state of mind precisely.
But the real gem of the episode came at the end of the show when she talked with her guest about the different ways that we engage in social change. Here is a quick and crude attempt at an understanding of what they said:
We need to see our work not as isolated activities that often appear at odds with one another but as an ecology of change happening across the spectrum.
Then her guest went on to beautifully articulate five different types of ways people engage in social change.
1. Personal transformation: If you change individuals, or change yourself, then you are changing the world. This a lot of what we are trying to do here at Feeding the Compassionate Wolf.
2. Alternative institutions: Building an alternative. Building a cooperative. Building a different way of embodying our values in the world. The solidarity economy. Worker cooperatives.
3. Dominant institutional change: People engaged in changing the dominant institutions — e.g. regulation, markets, rights, etc. This kind of work to change dominant institutions takes on three flavors:
- Inside game: People lobbying and advocacy from within the system to make change from within the systems of power. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues in “The Squad” are wonderful examples.
- Community organizing: Trying to organize people to build a constituency, build power, build leverage against elected officials or against the system to get their needs met. Kelly (the host) is a community organizer. Barack Obama was a community organizer. BLM is, in a way, a movement aimed at community organizing.
- Mass Protest: Taking to the streets — mass strikes, protest, demonstrations.
All of these forms of engagement take a different shape. Any successful change movement is an embodiment of all of these systems of change. Unfortunately, people active in one system often become antagonistic towards people using other tactics. When they all collaborate with one another they become greater than the sum of their parts.
