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Tag Archive for: MSC Transitions Lab

Our Midnight Call – Finding Unexpected Love With Power

By Julie Quiroz   |  May 24, 2016
Reflections | 4 Comments

One of the many stories shared in the “Shaping the Story of the Future” MSC Transitions Lab (May 14-17) was told by MSC Transitions Team member and Love With Power co-author Julie Quiroz via video conference.  The following is the written version of her story.


On March 30 I received a call at a little before midnight.

I was asleep. My 14-year old daughter had just crawled into my bed after studying late for a math test.

I was angry when my cell phone rang, right near my daughter’s head. I hit my phone to stop the ring. It rang again. I hit it again.  Then it rang with another number.  Finally I answered and whispered harshly into the phone, “Who is this! Stop calling! It’s the middle of the night!”

On the other end of the line I heard the steady voice of my doctor.

Calling me at midnight.

I rolled out of bed as quietly as I could, making my way to the kitchen where I crouched on the floor, hoping my daughter wouldn’t hear.

“Yes?” I said, knowing the call had something to do with the weird cluster of fevers that had struck me over the past month.

“We got the results of the blood tests you did this morning,” my doctor said.  “The results show you have leukemia. Acute leukemia. You will need to come to the hospital tomorrow morning to be admitted for chemotherapy.”

Hearing this news — as far removed from my healthy lifestyle as I could imagine — my thoughts went only to logistics, to my daughter’s test the next day, to the lunch I needed, wanted, to pack her in the morning.

“Oh,” I said to my doctor. “Okay.”

“I know you understand this,” my doctor added, as kindly as she could. “But I need to say clearly that this is a life threatening situation. It is urgent that we get you into treatment immediately.”

I hung up the phone, ready to dial the friends I’d need for back up support the next day, opening the fridge to remember what there was to make lunch with, hoping I could get my daughter to school for a few hours so I could breathe and think before telling her.

I knew I would need to narrate this crazy story to give it some meaning.

I knew we were heading into a terrifying future that I knew nothing about.

At 10 am the next morning we headed to the hospital. My friend – awoken at 1 am the night before — drove us there. In the back seat my daughter sat hand in hand with one of her best friends. My parents met us in the hospital.

Responsibility is the closest word I can find to describe how I felt that morning. As I entered the hospital I sensed a deep set of intentions guiding me. These weren’t intentions I wrote down that morning. They were intentions that had grown in me over my eight years of practice in tai chi and 60/40 stance, in the spiritual opening those practices created. On that awful day in March, these intentions led me to express gratitude, to stay open, and to be joyful.  

People say I was brave and strong. For me it felt like my intentions and my practices were simply carrying me.

Still, I ached to be the mommy I knew myself to be: I wanted to sit with my daughter and hold her and protect her through all that was happening.

But I couldn’t.

From the moment we arrived I was pulled away for tests, for a bone marrow biopsy, for intense conversations with the doctors who dropped into my life that morning to save it.

Instead of the parenting role I’d always held, I needed instantly to trust the friend my daughter had picked to be with her, to share mothering with the friend I’d brought with me.

On that day I had to let go, to accept a redefinition of the most important role of my life, that of being a parent.

I spent all of April in the hospital.

My daughter courageously left for her planned week of vacation with her father and extended family, then spent three weeks with families who took her in with unfathomable love and generosity.

My daughter and I had precious little time together that month. When we did, she would climb onto my hospital bed and cuddle beside me. We touched but barely spoke. Then, after a time, she would begin to cry.

Unlike me, her outside life and responsibilities continued: she had to go to school, had to take tests and do homework, had to endure the well-meaning but uncomfortable focus of students she barely knew. She had to show up in the world, every day, without her mommy.

When my daughter began to cry she would say, over and over, “I can’t do this.”

I can’t do this.

I can’t do this.

I listened, for weeks, as she cried.

I waited, patiently, knowing that she needed time to grieve, to be angry, to resist.

And I knew that at some point I would need to help her move along.

One day as she held me and repeated her cries of “I can’t do this”, I knew it was time.

From the core of my being, I dreaded that moment.

Still, I straightened my shoulders and gathered my strength.

With firmness and conviction I interrupted her.

“Mija,” I said.

“Right now both of us are going to find strength we never thought we had.

We’re going to do things we never thought we could do.”

My words were not especially gentle. They were not a question. They were not an invitation.

They were simply a statement of fact.

Saying these words, to my baby, my precious daughter, was excruciating.

Yet, to my surprise, as these words emerged from my mouth, they became suddenly liberating.

These words became liberating because I knew the strength my daughter was finding would serve her for the rest of her life.

These words became liberating because I knew that the impossible for us would become possible.

These words became liberating because I knew that we had stepped into a story of the future: a story of great power and purpose.

I still felt tremendous pain, but along with it came joy and even exhilaration.

 

This is my story, a story I would never have chosen.

It is as story about transition. It is about transformation.

It is one river of story that joins many other rivers.

Reflected in my story, I believe, is some helpful truth.

I believe this is the moment of our Midnight Call.

I believe this is a Midnight call for all of us, for all our children, for all our communities, for our nation, for our planet.

In this moment, in my moment, in our moment, I would like to offer five wishes:

In this moment I wish you awareness of the Midnight Call, in all its pain, its liberation, and its exhilaration.

In this moment I wish you the satisfaction of an assertive stance and the ease with which practiced intentions will carry you.

In this moment I wish you openness to re-envisioning the roles you have have imagined and defined for yourself.

In this moment I wish you the liberation of living in the future, in the story you create.

And, above all, in this moment, I wish you the deep and soul filling joy of community.

Welcome MSC Co-Director Mimi Ho!

By Mimi Ho   |  April 12, 2016
News, Reflections | 3 Comments

Dear Friends, old and new,

It is with great joy that I join Taj James as Co-Director of Movement Strategy Center, to stand together in purpose and community with our broad movement friends and family, our MSC staff team, leadership team, and amazing network of fellows, associates, and partners.

I step into this position at a time of extraordinary upheaval in our country and in our world, a time in which the failures of our economic and political systems have become clear and the harm is deeply and widely felt. It is a moment of great fear, anger, and uncertainty.

It is also a moment of great opportunity. Everywhere we turn we find people coming together to care for each other — to nurture healthy and just food systems, to honor and support families of all kinds, to keep fossil fuels in the ground, to build our next economy.

I believe — and all of us at MSC believe — that this is a moment inviting our most affirmative strategy and vision. We believe this is a moment inviting us to show up with our best selves, our deepest relationships, and our boldest dreams.

This is the moment I imagined when I came to MSC.

My Journey

I came to MSC in 2011 after two decades of community organizing, yearning for space where I could come together with other movement builders to reflect on our work, build strategy, and do the personal and relational work needed to ready ourselves for bigger leaps. I wanted to build trusting community so that we could share and learn from our biggest mistakes and dreams, and truly take risks together.

I came to the MSC team yearning for new ways of organizing and feeling a bit beaten up by years of campaigns. Even the inspiring and victorious ones could be grueling. California electoral initiatives on affirmative action, gay marriage, union funding, youth incarceration built movements and politicized and trained a new generation of organizers like myself. But we were mostly hammered at the ballot box for a decade until the investments in electoral savvy finally started to turn into victories. I worked on statewide and national legislative and organizing fights against welfare reform, for health care reform, and to save federal Medicaid funding. I worked on municipal campaigns for green, affordable homes and communities, campaigns to hold corporations accountable for spewing toxins on low-income communities in Richmond and electronics workers in China. Many of these campaigns had victories, built infrastructure, and brought in new people into the movements. Still, too often we collapsed across the finish line, depleted, and sometimes licking the wounds of damaged relationships with colleagues and movement partners.

I learned so much from the brilliant strategists and organizers I met in these campaigns and am forever grateful for all that I learned and experienced. Still, all of us knew that while our victories were important, they were insufficient compared to the magnitude of change we actually need.

Through all of this I experienced pockets of renewal, strategic clarity, and joy, so I knew all hope was not lost. The depth of some of my relationships through the years continued to feed me and have been touchstones in times of doubt and challenge. In my search to bounce back from personal crises and conflict, I was introduced to mind-body practices that not only ground me, but generate energy, and provide physical accountability to my swirling mind. From that place of connection to myself and others, so much more becomes strategically possible.

Of course my biggest lessons in transformative movement building came through being a new mother of two lively girls. I was getting some decidedly non-theoretical lessons that led to some very existential questioning of who I am.

I was getting my bootie kicked out of the delusion that I could do anything and everything, all the time, and so could our movements. I was reconnected with the power of pure love, joy and humor to help navigate through the most maddening and nonsensical aspects of human kind and myself. Like many of you who have looked into children’s eyes – as aunties, as teachers, as friends, and as members of the village – I was compelled more than ever to leave the world a better place.

Transforming the world by transforming systems, relationships, and ourselves

I had a hunch that I wasn’t alone in my simultaneous disillusionment and hope. So I came to MSC and together with a growing core of explorers, we embarked on a quest to find, gather, and learn from fellow travelers at MSC and in the broader Movement.

20160412-MimiLA

We realized that collectively we have big vision and emerging solutions — but hide behind clouds of pragmatism and incrementalism. We realized that our communities have systems alternatives that are the seeds of the new worlds we need.  We realized that by taking center, marginalized communities can lead the whole. We realized that by facing ourselves — our challenges, habits, beauty and powerful capacity for change — we can practice and build the human depth, relationships, and new strategy that creates the new world we need right now.

MSC has chosen to embark on a transformative journey to feel and understand the big moment our world, planet and peoples are in. A world of climate crisis, political turmoil, and staggering racial, economic, and gender injustice. A world where people, movements, and communities are daring — with success and reverberations — to radically transform values and chart a new way forward.

Together, MSC and our broader community has stepped into a bold Vision and Purpose:

To nurture whole people and whole communities

to transition from a world of domination and extraction

to a world of

regeneration, resilience, and interdependence.

To transform the world, we know we must transform our systems, our relationships, and ourselves. This vision, purpose, and commitment lies at the heart of our Transitions Initiative, a multi-movement community of purpose that MSC has initiated. The Transitions Initiative is bringing forth transformative capacities, relationships, and strategies for exponential impact. Through this community of purpose we are partnering with powerful emerging movements and movement leaders in innovative efforts that leap us forward into a future that honors the ways we are all connected in the web of life.

In this vision and purpose I find strength for the rigorous personal and relational work that makes new strategic paths possible. And over and over, it is community and people that keeps me energized and coming back.

Practice of Team and Interdependence

In our new co-directorship, Taj and I commit to practicing the art of interdependence and team. Taj and I are very different human beings with very different strengths, gifts, and perspectives. We share a deep purpose of investing in whole communities and whole people, and we have a growing intentional practice of team with each other and with the circles of teams within MSC and beyond. Our shared purpose and practice allows our very different approaches to be complementary and generative. We know that we deeply need each other to bring forth our best selves and best work, and we are very clear that we both need to be in deep relationship with our broader teams to lift up our best collective contribution.

Let me end with a quote from my co-director Taj, who writes:

MSC has always been a leaderful organization and one where I could make a contribution to a bigger purpose with the mix of strengths and weakness, habits and practices that determine how I show up. It is exciting to move into a phase in which the leadership that has always existed in MSC will now be more visible and affirmed. To be a leader side by side with Mimi Ho is a great honor.

Taj and I look forward to working together and in partnership with MSC’s leadership team: Rachel Burrows (MSC Managing Director), Sihle Dinani (Director of Finance), Masako Kalbach (Director of Administration and Personnel), Julie Quiroz (Senior Fellow), and Jovida Ross (Senior Fellow), and supporting our strategy team leads Rosa Gonzales, (Community Climate Solutions Team Lead), Luis Sanchez, (Organizing Team Lead), Nwamaka Agbo (New Economy Team Lead), and the rest of the extended MSC Family.

Most importantly, we look forward to working with you!

With love and power,

Mimi Ho

 

For Mimi’s full bio please click here.

  • Aparna Shah (Mobilize the Immigrant Vote) and Beth Glenn (Education Justice Network) connecting at MSC

Parenting for Liberation: My Practice & the MSC Transitions Lab

By Trina Greene Brown   |  August 19, 2015
Reflections | 3 Comments

I am raising a young Black boy in a society that is set up to set him up for failure.

This means I am often in protection mode: protection against educational inequity, unfair discipline practices, preschool-to-prison-pipeline, stereotypical accolades, and most importantly, his own self-hate and internalized oppression (don’t get me started on my 5 year-old-telling me he wanted to “be white”).

This is the daily battle I try to prevent my son from dealing with, the daily battle where I try to be the buffer between him and the real world.  I imagine myself as Super Mama, a powerful, badass mama with one hand holding a massive shield blocking my son, and the other, a powerful fist raised in resistance.

But in all of my fighting, resisting and protecting, I now realize that I have been blocking my own heart: my hands have not been open to nourish and nurture my son. I see more clearly that I have been parenting from fear.  I know that I must transition from parenting for protection to parenting for liberation.

My practice commitment is simple and affirmative: “saying yes.”

Yes to liberation.

Yes to freedom.

Yes to self love.

Underneath all of these affirmative statements is an internal struggle against a fearful and safe “no.”

After an amazing three days at the Movement Strategy Center’s Transitions Lab in July, with brilliant leaders working across distinct but intersecting movements, I am metabolizing and distilling the lesson from the foundational question of our Lab exploration: “How do we transition from a world of domination and extraction to a world of interdependence, resilience, and regeneration?” As a movement maker and staff of Move to End Violence, I am familiar with thinking about the “movement pivots” we need to make in order to go in a new direction. Now, as part of the MSC Transitions Lab, I am digging my heels deep into the “transitions” we want to make.

Transition is defined as “the process or period of change from one position or condition to another.” As a social justice movement leader, I have spent a lot of time focusing on the first part of this equation. Reflecting on my work in the violence against women movement, I know I expended a lot of energy naming the current period and existing conditions. This focus is present in the traditional names of our organizations.  Much of our language and framing is issue-based (what we’re fighting against). We’ve become so skilled at naming the problem it’s become hard to name the solution.

The key word in the definition of transition is “another” — not just focusing on the issue but also transitioning in order to experience and create another circumstance or condition. My past work with young people was filled with opportunities to envision solutions. Young people (I know this sounds cliche) are the future and therefore have the capacity to vision a different world.  A violence prevention curriculum I wrote with young girls was entitled “Be Strong” and spoke affirmatively from a strengths-based method for ending violence.

At the Transitions Lab, MSC guided us to think and vision a new world. We explored examples of movement strategies that employ visioning as a core element, such as my work with Move to End Violence, Octavia’s Brood, and Black Lives Matter. In each of these social justice leaders are supported to think differently about their work.

I invite you, too, to spend time visioning, looking toward the horizon, and sharing ideas of the world you hope to create.

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