On Relationships & Community
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
"Hosting is inevitably an exercise of power. In gatherings, once your guests have chosen to come into your kingdom, they want to be governed -- gently, respectfully, and well. ... Protecting your guests is about elevating the right to a great collective experience above anyone's right to ruin that experience."
Priya Parker
Boundaries Can Be Love
"...he wasn't, at least in the moment, going to shift -- and without a shift I couldn't continue to engage. I focused instead on what need I longed for and strategized on how to otherwise get that need met. There are degrees of engagement. Boundaries [are] the distance at which I could love me and you simultaneously."
Prentis Hemphill, in Holding Change
by adrienne maree brown
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
"A good team is made up of people who complement each other. Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea. Ideas come from people. The focus on people -- their work habits, their talents, their values -- is absolutely central to any creative venture."
Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace
The Dispossessed
"We know that there is no help for us, but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. All you have is what you are, and what you give. … You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."
Ursula K. Le Guin
Falling Back in Love with Being Human
"Know that you are not alone, never alone. Even in those moments when the world seems to open its mouth to swallow you whole, when the daylight burns with bigotry and the night is full of teeth, know that we are here. When you close your eyes, when you weep, when you wonder where to run, call for me. I will be here.”
Kai Cheng Thom
The Four Parts of Accountability &
How to Give a Genuine Apology
"We need to move away from 'holding people accountable' and instead work to support people to proactively take accountability for themselves. Say something the moment you know you've made a mistake, caused hurt or harm, or acted out of alignment with your values. We should be forthcoming about our mistakes, rather than hoping no one finds out what we've done."
Mia Mingus
Management in a Changing World: How to Manage for Equity, Inclusion, and Results
"An under-appreciated source of a strong culture is integrity: simple alignment between what you say and what you do, over and over. Consistent follow-through by managers and leaders, on big things and small, can have a bigger impact on building trust than elaborate team outings. Say what you mean, mean what you say, and do what you say you will."
Jakada Imani, Monna Wong & Bex Ahuja
Managing to Change the World: The Nonprofit Manager's Guide to Getting Results
"The best managers we've seen aren't wimps or tyrants but are simply normal, assertive people. Be yourself and don't overthink it. If you use humor in your personal life, don't be afraid to use it in your work life too. If you're on the quiet side, you don't need to lead office cheers. Just be normal."
Allison Green and Jerry Hauser
Reinventing Organizations: An Illustrated Invitation to Join the Conversation on Next-Stage Organizations
"Speaking our truth, giving voice to our deepest hopes and longings feels risky ... because in many work places, it is risky. Being in community is not easy. ... The friction of working with others brings up wonderful possibilities to reclaim aspects of who we are that we have neglected or pushed into the shadows."
Frederic Laloux
On Practicing Change
The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution
"Revolutionaries are made, not born. Bringing about change is something all of us can do. We don't have to be the hero when we join. You become the hero through practice. It's not that I'm a bold person. It's that I practice being bold. All of us can practice that. I'm actually a really shy person, with bold moments."
Phyllis Jackson,
to Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams
The City We Became
"Nothing human beings do is set in stone--and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to. People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are. ... The world might be awful, but we don't have to like it that way."
N. K. Jemisin
Critical Ecology
"We are as fucked as people are unwilling to change. Because it is our behavior and our ways of thinking and our ways of treating other people that metastasize into systems of oppression. And those systems of oppression have allowed us to indiscriminately toss people off of their land, to pull fossil fuels out of the ground at rates that make no fucking sense, and that all comes from people’s willingness to be like, “What am I willing to change about the way that I operate?”
Dr. Suzanne Pierre, on Ologies podcast
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
"So many of our organizations working for social change are structured in ways that reflect the status quo. I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do. ... I regularly check in with my vision for our collective future and make adjustments on how I am living, what I am practicing, to be aligned with that future, to make it more possible."
adrienne maree brown
LeVar Burton Reads podcast
"We resist [change], don't we? But if we are able to embrace the change while maintaining our center, that’s when we know we are really living with our eyes and our hearts wide open and our feet firmly planted on the ground...even when the ground is moving."
LeVar Burton, in response to
"Waystation City," by A.T. Greenblatt
Loving Corrections
"Accountability is often discussed as something that lives outside of us. ... The actual processes of being accountable involve slow work, growth work, work to undo and learn and become more self-aware, learning how to make an authentic apology, and being willing to accept appropriate consequences. This doesn't move at the speed of social media, it moves at the speed of one human, changing."
adrienne maree brown
A Promised Land
"I saw firsthand the power our example exerted on the hearts and minds of people... But with that came a corollary lesson: an awareness of what we risked when our actions failed to live up to our image and our ideals, the anger and resentment this could breed, the damage that was done."
Barack Obama
Something to Food About: Exploring Creativity with Innovative Chefs
"There are day-to-day decisions that add up. If you actually give a shit, do something, even if it's a tiny pickax on a mountain. ... It's about redirecting the culture, about creating an alternative, about creating a way out of the dead end that's there now."
Daniel Patterson, in conversation with Questlove
What If I Say the Wrong Thing? 25 Habits for Culturally Effective People
"Don't mourn the good ol' days. If we say we support diversity, we have to accept that difference is going to look and sound different than what we have become accustomed to. Our attitude needs to be to embrace that difference even if it requires us to make adjustments and learn new skills."
Vernā Myers
Just Cuz
The Believer magazine
"How are humans having hope when the evidence suggests we should not have hope at all? The planet is dying. Women’s rights are being destroyed. And yet people are finding hope still. Where does that come from? Is it sad that we have to have hope? Or is it great?"
Miguel Arteta, interviewed by Aubrey Plaza
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
"On a day like this, when the fiddleheads are unfurling and the air is petal soft, I am awash in longing. ... Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow's edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun."
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Rest Is Sacred: Reclaiming Our Brilliance through the Practice of Stillness
"You are worth the effort it takes
to rest, dream, remember, and become.
You are worth the time it takes
to reconnect to your imagination
in a world that sells prepackaged dreams. ...
You found a doorway to untapped potential.
Now the sky is your floor."
Octavia F. Raheem
Small Things Like These
"The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been -- which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life."
Claire Keegan
Photo of Benita by Sarah Deragon