process = rituals of care
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A reflection inspired by “Your Critique of Structure is a Trauma Response” by Zedé
I’ve been critiqued by folks I’ve once organized with a few times. Initially I be perceived as very go with the flow and later it be remarked I make things too complicated by prioritizing process or I be inflexible for asserting a decision voted on by consensus.
As a social practice artist, I do love a flow. And as a research-based politically engaged artist, I love a vibe and finding aligned folks to vibe with. Yet and still more than anything I love a structure and system that sustains our flow and vibe while supporting me doing me and you doing you.
Interdependent art making and community organizing isn’t sustainable off the alignment of values and vibes alone. I can love you and need you to put that in the shared calendar. I can look forward to meeting with you and still benefit from an agenda being prepared. I can trust you and still think transparency and tracking of the grant funding is best practice. I want to maintain the relationships built so let’s draft agreements on how we share resources (tools, labor, funds). We can be busy and believe this is worth prioritizing.
The vibes will get us in the room, but what happens when the rent goes up or moms get sick? The gaps in our capacity can only be bridged through rituals and systems of care. So why do we wait until the fires and the floods to map an escape route?
We often say we’re not outnumbered we’re out organized. The system of oppression seems to persist no matter who’s in them seats of congress, senate, etc. On the contrary so many grassroots efforts are hinging on the capacity of one or two people and in the ripple of life happening, the entire community garden, liberatory bookstore, studio incubator, etcetera is undone.
My take is that we redefine process / systems / structures as rituals of care. An assemblage of actions and tools that enable us to enact care throughout our organizing efforts and ensure the community resource we seek to avail is founded upon internal practices of care we uphold amongst one another.
An excerpt from “Your Critique of Structure is a Trauma Response” by Zedé
The actual historical record of the people we claim as ancestors in this work is worth talking about:
“Fannie Lou Hamer did not run Freedom Farm on vibes. She ran it with 680 acres, a defined membership structure, a pig bank with specific distribution rules, a board, a budget, and a set of programs with actual operational requirements. The thing that made Freedom Farm feed hundreds of families was not the passion of the people involved, though that passion ran deep. It was the structure. It was the decision about how resources would move, who had authority to release them, and what happened when something went wrong.
The Black Panther Party had a ten-point program. They had chapters with defined leadership. They had chains of command that determined who could make which decisions. They had written rules for how the survival programs would operate, who was eligible, what the process was. The Free Breakfast Program fed 20,000 children a day across 45 cities because someone figured out the logistics, assigned the responsibilities, and built a structure that could run even when any individual person was unavailable.
Ella Baker spent fifty years building organizations. She had deeply considered views about leadership, about how power should be distributed, about what made a structure accountable to the people it served. Her critique of singular charismatic leadership was a critique of the wrong kind of structure. She was arguing for more governance, more distributed decision-making, more formalized accountability, not less.”
These people were not free-form. They were not structureless. They were some of the most disciplined organizational thinkers of the twentieth century. And the movements they built held as long as they did, in the face of everything that came for them, in large part because of what was underneath them.
Considerations
1. What does it look like to create systems and processes (rituals of care) that allow the people in the seats to be interchangeable and the resources availed to be invariable?
2. If legacy is something outlasting you, what does it look like to actively create an organization or program that can function beyond yourself?
3. How do we become more honest about our own needs when organizing around the resources (tools, labor, funds, space) we desire to share?
4. What is the process (rituals of care) for entering and exiting an organization or program?
5. What are the processes (rituals of care) for accountability and repair?
6. How does decision-making get democratized? What does it require to of you to consent to consensus decision making and relinquish control?
7. What gets sacrificed when moving at the speed building structure requires? What gets sacrificed by choosing speed over structure?
8. How does all the information that lives in your head get made accessible to your could be collaborators?
9. Who gets to participate in building the system?
10. How is the system and structure responsive to change?