The Right to Belong to the Ecosystem of Our Own Lives While We Fight and Build

Throughout my career I have had a fascination with the relationships between people in organizations. Not the kind that you might get in trouble for with HR.  Rather, I’ve been curious about how individuals and teams work together (or don’t) to meet goals and make change.  

Most of my work and figuring out of this has been in the nonprofit sector.  For nearly fifteen years I’ve prioritized relationality - aka the association of people (for the co-op heads reading this!)- in my work as a co-op developer, executive director, board member, and organizational development consultant. 

Within this time frame, the connections between leaders, communities they serve, and the organizations they run have also sparked deeper focus in my work.  I have figured out some things and still have lots of questions though.  The more I learn, the more I realize that these three keep floating untethered.  And, that alone, they don’t allow us to be whole. Each one is not enough unto itself.  And, we need more to whole.

Groundedness to Earth and being held by Spirit are essential to moving through these intersections to build systemic durability - the process of mapping an organization's true human capacity and aligning it with affirmed values, principles, and strategic goals. When all are present, belonging is deepened and supported.  An ecosystem can thrive and be durable. 

I am learning, along with many of you, how to listen to the land and how to trust the unseen as I strive to play my role in making the world a little bit better. 

Our movements are not the structures we incorporate as or organize within.  Our movements are not the people they serve nor the individuals who founded the organizations.  Our movements are a living, breathing, creating, dying, and regenerative ecosystem that must prioritize belonging. 

Welcome to the inaugural issue of my new mini newsletter series:

Belonging and the Ecosystem of Systemic Durability

The Origin of Our Exhaustion 

Since stepping into a role as a nonprofit executive director nearly a decade ago and leaving it five years ago, I have looked at surviving nonprofit and movement leadership as striving to build some kind of personal shield, a way to be protected while trying to come home to one’s self.  

In stolen and colonized places all around the world, many of us (particularly those of us who have borne the brunt of the suffering that made the theft possible) know that capitalism and the cruelty of land theft are part of the origins of our collective exhaustion.  Hundreds of years since it began, we continue to inherit and pass down too much of a world that thrives on extraction and disposal to make survival possible.  

From the context of my work, I believe that we honor the primacy of the structure, the organization, the institution, the business over the lives of the people it serves and who hold it up. Here, human beings exist as units for production to win something, fight again, sometimes build, and change industries if we figure out how to escape. 

Our dependency on burnout, fracture, and productivity has resulted in a poverty that’s not just about the slow moving and unjust distribution of money.  For many people, we have been disconnected from our own human dignity as individuals and communities, unbeknownst to ourselves.  We have struggled to claim our right to belong to the ecosystem of our own lives as well as to one another. 

To stop funding the mission with our own exhaustion, I believe we must tend to where we belong.  There may be more, but I’ve come to identify five ways of belonging as essential to wholeness and thriving. 

The 5 Ways of Belonging 

I. Elemental Belonging

Before we are leaders, we are biological organisms made up of elements.  Too many of us are depleting our bodies by trying to follow the production cycle and ticking clocks. Each our bodies is a seed in the ecosystem that needs love and care to grow and become our potentiality.

II. Personal belonging

By birth, we are endowed with autonomy of conscience, thought, and emotion.  We are creative beings that need opportunities to know our own hearts and minds. You must belong to yourself before you can healthily belong to a mission.

III. Relational belonging

This may be our favorite place to belong, right?  Being with and in service of community is why so many of us are in social justice work.  In community, we cooperate, hold ways of expressing communal determination, and joy. In movement spaces we are brilliant at this—we hold the circles and guide our communities through crises.

But when personal and/or elemental belonging are compromised, we enter relational belonging as a martyr.  Showing up to the community depleted is not how we get free.  We must learn, collectively, how to be present to other of belonging. 

IV. Functional Belonging

For many of us, this is the co-op, the nonprofit, or the social justice mission.  Sadly, too many of our organizations mimic the constant syncopated rhythms of the capitalist systems we aim to fight.  We see this when a leader has no place to grieve except a bathroom stall. 

Natural cycles are present.  Natural rhythms are plenty and diverse.  We can mirror those instead within our organizations. This allows us to stop treating people as tools for the mission, and start treating the organization as a container for the people.

V. Universal Belonging

We belong to the thousands of generations that came before us, the possibility of many that come after us, and the Creator or Source. Our universality holds, envelops, and protects  all of the other ways of belonging.  Here we are sacred and an expression of the sacred. 

Our work is not about deadlines, reports, and protests.  Our work is about aligning all of creation with Spirit in love, care, and peace.

To have systemic durability, we have to move beyond simply surviving our jobs. More of us must lead the challenging work of transformation that includes returning to ancestral ways of being, visioning what we want our contributions to be for those coming after us, and being present and active in our creative gifts to make new ways. 

I’m not committing to a rhythm for this exploration with you.  However, I am committing to sharing an article about each path of belonging throughout the summer.  I also am practicing how to set boundaries and listen to the rhythms of my personal belonging.  That means that I can’t do a weekly newsletter and with the way summer goes, I shouldn’t do bi-weekly either!  

So, next time the newsletter will be about Elemental Belonging.  In the meantime, please subscribe to my Seed and Structure website to stay in the loop.  You’ll receive occasional updates, resources, and insights, including this newsletter. 

Wishing you a joyful entry to summer!