The First Director’s Message
Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director
Note: this is the directors message from our first issue of Intersections, our bi-weekly newsletter. The newsletter includes a message from the director (also in posted on this blog), resources to support liberatory change, and news about the ILI and ILI People.
Click here to access the Intersections archive.
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Welcome to the ILI community. With this first newsletter, we're "going public" with our work and our mission to create opportunities for change-makers to meet at the intersections of thinking, action, and connection to experiment and learn together and generate strategies for a more just future. We're glad you're here to think with us.
These are challenging, anxious times. The air is full of who’s to blame and what to do, with dire predictions of what’s to come. But a future without light is not the only possibility before us; in other words, we can hope.
Hope is not the same as optimism, which can be a mirage, the finish line wavering in the heat just ahead, fooling us into inaction. Hope says, there is no finish line, but keep going, because the only thing certain is change, and an honest look at the course of history affirms that liberation may not be just around the corner, but liberatory change is happening right now, happened yesterday, and will happen tomorrow.
Hope is the seedbed, though - it’s not the garden. The movement for Black civil rights in the 1950s and 60s didn’t come out of hope alone, or even just determination; its leaders studied for years to create its grounding in non-violent civil disobedience. The movement lasted and worked, and became the basis for social justice movements to come, because of that careful thinking, ongoing discipline and innovating strategies. Throughout, activists turned to each other to reflect on themselves and their work, and to support one another.
The Institute for Liberatory Innovation is founded on the belief that effective social change requires a constant return to learning, re-imagining old strategies, trying out new ones. Activists need to come together, collaborate and partner to imagine innovative strategies for change.
History has shown us that liberatory change grows from intersections of thinking, action, and connection. The Institute for Liberatory Innovation will create those intersections; we have already begun bringing people together to experiment, to learn from and with each other, to reckon with the past, and to generate strategies for a more just future.
This is urgent work, because history also tells us that fear, greed, and the pernicious beliefs and structures that drive systemic oppression will work hard against any change that promises liberation. Without the sustenance of learning, thinking and changing together, we won’t sustain ourselves and our spirits for the long haul.
Whatever happens next, and then next again, will continue to call on us to keep moving and learning together. The work of the ILI is to make that possible.
We hope you’ll join us.