Thinking Together

 - Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Founder and Director

Thinking is essential in the work of social change, and resisting injustice, inequity, and violence.  ILI advisor Elizabeth Minnich calls it a matter of life and death.[1]  Our work at the ILI is to generate innovative strategies for change; we can’t do that without thinking.  Actually, we can’t do it without thinking together.

This newsletter is part of our thinking together.  As I write, I am keenly aware that you will read it and think about it, that you may share it with friends and colleagues. So, it really does feel like I’m offering just one voice to a collective conversation.  

I think, sometimes for hours on end, with ILI advisors, and associates. The ILI Board of Stewards thinks together.  In the six schools where we implement our Equity Scholar in Residence model, educators thinking together with the ESR. I think with district leaders, and school boards.  I think with organizational partners as well.

When we think together in the ILI community, we learn, we are surprised by new insights, and often moved to tears.  But thinking is not enough. Learning is not enough.  Being moved is not enough. To make good on its importance, thinking together needs to drive change.

Every other week, Intersections readers email to say they’re changing, as a result of thinking about these newsletters. They report that they’re changing the way they behave at work, in meetings, in governance, in family, in day-to-day interaction with people they meet.

They’re more compassionate and curious. They stop calling names, and start being strategic in their responses to fear.    They respond with care to honest ignorance.  They get more resilient so they can take in how they have caused harm. They become more accountable. They take deep breaths, accept that this is all about practice, trying and learning and trying again. 

That’s real change, and it comes from thinking together.  Change has come out of thinking together in real-time conversations, too.  Educators who think together with the ILI Equity Scholar in schools have changed curriculum, practice, policies, and traditions as a result. They respond more quickly and effectively to inequity. They behave in ways that ensure all students can thrive.

Thinking with advisors and partners raises questions about status quo concepts and change strategies.  Lately I’ve been thinking with several advisors about the notion of community as applied to whole swaths of people. We’re asking, Is there really such a thing as a BIBOC community?  An LGBTQIA community?  If not – why do those ideas persist?  What purpose do they serve, and for whom?

Our partners and advisors and associates are noticing that there are few strategies available to meet and mitigate resistance to social equity, both organized and impulsive.  Thinking together about that has changed the way we work. It has changed the way I talk about equity.

My perspective on change is shaped by systems thinking: systems change when their parts change. Change parts with intention, systems change in intended ways.   In other words, when I change my behavior, I change the system.   Others think of change more as a shift in collective consciousness. Others think of change as linear, one domino driving the next.

Either way, when thinking together yields insights that change behavior, and when that behavior means more people thrive, in increasing peace, that’s cause for hope.

I thought a lot in this year’s newsletter about hope, and about despair. I was reminded that hope, as attorney and activist Bryan Stephenson often says, is a “superpower,” absolutely essential to the work of human rights and equity. I was reminded that despair can be weaponized to quash hope.  Considered this way, I was reminded that hope is an act of resistance.   If nothing else comes of thinking together, the act of hoping is sometimes enough.

We often thinking of our work at the ILI in terms of new programs, models, and services.  That’s not all of it though.  It’s also thinking together.

In one newsletter this year I wrote about circles of action, how it doesn’t require power or organizing skills to create change.  Schools, organizations, and communities change when the people in them change.

Over 400 people subscribe to this newsletter.   We work with hundreds of educators.  Between our Board, advisors and associates, there are over 30 of us driving the work of the ILI. We think with research participants, clients, and colleagues in other non-profits.

That’s hundreds of people, thinking together and changing the way they behave. That, as a friend of mine often says, is not nothing.  It’s a lot.

Thank you for being part of our work.  Thank you for helping create the critical, necessary, urgent change of more people thriving in evermore peace. 

[1] The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking. (2019)   You can also listen to Dr. Minnich speak about these ideas here.