This week I was at Haley Farm for the third intergenerational gathering hosted by the National Council of Elders since 2021.  The Council began in 2011 to bring together movement leaders of the 20th Century with those emerging today.  The Council says:

“We, of the National Council of Elders, dream of new worlds. We have helped bring to life the movements that have enriched our humanity over the past 70 years. Yet we know that we have a long way to go to create relations based on peace, love, and mutual responsibility. In 2012 we gathered in Greensboro, North Carolina and wrote a “living Declaration” pledging to “be faithful to our own history” and to undertake with younger generations to do “everything in our power” to bring a greater measure of justice, equality, and peace to our country and to our world.” 

We focused the conversations on the state of our movement, especially the contradictions emerging in an atmosphere of increasing individualism, call outs, and push outs. We explored what we mean by movement. How do we understand the practices, cultures, people, and collectives that are moving in the same general direction for change, but reflect different ways of working and knowing?

Everyone agreed that even with those of us most aligned with the concept of revolutionary change, the internal challenges we face are as critical to address as the external threats posed by an increasingly repressive and violent regime. We asked, how do we move together in new ways, while taking care of each other and ourselves? What is the role of organization now? What is the role of organizers? What kinds of organizational structures do we need today?  What does the idea of healing justice contribute to our understanding of how we organize? What do we mean by radical love and spirit rooted activism?

To explore these questions, we emphasized the power of stories. We looked to moments in the past where we faced conflicts and contradictions, pressures and repressions.  We hoped that out of our collective stories, shaped by our practices in the past, we would open new ways of thinking about what is possible to create.

People told stories of organizing Freedom Schools and voter registration in the South. Others offered stories of organizing today in the context of large nonprofits. People from rural areas challenged us to think about the unique vulnerabilities they face due to isolation and distances. There were stories of confronting violence against indigenous communities and organizing against attacks on women and the transgender community. We talked about the importance of Stop Cop City as an example of counter narratives and the value of public declarations of solidarity.

In all these stories we saw how contradictions can strengthen us and give us deeper understandings of our own humanity. We explored the role of shared values in helping us overcome interpersonal conflicts and of finding ways to call upon our visions for freedom to remind us of what we share and of our efforts to create new ways of being that bring out our best selves.

We talked about specific tools: the use of music and song to connect us, immersive experiences to deepen our ties to each other, transparency in decision making, intentional agreements, and building learning organizations that anticipate conflict. We looked at the importance of narrative, counternarrative, and new languages.

Central to all the discussions was the importance of creating spaces to talk and tell our own stories. We saw these practices as essential for creating the kind of cultures that provide a context for working through conflict and generating the strategies and tactics we need to transform our futures.

We left the gathering space with a deeper understanding of the contributions of Black feminists to our ideas of healing justice. Their work helped us frame healing justice as a “political strategy of collective care and safety that intervenes on generational trauma from systemic violence and oppression.”

 Amid all the contradictions we face as the larger economic and political systems are collapsing, we better understand our journey of intentionally, thoughtfully, centering love and hope at the core of our political practice.