Sometimes it feels like we need superhuman powers to build the movements we want.

I know I’ve felt that way as I’ve worked in long-term collaborations, committed to making sure our work made a difference in people’s lives and paved the way for bigger and deeper change.

And I’ve been part of big shifts way beyond what I could have imagined.  Like serving on the facilitation and design team of Move to End Violence, witnessing the re-emergence of a movement that had achieved extraordinary success in radically shifting policies, programs, and beliefs about violence against women and girls.  After 40 years, however, the movement had lost much of its movement fire, becoming institutionalized and fragmented, and no longer serving as a bold and audacious catalyst for an end to gender violence and violence against women and girls.

Now I see this movement being re-ignited. How is this happening?

Naming big pivots seems to be crucial:  The movement builders in Move to End Violence defined and named three core pivots they want to make: from defensive stance to proactive stance, from fragmentation to wholeness, from immediate needs to social change with strategic direction.

Beyond the movement to end violence, what are the pivots that re-ignite movements?

Can we name these pivots?

Based on our collective experience across many movements, a few of us at Movement Strategy Center tried to do just that: to identify and define a set of crucial movement pivots, as well as the qualities that allow people, organizations, and alliances to make these big shifts.

Do we need some kind of new super-human power to make these pivots?

I don’t think so.

Looking across our movements I don’t see us needing x-ray vision or a magic wand or the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

No, we don’t need superpowers to make these pivots; we need the pivots to unleash the movement superpowers already within us.

Pivot #1: From Isolation to Interdependence

We all know what it feels like to operate with narrow focus – and what it feels like when we’re doing something else, when things feel interdependent and our work coordinates with others so that there is a sense of moving as a unified whole.

Is this something that just happens, or is it possible to shift a situation by showing up in a different way?

Looking across our movements we’re seeing that people (and organizations) are able to make this shift by holding broad awareness.  Look at where our movements are most successful right now and you’ll find people and organizations that see and value the ecosystem of roles and relationships all around them.  They take time to build relationships and develop a clear picture of their landscape.  Their aim is not just to get something done, but also to strengthen every aspect of the movement ecosystem.

Pivot #2: From a Defensive to an Offensive Stance

When we’re reactive, fighting for little wins at the margins, it can feel overwhelming, like there’s no way to win.  But there are moments when we know we’re on: when we’ve shifted the parameters of the debate and opened up new possibilities for change.

Leading with bold vision and purpose helps us shift from defense to offense.  The most effective people and organizations right now are able to envision beyond what is politically possible at the moment, leading with what we need and want.

One fantastic example is the Vermont Workers’ Center that began a fight for universal health care in their state, knowing it was politically impossible at that time.  They started by building a grassroots base of support capable of making it politically possible, ultimately making Vermont the first state in the US to pass universal health care.

Pivot #3: From Marginalized to Powerful

Marginalization isn’t in our heads.  It’s very real in how communities are resourced and treated, with people of color, immigrants, LGBT, and other groups shut out of power and material resources.

At the same time, people and communities can internalize this marginalization, limiting us and our efforts even in the face of opportunity.  Marginalization can become an identity, a mindset we become attached to.  And when you’re attached to marginalization, it’s pretty hard to have a healthy relationship with power.  We tend to either shun power altogether, or grab on to control, domination, and exclusion because these reactions are familiar to us — the only kinds of “power” we’ve ever experienced.

And at our best, movement builders aren’t just trying to bring “the margins to the center” but to help create a role for everyone.  For example, in Move to End Violence, we’ve needed to let go of narrow prescriptions of who could build that movement, recognizing great vision and ideas coming from people in institutions that might feel far removed from the perceived social justice infrastructure.

How do people and organizations move from internalizing marginalization to stepping into healthy power?  Grounding ourselves in people, communities, and histories is key to this pivot.

Pivot #4: From Competition to Strategic Direction

Competition is the opposite of movement building, but it’s hard to resist. It oozes through our schools, our political system, our economy, and our organizations.  Those who rise above it find ways to connect their work to the work others are doing, amplifying collective power.

Pivoting from competition to strategic direction means learning alignment: focusing on movement level strategy and coordination.  The essence of movement strategy is to build power and achieve wins by aligning around shared purpose and moving together.  Movement building is not about adopting a singular “right” social change method; it is about aligning various methods and politics towards common goals. Alignment means transcending “either/or” thinking and finding a “third way.”

A powerful example of this was last spring’s gathering of grassroots and inside-the-beltway communications leaders and organizations at what was called the Knowledge Exchange: A Telecom Agenda for a New Administration.  Co-led by the Center for Media Justice and Consumers Union, the Knowledge Exchange convenes grass-tops leaders, community organizers, and media policy leaders to strengthen the effectiveness, collaboration, and impact of the movement for media reform and justice.

Pivot #5: From Control to Creativity

For all kinds of reasons – from funding to internalized oppression – many people and organizations in social justice work feel tremendous pressure to “know” and “succeed.”  This pressure constrains us from thinking creatively and taking risks.  In fact, movement building works best in a creative environment, with unexpected solutions emerging that work for the highest good of all.

Imagine what it would feel like: unexpected solutions that work for the highest good of all, continuous processes for tapping into a deep creative impulse for freshness, beauty, and resonance.

Trusting and innovating are essential for pivoting from control to creativity.  We need to learn to trust new ideas and approaches, fiercely respecting and paying attention to each other’s humanity with curiosity and trust. We need to take risks and learn from our mistakes.  Right now we are witnessing an explosion of cultural and artistic work in every movement sector – the migrant rights butterflies, Strong Families’ Mama’s Day cards, the sunflowers at the US Social Forum; culture and art are key to the movement pivots we need to make.

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Feature photo: wallyg via photopin, creative commons license

This is a repost from the great new blog Transformation that tells the stories of people who are combining personal and social change in order to re-imagine their societies.

I was in Seattle the week after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin, preparing for a gathering to revitalize the movement to end violence against girls and women. In the days leading up to this gathering I heard his name shouted over and over again by protesters in the streets. In the soul-jarring moment of the verdict, it was also my own name that I heard shouted through the bullhorn. Zimmerman had become the personification of racism; the embodiment of the enemy.

In that moment I cringed, and not just because we shared the same name. I began to see something clearly that I had struggled with before. This kind of personification – so emotionally powerful, tempting and cathartic – leads us away from a focus on the culture, structures and processes of racism that the Zimmerman case represents.  And that’s also the problem with empathy. While it’s important to honor the humanity of those whose actions cause great harm, “developing more empathy” is never enough to confront injustice and discrimination. It’s not how much empathy we feel in general terms that really makes the difference, but what we do with the empathy we feel and how we do it in concrete situations.

At the Movement Strategy Center in Oakland, California, we work with groups who wrestle with these issues every day. They have their feet to the fire of injustice, but they eschew simplistic solutions that demonize other people. Instead, they try to confront conflicts from a place of “radical connection:” a mix of unbending honesty about injustice and its causes, balanced by the openness and humility required to understand the motivations of other people and find ways through the forest of competing interests.

Kimi Lee is a good example of what we mean. She is a member of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a group that brings together housekeepers, care workers, nannies and home health assistants, most of whom are undocumented immigrant women on very low incomes. Sixty-one per cent of live-in domestic workers earn below the minimum wage. Kimi herself is not in that position, but she knows first-hand what it means to care for others in the family with very little help from private insurance companies or the state.

Two days after Kimi gave birth to her first daughter her mother experienced a major stroke, and she was hospitalized in intensive care for the next six weeks. When she came home she needed to be cared for by Kimi and her sister, not to mention requiring their help in navigating $450,000 worth of medical bills for which none of their insurers wanted to admit liability. As a result, her young daughter didn’t see a park for a full six months, Kimi recollected. What the family needed was not more empathy but more support from a better system.

Enter the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which is working to get “Domestic Worker Bills of Rights” passed in every state in an effort to improve their benefits and wages. But instead of demonizing the employers of domestic workers, the Alliance has launched a different approach called “Caring across Generations.” This campaign aims to “build bridges” among different groups (including employers) in order to find solutions, instead of “burning them” as was the danger in traditional labor and community organizing. And this is radical connection in action – the ability to confront injustice from a position of shared understanding and responsibility.

Cultivating more empathy among people with different interests and perspectives is certainly one part of this story: as social animals, human beings can mirror the feelings of others without much conscious effort, even if they have radically-different life experiences, values and beliefs. From a social justice perspective this is great news. As Caring across Generations and other campaigns have shown, it means that connections can be built and barriers transcended that might otherwise seem impossible.

But this form of empathy also has its limits. In a recent New Yorker Article, Paul Bloom shows how empathy can become a reflexive, reactive emotion that short-changes the actions and understanding required in the pursuit of social justice. On its own, empathy focuses attention on the story of an individual at the expense of the larger landscape of inequality. Embedding empathy in the individualistic cultures that dominate modern life makes it less likely that people will interrogate the systems, structures and institutions that affect the lives of individuals in different ways. Yet it is this larger landscape that makes it easier for some people to feel and show empathy than others – try it after a twelve-hour day working two shifts at McDonalds, for example. Even worse, these emotions can be manipulated to create support for one group at the expense of another.

That’s why nurturing the courage and conviction to transform these systems is just as important as developing more empathy in ourselves and others. The idea of radical connection captures this combination perfectly. It’s a visceral recognition that we are part of something larger that urges us to act for the whole community’s benefit, and not just for those few individuals with whom we empathize directly.

Sometimes our attraction to empathy may have more to with the fact that it makes us feel good about ourselves. Perhaps it can even screen people from the need to understand the real impact of injustice. But when empathy is experienced as radical connection it can take us to places that challenge our worldviews and our sense of self – places where the pain of separation, oppression and trauma are felt more deeply than any transcendent experience.

These places are uncomfortable, but they also act as crucibles for self-growth and for reaching out to others without any sense of paternalism or privilege.

This is a crucial difference between empathy and radical connection, since the latter requires that we be self-critical about our own roles in perpetuating any processes that cause harm to others. If we fail to bear witness to the trauma we feel and the harm we have done; if we fail to galvanize the resources we need to heal ourselves, then we miss the potential for deep transformation. Developing these capacities is essential if empathy is to strengthen our work for social justice.

Many social justice groups use meditation and other personal development practices to cultivate these capacities. For example, the environmental group Forest Ethics attributes their success in building strong relationships with their opponents to their group meditation practice, which helps their staff to advocate for controversial causes without alienating those in government and industry whose support is needed to secure solutions. The group has already achieved success in this way in protecting hundreds of thousands of acres of British Columbian forests. Linked to the core capacity for empathy, these practices allow us to see and feel the humanity of others and to transcend the raw emotions that can block the actions required to promote social justice.

When my neighbor Yansa once asked if I was related to George Zimmerman I laughed. On the surface the answer is obviously “no.” But the honest response has to be more complicated, because we are all embedded in a web of relationships that are held together by both empathy and responsibility: relationships with others who are known and unknown, with those who came before us and those who are not yet born, and with those who share our beliefs and those who don’t.

At the center of his web of relationships stands empathy, but not just that. What carries us through the tides of history with some sense of social justice purpose is radical connection – the ability and willingness to stay with injustice in all of its pain and contradiction, yet still see and grasp the possibilities for loving-hearted action.