Belonging @ Scale: Part 1

The art of systems curation... for transformation

From left: Me (tall in back), Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining), Lisa Yancey (facilitator), Imara Jones, ALOK Vaid-Menon, Sanjay Purohit, Marielena Hincapie, Staci Haines, and Bridgit Antoinette Evans. Front row, kneeling: Farzana Khan, Nicole Chi (recorder), and Mark Gonzales.

One core inquiry sits at the heart of my life and work: how can we create a world where everyone belongs? 

In the fall of 2021 I invited a small group of people to help shape an initiative I called Belonging @ Scale. I had just written the convening prompt in this newsletter, a reflection on scale where I framed the inquiry:

We have a collective responsibility to meet the scale of the crises we face; this requires re-conceiving how we think about scale… The invitation is this: we — those of us who hold an intention toward co-creating a better world — need to collectively raise our sights… Can we take responsibility—with humility—for building a world where everyone belongs?

In the summer of 2022 we received a grant thanks to the stewardship of David Hsu at the Omidyar Group, and two weeks ago it finally happened: a lovingly and intentionally curated group of twelve people convened in Medellín, Colombia to ask—and do our best to answer—how we create Belonging @ Scale.

This will be the first of two posts: this one to provide some context about the vision for the gathering; the next to dive deeper into emerging themes and explore the implications for those of us interested in the question of how we nurture transformation at the scale this moment requires.

TL;DR: The art of systems curation combines two vital and under-appreciated skillsets: curation (the act of finding the “right” people) and systems convening (gathering a diverse and representative microcosm of the whole). The container for transformation starts with Who: it is difficult to over-emphasize how important it is to get the “right people” in the room. Where also matters: space (geography, and room) can either unlock or crush creativity. Facilitation is essential: holding space for transformation is an under-resourced skill. Inside a skillfully created, located, and held container for transformation: so much is possible.

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It starts with Who: Curation…

For five years now I’ve felt a deep longing to gather with people who take this question of belonging and scale seriously. So I’ve been trying to find them: adrienne maree brown calls such people WOEs: people “working on excellence.” The Embodiment Institute calls them “Transformational Characters”:

This is the act of curation, and I think it’s one of the most important things we can do. As Michel Bachmann reminds us, transformation starts with Who. I think it’s one of the only shortcuts I’ve found for transformation, and a key way to leapfrog many of the places where we (particularly in social justice spaces) get stuck. So often we lose time debating vision (what is our north star?) and values (how do we be together) that we don’t actually get to action. Yet vision and values are a vital foundation: without them, no sustainable collaboration is possible. So I invite people who already share vision and values (though of course there is great diversity in how we express them in our work), and we can begin building upon that shared foundation.

In this case, I sought out those individuals who share both a vision for a world where everyone belongs, and share common ways of being/relating that enable transformation (which I/we have distilled from observation/learning as the core principles of Building Belonging). To that baseline I added a third thing unique to this convening: those rare individuals who are committed to and capable of thinking, dreaming, and acting at the global scale this moment requires. [I want a word for this: if praxis combines theory and practice… what is the word that combines theory, practice, and vision/imagination?]

I was honored and humbled to be joined in co-curation by Bridgit Antoinette Evans, Sanjay Purohit, and Staci Haines: people I had the privilege of getting to know and develop relationships with over the previous few years… enough that they were willing to lend their credibility and networks to finding the right set of people to help realize our shared vision.

… and Systems Convening

But it’s not only individuals; it’s also about the collective. It’s about trying to represent the entire system with as much diversity as possible inside an intimate container. Enough sameness (shared purpose) to create a sense of trust and belonging; enough difference (diversity) to enable transformative innovation. As Steven Johnson writes:

If you look at the the history of ideas, the most powerful ones, the ones that are really transformative, they almost always come out of the collision between at least two or three or four different intellectual worlds or traditions or fields or disciplines. The border between disciplines is where the exciting stuff happens. 

Yes. I wanted to do my best to convene a diverse fractal (microcosm) of the whole. Of course, it’s hard to capture the whole system inside a container of shared values… not many folks in the private sector tend to share my post-capitalist analysis :-) As Francia Márquez, the Vice President of Colombia declares (can you imagine Kamala Harris saying this?):

It is not enough to be feminist if you are not anti-capitalist, if you are not anti-racist, if you are not anti-colonial.

This is the art of what Bev and Etienne Wenger-Trayner call “systems convening.” I consider it a more specific and intentional form of curation… and one without which I don’t believe systems transformation is possible. (In my LinkedIn profile I identify as a “systems curator”… this is what I mean). The paradox of this role: it can only be done by what Stowe Boyd calls a “deep generalist.” And yet: generalists by definition often lack the expertise and credibility in any specific field to have the requisite convening power.

People would understand why I wanted to talk to them about their domain of practice, but not why I wanted to connect them to a person in a seemingly disparate field. I expressed the challenge here as the “can the center hold” dilemma. I initially addressed this via the Conversations on Transformation series by doing systems convening inside an already coherent “system”: convening diverse fractals of humans to talk about conflict transformation, say. It’s much harder when the “system” is the whole world :-)

I struggled mightily to come up with a unifying framework (belonging, the climate crisis, authoritarianism…?) The answer, of course, came back to my starting point: the Who. Relationships are the glue that helps the center hold. People didn’t say yes to Belonging @ Scale; they said yes to a person they trust. As Peter Block reminds us (take a moment to let this land):

The hardest thing for people to understand is that the relationship is the delivery system of anything you try to accomplish. (Emphasis in original)

Where: Place matters

We chose Colombia, and Medellín specifically, for many of the same reasons we curated our invitations. We wanted a place that could be a fractal: where we could ground the global inquiries we were holding. Colombia has it all: histories of colonization and enslavement, migration and border issues, a recent history of violent conflict, resource extraction, the devastating results of the neoliberal “Washington consensus,” drug trafficking, religion and the state, complex race relations including with indigenous people, etc.

But equally important: we also wanted to highlight the positive. Dynamic social movements, indigenous land stewardship, a vibrant and diverse population, the recent election of the first progressive President and first Afro-Colombian and female Vice President. As Marielena said in her opening grounding for our group:

The world has a lot to learn from Colombia in this moment.

We had several other criteria. It felt really important to be outside the United States, to free our imaginations. There were practical considerations: an international airport reasonably accessible to most people (Sanjay bravely trekked 37 hours to get there!!); a good place to be in July (we had considered the Caribbean but were nervous about hurricane season); safe for the diverse bodies in our group (including Black, Muslim, and trans people). And joyful considerations: a place of relaxation, and beauty; somewhere that could spark joy and nourish us in our inquiries. We wanted a place that would feel alluring and intriguing, that people would want to say “yes” to.

We landed on Medellín: la ciudad de la eterna primavera (the city of eternal spring). Which, we wryly observed, with global warming was rapidly becoming the city of eternal almost-summer.

We ended up choosing Hotel Piedras Blancas, nestled within the eponymous Ecological Park in the mountains above Medellín: a gorgeous retreat space ensconced in nature.

View of our hotel from the reservoir below

More than that: the specific spaces we would gather felt hugely important. Corporate board rooms stifle imagination and crush creativity: we needed something spacious, with natural light, access to greenery… spaces that would support us in our quest for transformation. Piedras Blancas delivered: we gathered in multiple spaces in our time there, and each felt inviting (at least to me!) in different ways. Our crew on the balcony overlooking the water, wind whispering all around, sun warming us, and birds singing accompaniment all around (my favorite spot).

“How”: holding space for transformation

While I do think Who is the most important question, the Who of course is a function of the What and Why. The What and the Why were for me simultaneously the most obvious and the most difficult to articulate: the “What” were the curation criteria, the reason for this group of people. And the Why: well, to build a world where everyone belongs, and to do so by grappling with scale. Here is the pdf of how I framed the invitation to the group, doing my best to practice what the Art of Hosting community calls the “Art of Calling.” Ria Baeck explains:

Many of us who have been on the path of ever deepening authenticity… feel at a certain point that we need to do something that hasn’t been done before… The practice of this art embraces both the feeling of being called and the act of inviting others into this call.

That’s all just to get folks in the same room: to get to “yes,” to grounding everyone in the same inquiry/longing. Then, the unenviable task: how to move us toward our full potential? How to unlock and channel the incredible power in the room… in service of our shared vision? I was confident that good things would happen. To me the question was how much of our creative potential we could tap in this inaugural gathering: 50%? 80%? This is the art of facilitation, and it’s essential. As adrienne maree brown notes in her book on Holding Change:

Some of us are called to hold the containers in which life transforms and the future unfolds.

Honestly, I don’t feel confident that I’m one of those people. My gift (well, my audacity) is to try to create the container: in this case we called upon facilitator Lisa Yancey to hold it. It’s incredibly difficult to steward transformation and unlock collective potential, especially across as much diversity—and with as much ambition—as we gathered in Medellín. It was a joy to watch Lisa in action: the second time in three months (the first was the Building Belonging stewardship team retreat in Seattle, facilitated by Chris Moore-Backman) where I had the privilege of witnessing firsthand a master in the art.

I resonated recently with a podcast featuring the Post-Growth Institute’s Donnie Maclurcan where he declared:

The number one thing organizations need to do is work on their facilitation and get training in embodied facilitation.

It’s always bold to speak in superlatives, but I may be inclined to agree with Donnie: the revolution must be facilitated.

Goals for our gathering…

When I emailed my family before the convening to try to explain what I was doing in Colombia and why it mattered to me, I named my four goals:

1. Everyone would understand why every other individual was invited, and have a shared sense of why we were gathered as a collective.

2. Everyone would be influenced by the gathering to evolve/transform their work/practice in some significant way (what co-curator Sanjay Purohit calls a “plus-one” intervention).

3. It would beget more collaboration: both micro-collaborations as individuals within the group collaborate with each other and some collective action beyond the initial convening.

4. Everyone would find enough value in the convening that it could serve as a proof-of-concept: that we can collectively inspire the broader social justice and systems transformation field to support similarly curated future gatherings as a key intervention to build a world where everyone belongs.

I trusted that each individual would bring their own set of goals and aspirations; I really appreciated Lisa’s consistent invitation in the planning to continue to hold the question of “why are we gathered here.”

And intentions for me personally

To these goals I also had a set of intentions for how I wanted to show up personally. I had three:

1. The most enticing and difficult for me: let go of control. All the effort and countless hours I had put in to help create the container… it was now time for me to trust Lisa and the collective to hold it. Time for me to move from curator/convener to participant.

2. I also wanted to speak from curiosity and inquiry, not from knowledge. I felt a temptation to justify my presence as participant: a bit of imposter syndrome alongside people for whom I have such deep respect and admiration. I worked hard not to project that into the room, and instead to trust that I belonged.

3. I wanted to take up the right amount of space: not to expand into the entitlement of my socialized identities, but nor to shrink from sharing my fullest gifts. Always a work in progress.

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So… that’s the context: the invitation to Belonging @ Scale.

It was an incredible experience: without question the most holistically demanding experience of my professional life. Mind, body, heart, spirit, relational acuity: an invitation to bring my full capacities to bear. And utterly beautiful; dare I say transformative. Whether in deep discussion at our retreat space, over dinner in the city, or at an LGBT night club: people brought their full selves, and it was magnificent to witness and be part of.

I’m still processing and integrating much of what transpired, and the implications for I, We, and World. In my next post I will share how I’m processing… and will be inviting consent from my co-conveners to share with you in this forum: the question of who gets to chronicle history matters, and part of our shared commitment to belonging is how we tell a collaborative story from diverse perspectives.

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