Power is one of the deepest entanglements in social justice spaces, and one of the most complex and tender parts of our journey. If we see power as the other side of love, both essential to unleashing our collective potential to reimagine, disentangling it becomes essential to live into our desired futures. As a Community Catalyst, what’s my perspective on the work we’ve already done to reimagine power in the Community and what that remains to be done?
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“The Community Catalyst works to enhance the individual and collective potential of the Community.” This second field note is part of a series ‘Fieldnotes from a Community Catalyst’. These notes are all personal reflections made ‘in the midst of living’ within the Community - to help us and others keep on discussing, exploring and reimagining.
If centering relationships is about unleashing love to reimagine, then capability is about unleashing power. Imagination needs spaces not only filled with both love, but also power. They are two sides of the same coin.
“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength to bring about social, political, and economic change... What we need to realise is that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic.”
— Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here?, 1967
I want to share ways in which Reimagine Peace embraced the aspiration of shifting power to the edges of the system, the detailed work that we did to keep on working to transform power within the Community, and explore the potential gaps between aspirations and reality. What would it look and feel like to be in right relationship with power, and unleash as many authors of our future as possible?
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Reimagine Peace was born out of a commitment to shifting power—deeply inspired by the #ShiftThePower movement. A key part of the aspiration was resource redistribution: a $500,000 participatory ‘reimagine’ fund - to be designed, managed and implemented by peacebuilders and activists on the frontlines of forging alternative futures for peace. But the aspiration was not only about resources - It was also a political act. Resources buy time and space - for Community members to build relationships, co-strategise and stake a translocal claim on ‘global’ leadership.
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From within the Community, to make the most of this access to resource and potential for leadership, we’ve had to keep working to transform power - to deepen our individual understanding and awareness of how power continues to play out in invisible ways, and actively shape our culture and governance for all members to achieve their potential.
Exploring our intersectional identities and how they shaped our experiences in the Community—and in the world - was central. Inclusion wasn’t enough. - we need to increase our awareness of different experiences of power, and actively work to ensure all members were able to access the opportunities offered by the space. We learnt, I learnt, that depending on how you’ve experienced power beyond the Community, access to resource can feel like a weight. You may feel an added burden to prove yourself. It can be hard to trust your own agency, or believe you’re allowed to do things differently. To reimagine power, we need to acknowledge these dynamics with compassion and honesty. We need practices of self-awareness and mutual support. We need those who hold structural advantage to actively make space—and those who are marginalised by our systems to feel invited into full leadership.
We tried to translate this increased awareness into our culture. Our community agreements became a mirror and guide, encouraging us to:
-Use our power and privilege to mitigate power and privilege.
-Slow down.
-Pause for clarity.
-Name our intentions.
We‘ve thought carefully about how to integrate this understanding and these principles into the way we organise. In our approach to leadership, we started from the principle that everyone was equally compensated, regardless of geographic location, and, over time, integrated principles of solidarity in how we allocate resources. In selecting members for roles, we balanced an emphasis on experience and ‘expertise’ with a desire and commitment to learn. In decision-making, we’ve sought to be collectively led - but shifted what that means over time, and depending on context, balancing the desire for inclusion and building relationships through discussion, with the realisation that time itself, and availability for discussion, is another form of privilege. As we continue to evolve our structure, and understand more about the practices of reimagination, I’m sure how we seek to share and transform power will continue to evolve.
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And still I’m left with a feeling that more is possible - that power is not only to be shifted and transformed, but also unleashed - enabling more creativity, more agency, more interconnection.
I have felt acutely aware of my many privileges throughout this journey, my whiteness, my home in the Global North. Knowing how to use that power in service of unleashing others’ power has not always been easy. Sometimes I’ve frozen, afraid to get it wrong, rather than embracing what could be possible. And I feel that weight in yearning for something more. What else can I not see?
But there are images and ideas that point to something different being possible. One activist participating in the initial imaginaries process in Reimagine Peace imagined a future in which power was a circle—each person’s power reinforcing and amplifying the others’, in a regenerative cycle.
What if that future were now?
What if power as something sacred and shared?
What if we each could feel our own agency, and know it adds to—not takes from—the collective?
Whilst I’m not sure what that looks like, I hope this is where our exploration leads. And we’re able to start shaping the collective future we want by unleashing as many creative authors of that future as we can.
What inspired and inspires me (and might inspire you):
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