The Density of Our Being: Why the Mission Can’t Hold It All
Reclaiming Relational Belonging and non-transactional care in an extractive world.
In the waning days of summer, a friend and I drove 90 minutes each way to a quaint beach town on the Jersey shore. It had been a while since we’d spent 1-on-1 time together. One of the marks of deep friendship is the ability to return to each other as if no time had passed. With no screens, watching the strong ocean current from under her umbrella, we just spent hours talking - intimately, with laughter, vulnerability, and openness to learn from one another.
My friend and I both do movement work. Sometimes we work together. We spend our work days with clients strategizing, mobilizing resources, and strengthening leadership primarily within nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. Of course we talked about work during our beach day, but it wasn’t about the tasks.
We talked about the struggle and joys of our interior selves as it relates to the work. What healing do we need? Do we believe healing is possible while involved in labor fighting against racialized capitalism, chronic underresourcing of mostly women of color-led organizations, and building a future of cooperation and solidarity? How do our partners and children respond to us now? In what ways is our generation experiencing womanhood that is different from our mothers’? And ultimately, where do we want to eat dinner tonight?
Mostly, we were just being together, finding relational belonging with one another. At its core, relational belonging is built on love, shared joy, and mutual care. It is about being with people - connecting, weaving ourselves together through heart, story, experience, and trust. Relational belonging abides in relationships of reciprocity where we give capacity and uplift each other’s spirits. Relational belonging does not require labor all of the time. It does require being most of the time.
When we dwell with someone relationally, we are not being transactional. We don’t have to show up ready to martyr ourselves or distort who we are to belong.
Primarily, we experience relational belonging, if we are so fortunate, in our families, amongst friends, neighbors, worship spaces, and in mutuality. Here, we can lay down the capes, titles, and masks to just be.
For many people, there is an expectation or hope that relational belonging is possible with those we labor alongside. When we show up to a volunteer shift or to the job that gives us a paycheck, many of us have been told that we should show up with our whole selves - flaws and all. We extend what belongs to our intimate circles—our people—to the sites of our labor.
I am going to say something that many people won’t agree with and that might sound harsh. I claim it as my truth after three decades of working across different kinds of organizations that wanted pieces of me or all of me. If we give the mission of the organization all of our relationality, we eventually begin to lose our functionality. If we show up to movement work as though our lives are on the line for the mission, eventually, one way or the other (with or without intent) they will be.
We constantly confuse relationality or being, with organizing, campaign labor, or crisis management.
The cost of this confusion is significant. And, I am not blaming anyone for this. Despite our best efforts, our organizations often mimic the productivity and transactional driven rhythms of late stage capitalism falling apart. Even when we promise that our movement homes are sites of relational belonging, they cannot contain our being most of the time.
We see this when a leader has no place to grieve at work except a bathroom stall. We experience this when we do check-ins, welcoming everyone’s burden only to put it in the room (or on the bike rack if we are lucky) and move right on to the agenda. We lead this way when we sacrifice our well-being for the mission and design workplace wellness policies that triage the leaks rather than prevent the harms caused by the organization.
If relational belonging actually belonged within the organization, our places of labor would function much differently. What is overabundantly available to us within the work of social justice, however, is functional belonging.
Functional belonging requires transaction, scopes of work, job descriptions, decision-making matrices, copy machines, laptops, marketplace skills, and is problem-solving focused. The functions are best utilized when they are undergirded with values of justice, equity, democracy, and even love.
Belonging in this way is bounded and fixed. Individuals are expected to move in and out of relationships of functional belonging with organizations and people. We are in our functional belonging in service of the mission.
Although a generation of us have been convinced to the contrary, organizations do not require the density of our human being-ness to be containers of deep care and even love. We need durable organizations that affirm the dignity of each person involved so that they can provide functional labor sustainably.
When the organization is recognized as the structure through which people labor towards a common goal, it can be designed to uphold boundaries that provide ways for leaders and staff to give their best within healthy constraints of the mission rather than the overflow of their relational belonging. We should not expect workplaces to be sites deserving of all our relational capacities. It cannot return to us what only that inner orbit of relational belonging is designed to provide.
Now, is there room for relational belonging within our organizations? I am hopeful that there is. However, the conditions of most of our organizations cannot adequately or justly provide the container for it. We have to stop treating people as tools for the mission and start treating the organization as a container for the people.
In the next article, I’ll explore ways that movement organizations are well on their way to weaving relational and functional belonging. After that, I anticipate one more article in this series about belonging, which is Universal Belonging - what ties all of the other ways (elemental, personal, relational, and functional) together.
In the meantime, may you have all that you need to protect your overflow.
Comments