Click HERE to download a full-color 6 page PDF of this issue of the newsletter.
Notes from the Director
Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise, what is the use of seeing?
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Dr. Liza Rankow
Our guest author for this issue, Nicole Lee, writes about her own process of seeing and acting that led to the founding of an innovative Oakland-based youth leadership project called Urban Peace Movement. Her "three dimensional" model of social change creates the foundation for authentic transformation from the inside-out. I hope that after reading her article you will visit the UPM website to learn more about their work.
SUSTAINING THE SOUL OF ACTIVISM
Support groups continue on the second Sunday afternoon (4-6PM) and fourth Monday evening (7-9PM) of each month. Upcoming dates include: June 28, July 11 & 26, August 8 & 23. (See our Classes and Events page for details.) And this summer we will be presenting our "Sustaining the Soul of Activism (and Activists)" introductory workshop for a number of Oakland-based organizations. Please see the article below to meet the newest member of our team, Emmanuelle Regis.
TRANSFORMATIVE VISIONS 2011
We are pleased to announce the receipt of a grant from the FAITHS program of the San Francisco Foundationin support of Transformative Visions 2011. Look for the call for visual art and spoken word submissions coming out in November, and the event in the spring. Meanwhile visit our Transformative Visions web pages for photos and video of past events. Our heartfelt thanks to the Foundation for a second year of funding this dynamic community arts program!
HOWARD THURMAN CDs
Stay tuned for the October release of a magnificent six CD audio collection, "The Living Wisdom of Howard Thurman" to be published by Sounds True. I have been privileged to work with Vincent Harding, Luther Smith, and Thurman's daughter, Ms. Olive Thurman Wong to produce this exciting project. The set includes seven hours of some of Dr. Thurman's most inspiring sermons, meditations, prayers, and radio broadcasts. Each CD features a special audio introduction by one of his contemporary students: Alice Walker, Michael Bernard Beckwith, Edward Kaplan, Dr. Harding, Dr. Smith, and myself. Look for details in our autumn newsletter!
PRISON MINISTRY
On June 26th OneLife will participate in the Juneteenth program at Deuel Vocational Institution - the state prison in Tracy, CA. Our board vice-chair and music minister, Valerie Brown, will direct her vocal group Dominion a cappella ensemble, and OneLife supporter Cat Brooks will perform her spoken word piece "A Warrior Prays." We look forward to developing our prison programming as capacity permits. Please contact us if you feel called to be part of this ministry or if you are already involved in prison or reentry work and think that we can be a resource to your program.
MEDITATION AUDIO
At last! Destiny Muhammad, our beloved "Harpist from the Hood," and I recorded a 26-minute guided healing meditation. The audio is free for the listening on our website. Look for links at the bottom of the Retreats page and on the Listening Room page. Our gift to you.
RETREAT LOCATION CHANGE!
Please note that our August 7th retreat will be held in a NEW LOCATION. See Retreat page for details. We hope you will join us!
Homicide and street violence continue to plague urban communities throughout the United States. According to the Department of Justice, in 2005 over 18,000 people were murdered in the US -- 12,352 were the result of firearms. In my hometown of Oakland, California the numbers are grim. In the last three years there have been nearly 400 homicides in a city with a population just over 420,000 -- 70% of those being under the age of 35 and overwhelmingly African American and Latino males.
The impact on those who live in the communities hardest hit is palpable. For many young adults in the "flatlands" of Oakland, violence has become a normal part of everyday life. You cannot walk more than a block in East Oakland without seeing a makeshift memorial or without noticing scores of young people dressed in t-shirts adorned with photos of loved ones recently lost to violence.
2006 was a particularly bad year for Oakland, with nearly 150 homicides in that year alone. As a community organizer, I had to ask what role might a movement for social justice have to play in what is taking place in Urban America, and was there something that I could do to intervene in this situation.
I had started out back in 1998 as a union organizer for workers in the hotel industry and eventually went on to work on economic justice issues more broadly. In 2001, I began an eight-year stint at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights which, at that time, was under the leadership of now famed environmental advocate Van Jones.
It was during 2006, when I was with the Ella Baker Center, that I really started to take serious consideration of this question of urban violence from my perspective as a community organizer. I began by looking beyond the social justice community and into the Oakland community more broadly, and I had conversations with people, mostly younger people, about the violence in our neighborhoods. For understandable reasons, many community members and friends of mine from Oakland expressed a level of numbness or despair when I asked them what they thought could be done. My own feelings about the violence in Oakland, especially after the tragic loss of the 21-year-old son of a member of our organization, bordered on depression.
Luckily, by the Grace of God, I had just been introduced to what I would now describe as "mindfulness practice" at a training that I participated in. It was at this training that I first encountered the concepts of "being" and "possibility," which were strange concepts for me to take in as someone (a community organizer, at that) who was very focused on "doing."
From the framework of "being" I saw that I was holding a hopeless way of being. And I realized that if one were to add my "way of being" up with the other feelings of numbness and despair that I heard from people around me, and multiply that by the 420,000 people in Oakland, then peace really had no chance at all.
I felt called to confront my own hopelessness and create space for another way of being, and so I created the possibility of courage. As someone who is nearly obsessed with checklists, organization, and getting things done, I was kind of at a loss for what to "do" next! Courage was great and all, but it didn't come along with a work plan or a set of goals to accomplish. So I waited.
One day very soon after this, I was driving down the street and happened to pass three intersections, each with a small peace vigil calling for an end to the war abroad. The vigils were very simple and attended by a small number of mostly white activists. I was moved by the simplicity of the act and the feelings of solidarity that the vigils evoked. And I thought to myself, "Why don't we do the same thing for the violence happening here in our own backyard, just with younger, browner folks and in a way that's a little more 'hood-friendly'?"
I went back to work the next day with a proposal to coordinate three simultaneous "Silence The Violence" vigils in the flatlands of Oakland. We set out to accomplish what we thought would be an ambitious goal with this event, and put the word out to others in our network to join us. Within a three-week period the event grew to 21 vigils in five Bay Area cities with over 2,000 people attending, a radio broadcast on one of the largest Hip Hop stations in California, and the cities of Richmond, Oakland, and San Francisco declaring it "Silence The Violence Day."
At the point at which this happened, I had been organizing for many years, and I had even worked on various campaigns that ended in victory. But I had never witnessed something with as much velocity as this event. It was as if this Silence The Violence Day had a momentum and a life of its own. This experience revealed to me, first hand, what is possible when "doing" is empowered through "being." It showed me what is possible when we, as human beings, begin to confront our own despair and resignation and pick up courage instead. It was a life-altering moment. And it led me to a new theory of social change.
This new theory is what I had heard my mentor, Van Jones, once describe as "three dimensional" social change. Conventional models of social change hold up two dimensions: a 'Top-Down' approach including things like legislative change, electing politicians who will carry your agenda, and traditional policy advocacy; and a 'Bottom-Up' approach, which includes things like grassroots organizing and direct action. A "three dimensional" approach adds the third element of 'Inside-Out.' It acknowledges the relationship between "inner" transformational work and its impact on the "outer" world. And the presence of this third dimension, along with the other dimensions, creates a space in which things that may not have been possible in the two-dimensional model become possible -- a space where breakthroughs and innovations occur.
I realized that prior to this breakthrough in my own organizing work, I had only been operating in two dimensions. We can live an entire lifetime in two dimensions, but three dimensions gives us a full range of motion, where things that at one time seemed impossible can happen with simplicity and ease. I'm not suggesting that there are no hurdles or challenges in the work that I do now, but I have access to a level of power that I wasn't even aware of before. And I have experienced the way that "inner" practice can impact the "outer" world that the social justice community desires so deeply to transform.
And now, when I look back at some of the most powerful social movements in history, I can see the presence of this third dimension. The actions taken by Civil Rights activists, for example, were acts of deep faith from the 'Inside-Out.' They were standing for what was possible in the face of bleak circumstances and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Dr. King expressed that faith so eloquently when he asserted, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." There is a rich legacy of social activism fueled by transformational work for us to inherit. And for that I am so grateful.
~*~*~*~
Nicole Lee is the Executive Director of Urban Peace Movement, an organization that grew out of the Silence The Violence Campaign that she founded three years ago at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. She is a fourth-generation Oaklander and has spent the past 11 years in labor and community organizing and policy advocacy work on economic justice and juvenile justice issues.
The Urban Peace Movement works to end violence in Oakland and beyond through transformational work with young people directly impacted by street violence, and through shifting urban youth culture.
Last week I was interviewed for a short video by the Heal the Streets program of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. One of the question-prompts was to describe my vision for Oakland. And I was surprised to discover that I didn't have an answer. Bits and pieces, yes. Or something idealistic and generic. But an authentic vision of wholistic transformation for our city... I just couldn't see it. I reflected on the
time, energy, and resources that so many of us expend simply trying to
survive, trying to undo some of the harshest injustices and maintain
even a rudimentary "safety net" for people in need.
We can get so focused on the immediate crisis that we forget to look up, to look beyond. And I wondered what might be possible if all that energy, that investment of time, attention, and resources was available for creative pursuits -- moving past fixing what's broken to dream a new dream and bring it into manifestation. What kind of Oakland (and what kind of world) might emerge? I'd like to find out.
What if we could infuse our work now with the power of that creative possibility? Indeed, there are people doing it already. Even (and especially) in the midst of a seemingly unending list of crises, they are reaching beyond the standard repertoire of "fixes" to catch a vision of something greater. Einstein reminded us that you cannot solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it. Audre Lorde cautioned that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. Yet as a nation, we appoint the former executives of Goldman Sachs to remedy the financial collapse. We look to BP to restore the Gulf. We expect our military to end the wars, and we make insurance companies the arbiters of health care.
Instead of preserving or even modifying systems that have already proven they do not work, we could take advantage of these upheavals to risk a new direction. Ultimately, we will have to. There simply isn't enough oil in the world to sustain our current usage. There isn't enough money to satisfy greed. And no matter how many weapons or prisons or police we have, it will not make us safe.
So what is it that allows us to go a new way -- whether in our personal lives or in the collective life of a city, a nation, or the world? Futurist and evolution biologist, Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris, provides an apt metaphor in the lifecycle of the caterpillar and its metamorphosis into a butterfly.
A caterpillar, Sahtouris says, "can eat up to three hundred times its own weight in a day, devastating many plants in the process, and continues eating until it's so bloated that it hangs itself up and goes to sleep, its skin hardening into a chrysalis." Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar body breaks down, dissolving into a kind of protoplasmic stew. Within that are what biologists have named "imaginal cells." It is these cells that carry the pattern for butterfly. At first they are destroyed by the immune system as "other" to the self-ness of caterpillar. But as more of them emerge, and especially as they begin to link together, the "self" is redefined -- transmuted into something entirely new.
The imaginal cells are present in the skin of the caterpillar its whole life, but remain dormant, according to Sahtouris, "until the crisis of overeating, fatigue and breakdown allows them to develop." Perhaps our bloated, destructive, and over-consuming society is poised for a collective metamorphosis. Perhaps each of us is an imaginal cell, holding the blueprint for a new way of being. And perhaps as we come together in the vision of possibility, a momentum will be generated redefining our selves and our world. What looks (and no doubt feels) like the worst conceivable outcome for the caterpillar is actually the threshold for a whole new realm of existence: the birth of liberation and flight. I pray this will be our truth as well... and the truth for our beloved Oakland.
*
Dr. Sahtouris quotes above from: www.sahtouris.com
OneLife is thrilled to welcome a gifted young woman who will be working with us through the Fall as the lead facilitator for our "Sustaining the Soul of Activism (and Activists)" workshops.
Emmanuelle Regis has been involved in social change organizations for over 12 years. She is passionate about working with social justice practitioners who want to create new paradigms for their lives, organizations, and communities aligned with the values of peace, freedom, and human dignity.
She is a life coach, having completed her coach training at Newfield, and is part of a unique cohort of coaches of color committed to the field of social justice. Specializing in ontological coaching, Emmanuelle works in the realms of body, emotion, and language to support holistic transformation and assist in unfolding the innate knowledge and power of every human being to create. Her commitment as a coach is that all people come away from the relationship with a deep-seated experience of freedom and concrete tools they can take away as their own.
She writes, "I see social change organizations as uniquely positioned to offer a place for individual, community, and cultural transformation and healing far beyond the context of political change. With the incorporation of new tools, new ways of thinking and structuring organizations, and open minds and hearts, the ideal of 'being the change we wish to see in the world' becomes the standard."
Emmanuelle received her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science / International Relations from UC, San Diego.
Note: Please contact us if you would like to learn more about "Sustaining the Soul of Activism (and Activists)" programs.
