On Stewarding Love & Liberation
Some reflections from 15 years of dreaming & fighting for structural justice.
I stare at towering palm trees and rolling hills carpeted by dense emerald shrub. Behind me, men take dips in holy water. It feels surreal to be back at the same ashram where, 15 years ago, I received the Skype call that changed my life: A job offer at United Nations headquarters in New York City.
At 25, I had struggled with the ashram’s teachings, which centered on personal transformation as the path to social transformation, and was relieved to have an excuse to leave. I remember debating the swami: With so much suffering all around us, why should I work on myself? I’m fine. Instead of just sitting here and meditating, shouldn’t we spend our time trying to fight injustice?
That Skype call appeared like a dare from the universe: Alright, let’s see how far that logic gets you. My first UN assignment: To defend child rights in Iraq, during the Iraq War.
I packed my bags, bid my flummoxed swami goodbye, and soon found myself in NYC and preparing to move to Jordan. Fifteen years flies by. I didn’t last long in that job, for I was young and impatient. I had felt vexed by the limitations of a massive bureaucracy, and was curious what other routes might yield. So at 27, with little experience but ample idealism, I left to co-found an organization, Reboot. Our mission: To fight for structural justice by amplifying the voices and dreams of those who have been systematically excluded from power.
It has been an extraordinary journey. Over 13 years, we worked alongside communities fighting for dignity in over 30 countries, architecting Presidential Initiatives for human rights, supporting global movements to decolonize knowledge, standing with journalists fighting for press freedom, helping launch a media innovation lab, and running national programs for electoral integrity, public health, and more. Through it all, we learned a lot about the politics and process of social transformation.
This week, we shut our doors. Reboot was always but a vehicle to drive change on issues we cared about, and to study and practice different ways of doing so. And our ambitions and curiosities eventually outgrew this container. In recent years, we contemplated various paths for transition, including several acquisition offers, ultimately deciding on an intentional wind-down. This official announcement marks the end of this road.
While I’m immensely proud of what our team accomplished, this is not a celebratory trip-down-memory-lane kind of post. Reboot consistently punched above our weight, but enumerating wins and performing success serves no one. I hadn’t planned on writing a reflection piece, but somehow the stars aligned to bring me back to Southern India where it all began, and these whispering trees have a way of opening the heart. Out of mine spills questions: What do I wish I’d known at the start? What more could we have done? Given our positionality, where should we have moved differently? How might our lessons and missteps inform forward struggles for structural justice?
I pose these not for the sake of theory or self-flagellation, but because anyone engaged in social justice work has a responsibility to interrogate how we show up. We must consistently ask hard questions of ourselves — for what is at stake is not just metrics, egos, careers, grants. The real stakes are the lives and hopes of those screwed over by our intersecting crises of capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. The real stakes are the lives and hopes of those who deserve so much more life and so much more hope.
So what follows are some lessons from the past 15 years, the result of one human grappling with what it means to be human in a world that keeps simultaneously breaking and expanding our hearts. I don’t pretend to have any unique insight or moral authority, I simply offer these in the spirit of learning in public, and as a love letter to those picking up the baton. I hope they can be helpful to someone else finding their way.
1. Bridge inside-outside strategies, but be vigilant about cooptation.
From the jump, Reboot’s work was rooted in inside-outside strategies. We knew that elite global institutions — from G20 governments to the Bretton Woods bodies to the world’s largest NGOs — were instruments of a corrupt world order that directed and abetted structural violence. Yet as young idealists, we believed that we could hack these institutions.
Take the global “development” sector: In 2022, there was $204 billion spent in overseas development assistance, plus $70 billion from private philanthropy. This is a pittance compared to the resources the Global North extracts from the Global South — yet, to us, it was a worthy site of contest. Much of these resources are tied to neocolonial agendas, reserved for Western contractors, or simply misspent. How might we redirect them to uplift communities long marginalized? Was it even possible to wield such power in service of true justice?
We settled on entryism as our political strategy: Alongside radical comrades, we would infiltrate powerful institutions with the mandates, resources, and infrastructure to effect change at massive scale. And we did. For 13 years, we worked with grassroots collectives, activists, and movement groups, and orchestrated collaborations, co-creations, and negotiations with governments, international agencies, bilateral donors, multilateral development banks, leading philanthropies, and Fortune 500 companies.
For many, it may have seemed incongruous, but it made sense to me. I was just as passionate about organizing with comrades who believed in burning it all down as I was working with lifelong bureaucrats on the minutiae of legislative reform. Both were essential.
Many turn their noses up at “inside work” — it’s boring, compromised, incrementalist, too slow. And that is all true. But this sneering attitude has undermined the power of our movements, and helped fuel the rise of our opponents.
In Democracy in Chains, historian Nancy MacLean details the rise of the U.S. radical right. Her narrative centers around the partnership between libertarian billionaire Charles Koch and economist James McGill Buchanan. Koch wanted to organize fellow industrialists to “save capitalism from democracy” but recognized that since they were vastly outnumbered, the only way his movement could gain power was to “use their knowledge of ‘the rules of the game’ — that game being how modern democratic governance works — to create winning strategies.” The financier found a partner in Buchanan, whose understood how to shift society “with detailed rules that made most people’s eyes glaze over.” Buchanan understood that in the boring fine print, he could achieve transformation by increments that few would notice, because “most people have no patience for minutiae”.
The impact of this alliance on our governing institutions is clear: By 1990, more than 40 percent of sitting federal judges had participated in a Koch-backed training program on how to apply free market economics to legal decision-making. Recent Supreme Court decisions — like last year’s West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which profoundly undermines the government’s ability to address climate catastrophe — are the results of their cunning long game.
Many leftists, however, seem allergic to building and working through institutions. Take Occupy Wall Street, a movement to challenge the greed, corruption, and inequality wrought by sociopaths like Koch. As Jonathan Smucker observes, while OWS was successful in aligning a long-fragmented political left, and engaging far broader audiences, it was deeply ambivalent and even hostile towards the notion of building and wielding power, leadership, and organization. This hesitation was its demise.
This suspicion of power is understandable: We see corrupt institutions, and fear being corrupted ourselves. We fear the dilution of our agendas and the cooptation of our comrades. For under hypercapitalism, those with economic power get to set the frame and those without then spend inordinate energy pushing back — and we only have so much energy. But within fundamentally conservative, incrementalist frames, how radical can we really be?
If we want to reframe the terms of debate, we must seize power. It is precisely because of the shortcomings of institutional power that we must engage with it — with appropriate caution, rigour, and accountability practices — and build alternatives. For we need the passion and conviction of our activists and the resources and infrastructure of our technocrats. The art lies in sequencing and diplomacy: Understanding who to pull in when, and managing egos when those used to calling the shots are asked to take a backseat.
This is the only way to resource and build structures around our most radical visions, and to do so at the scale our current crises demand of us.
2. Mind the boring details.
I’m just going to say it: Reboot was poorly structured for the type of change I aspired to. (Note the “I” and not “we” here. Every organization is comprised of individuals with different interests; here, as with this entire post, I’m simply speaking from my own perspective.)
We were a hastily set up limited liability company (LLC), headquartered in New York City, doing work around the world, with a culture tainted by white supremacy values, led by an immigrant founder reliant on various visas.
Let’s break it down:
Legal Structure: I had been nominally based in America for two years when we registered Reboot. My previous experience as a freelance journalist, researcher, and UN worker had given me zero experience with U.S. legal entities. My co-founder, an American, was eager to move quickly and proposed an LLC, explaining it was the fastest, easiest way to get up and running. I was uncertain, and asked about the possibility of nonprofit or cooperative structures, but was quickly dismissed — ”they’re too messy”. Believing that operations “weren’t my thing”, I let myself be convinced. Our operating agreement was drafted by an early staff member who had gone to law school but had never actually practiced law. Eager to get to the real work, I signed a bunch of paperwork, trusting that others with more knowledge of law, finance, and accounting had created a solid structure. It was off to the races.
I’ll spare you the gory aftermath, but the short version: This was all incredibly stupid on my part. Those decisions in the first 3 months of Reboot have handicapped my life and work for the last 13 years.
In hindsight, the structure best suited for what I wanted to explore would likely have been a fiscally sponsored nonprofit, then perhaps a 501(c)(3) as we matured. This would have freed us to focus on our own programming and do much less fee-for-service work. Which is not to idolize nonprofits — there are limitations with any structure — but for what I wanted to explore, it made more sense. Instead, we were constantly working to convince other organizations with their own philosophies to adopt ours; we did alright at this, but it was a roundabout way of pursuing our agenda. (There were, of course, benefits, e.g. a lot more “inside” access and influence.) Over the years, we kept exploring ways to establish a hybrid organization, but it never got traction. For- and non-profit approaches to strategy-setting, staffing, fundraising, and execution are fundamentally different, and the legal and administrative requirements of running a hybrid were just too cumbersome for an organization of our size.
Later, when there were disagreements on direction, our poorly drafted governance documents — the fault of us founders, not of the person we asked to draft them — gave us little recourse, leading to years of destabilizing tussles. The resolution was painful and expensive, and sucked an enormous amount of energy.
Location: Reboot was headquartered in New York City — in the early years, out of my apartment, then in three different offices across Manhattan and Brooklyn. We also had an office in Abuja, Nigeria, and temporary field studios wherever we did longer-term research or implementation work. The problem, shocking to no one, is that being based in one of the world’s most expensive cities — globally, NYC ranks third in average salaries — and doing work primarily in the majority world made no sense.
Because I cared about the work, I wanted to bring on the best people. Yet because I cared about righting inequity, I felt hypocritical asking funders and partners to pay the rates of a NYC-based organization. The arguments were flimsy at best: Because this is where I happened to live when I started it. Because Western staff could engage with them in culturally familiar ways, and write the reports they needed to defend their own jobs. But as an executive director that needed to make payroll every two weeks, I did it anyway.
The truth is that the resources should have been spent elsewhere. Sure, we always partnered with local organizations. And sure, intermediaries can be valuable. But that is true only if we recognize that they’re temporary stopgaps as we meaningfully shift resources to the places and communities suffering most from structural injustice. Of course, we were a tiny drop in the ocean and not unique in the field. But the ache of hypocrisy never left me. For we were yet another tool keeping money, knowledge, and power in the rich world, in ways that maintained its inhabitants’ comfort, privilege, and sense of importance.
On a panel, I was once asked about how to truly change who sets agendas. I suggested a two-pronged program to support those in positions of power to “get out of the way”: basic income to meet their security needs, and counseling to untangle their egos from their work. A think tank actually reached out to explore partnering on building out such an experiment. I laughed and explained that the comment had been in jest. But sometimes I wonder if I should’ve taken them up on it.
Early Culture: Our early team was majority white. Given our roots were in international “development”, this may not be surprising. The sector is structurally racist, rooted in neocolonialism masquerading as charity, and leadership and peer nonprofits have long been predominantly white. I now see how our early culture was rooted in white supremacy values: a constant sense of urgency, worship of the written word, the belief that progress is bigger and more, and fear of open conflict. I was key in perpetuating these dynamics: As the first in my family to have access to the spaces we were moving in, I had no idea how to carry myself — so I mimicked others. I thought these behaviours were what it meant to be a professional.
As Toni Morrison reminds us, racism keeps us answering other people’s questions. Our early culture meant that for a long time, we were bound up in the wrong questions. Over time, our staff and collaborators became incredibly diverse, but foundational norms are hard to shake. While it took time and effort, including me going on my own learning journey and many difficult conversations, things eventually shifted — but still within limits, given the cultural and political contexts within which we were embedded. Maurice Mitchell’s “Building Resilient Organizations” is essential reading to understand and help address many of the dynamics we grappled with, and that I continue to see among peers.
Immigration: This is a niche point, but for all my fellow immigrant founders: Think carefully about the intersections between your legal status and your work. Each situation is unique, but mine, in short, is I’ve been on four different employer-sponsored U.S. visas, all tied to the UN or Reboot. When disagreements arose in the latter, it put me in a very difficult position. I’d entrusted people with an interest in my professional performance (and not necessarily my personal well-being) for immigration advice; in hindsight, I should have sought my own counsel. The impacts on Reboot and I were wide-ranging, and included limitations on the type of funding we were eligible for, on how I organized and participated in protests, and on my ability to pursue other interests. Last year, I finally received a green card, which thankfully opened a new world of possibilities.
I’ve found there is often reluctance and even shame in raising this topic, perhaps because as immigrants, many of us are conditioned to keep our heads down and “be grateful to be here”. I never mentioned it to funders or partners, and certainly not to staff outside of HR, for fear of being labeled a vulnerability. I realized too late how this orientation undermined us all. (I’m glad to see funders like Unshackled Ventures acknowledging the unique risks immigrant founders take and providing appropriate support.)
3. Care for yourself as much as you care for the work.
I started Reboot at age 27. Within seven years, we had been entrusted with architecting White House initiatives, implementing seven-figure programs, and doing delicate work in conflict zones and in after natural disasters. Consumed by a desire to Make Change, I had little regard for my own well-being. The criminal amounts of inequity we stared down daily felt unbearable, and I was desperate to do anything to make it stop — this led to a belief that I was both invincible and insignificant.
I jumped into situations that, in hindsight, were ill-advised: living “like a local” in Libya after the civil war, against the advice of security analysts; traveling in the middle of the night on rural Nigerian roads known for carjackings to maximize time for community meetings; missing a best friend’s wedding because work in Afghanistan was “just too urgent”; throwing 200 percent of myself into the work at the expense of my health and community. Given my aforementioned self-reproach about consuming resources — and the left’s cultural tendency toward asceticism — I was also grossly underpaid for most of Reboot’s run, and then somewhat underpaid once a seasoned COO joined and insisted we raise my salary.
I had little interest in my own security partly due to some childhood experiences, and partly because I felt guilt for my newfound privilege. I was a Taiwanese immigrant now holding a Canadian passport. Although my parents had made incredible sacrifices to “pull us up” from working to middle class, I had done personally nothing to deserve our new station. In just half a generation, my life was drastically different from those of my cousins back home; it was rich with possibility. Pure luck got me this lottery ticket, but I just as easily could have drawn another.
Given this logic, I thought, if the communities I worked among were neither safe or satiated, what right did I have to be? If my well-being was truly at risk, I had medical and evacuation insurance and could be airlifted out — that was not an option for them. Thus I believed it my duty to push myself to my limits, and use my privilege to try to do what they could not.
Some team members operated similarly. And our youthful naïveté did fuel some groundbreaking work. Since we didn’t know how things should be done, we let our values guide us. We owned the challenges entrusted to us, rather than treating them like abstract mandates. We lived among communities experiencing the challenges we were tasked with addressing, rather than doing drop-in research. We obsessed, often late into the night, over how transformative a change we could possibly achieve, rather than aspiring to good-enough incrementalism. We threw 200 percent of ourselves into the work, with little regard for protocol.
As a result, we accomplished things deemed improbable. We challenged conventional (read: neocolonial) wisdom on addressing “corruption” in the Global South, we built the world’s first mobile voter registration system for a war-torn country to have elections after four decades of authoritarianism, we supported journalists uniting to defend press freedom, we ensured refugees could get critical support to rebuild their lives, and we helped launch a new government ministry focused on ushering in the impossible.
But the work took its toll. I began to struggle in moving and translating between worlds: communities living in acute precarity and institutions of extreme privilege. I found myself increasingly prickly and rigid in my thinking. My temper grew short, the smallest things would set me off. Because I was on the road 70 percent of the time, I was often cut off from friends. And I couldn’t afford professional support to make sense of my anguish.
On the advice of my friend Sabrina Hersi Issa, I started reading Trauma Stewardship, by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky. Her words hit me like a ton of bricks:
Rather than acknowledge my own pain and helplessness in the face of things I could not control, I raged at the possible external causes. I sharpened my critique of systems and society. I became more dogmatic, opinionated, and intolerant of others’ views than ever before. It never occurred to me that my anger might in part be functioning as a shield against what I was experiencing.
The book gave me a framework for understanding what was happening to me. Exposure to trauma without ways of processing it, Lipsky explains, can change us on a fundamental level. Despite knowing there is only so much one can do in troubled situations, individuals with secondary trauma tend to still feel responsible in some way. As a result, we minimize our own struggles, we numb, we grow angry and cynical, and we let guilt consume us.
I realized I couldn’t continue to operate from a place of despair and guilt. Since then, through a lot of work — including therapy, friendships, plant medicine, and different healing practices — I’ve been processing my grief; I am still on this journey. I now better understand when to push limits, and when to pull back. I focus on personal and collective care, and move at speeds where that is possible.
Today, I mentor younger women and support peers, many diaspora of the global majority. In some, I recognize the same survivor’s guilt I had, and the same will-do-anything desperation for change. I find myself giving them the same advice that two former bosses, Erica Kochi and Chris Fabian, gave me: It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Pace yourself. Take care of you. Otherwise you’re no good to anyone.
Despite respecting them deeply, I used to roll my eyes at this. I wondered if they’d gone soft. It was only years later, after multiple bouts of burnout, did I realize the wisdom in their words.
Today, when I offer this advice, I see the same skepticism I had. I get it: This work is urgent, and I know what dogged persistence can yield. But I also know that we must run the marathon from a place of wholeness.
4. Reject the quantification of everything.
For four days in November 2020, it seemed like all of America was holding its breath. After a devastating four years of the Trump presidency, the idea that he may be re-elected had many of us sick with worry. As votes were being counted, days had never felt so long.
To distract myself, I listened to podcasts. One was Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes discussing the preliminary election results, and forecasting what might transpire. I like Klein’s show and find him an incisive host, but this particular conversation was excruciating. Both journalists spent the bulk of the episode lamenting the limitations of political polling: How is it that pollsters haven’t learned from 2016? Why did all these candidates underperform in their polls? How do we explain the systemic misses in polling predictions time and again? While the two nodded to the well-known limitations of polling — namely, it is difficult to capture multidimensional human cognition and behaviour in such flat ways — they seem perplexed about what an alternative might be.
As an ethnographer, I was ready to tear my hair out. (Instead, I ate a very salty curry for dinner that night; yes, rage-salting is a thing.) The fact that two of America’s most prominent political pundits couldn’t for the life of them see another way to get a true pulse on citizen sentiments shows how far down the Hard Data is God road we have gone. Activists like LaTosha Brown and anthropologists like Sarah Kendzior and Arlie Hochschild have done important work to describe the complex forces at work in our so-called democracy, and in ways that can inform how we poll and understand one another. But many in power just don’t want to listen — if it’s not backed by a number, we don’t care.
These dynamics transcend the political arena. Over the last few decades, driven by advancements in technology and data analysis tools, there’s been an explosion of top-down pushes to quantify, measure, and “optimize” the work of social change. Proponents believe that doing so will lead to greater efficiency, accountability, and impact. But quantification can be at best a distraction, and at worst sabotage the very transformations we seek.
Years ago, I led an ethnographic study of a major international development agency. A key theme that emerged was how its leadership’s obsession with quantification had perverted the agency’s work. Case in point: We found PhD students in Jeeps driving around Zimbabwe to count the number of pencils in schools, so as to be able to assure the donor country’s legislative body that their aid money was being responsibly spent. While this particular case was extreme, there are countless similar versions — more moderate, but no less insidious — everywhere.
Andrew Natsios, a former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), described this dynamic in “The Clash of the Counter-bureaucracy”. In it, Natsios describes the challenges USAID faces in defending its value to Congress, where the majority of members are millionaires, living worlds apart from the victims of globalization—or in their parlance, the “beneficiaries” of foreign aid.
Natsios describes the warped incentives driving quantification: Congress, which funds USAID, doesn’t understand development well. Their motivation is to appeal to American voters, who generally lack a strong grasp of international affairs. (A 2022 Pew survey found that only 48 percent of surveyed Americans correctly identified Kabul as the capital of Afghanistan — aka the country it invaded in 2001 and spent $2.3 trillion fighting a war that killed over 241,000 people and displaced millions more.)
The pressure to count and justify efforts for D.C. is dysfunctional, as it encourages work that is visible and countable. The more we can see and measure, this theory goes, the more impact we’ve had. As Natsios explains, the opposite is true: “The development programs that are most precisely and easily measured are the least transformational, and those programs that are most transformational are the least measurable.”
I’ve seen this dynamic not just in development agencies, but in foundations, large nonprofits, movement groups, and more. There is of course a role for measurement. But overly zealous pushes to meet targets starves us of our creativity, and distracts us from the real systemic challenges.
For the fetishization of hard data impedes our understanding of the world. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “Scientists have been so conditioned to be skeptical of even the hardest of hard data that bending their minds toward theories that are verified without the expected graphs or equations is tough.” Western science cannot answer questions such as why asters and goldenrods look so beautiful together — in fact, it sneers at such a question. (Kimmerer’s university adviser told her, “If you want to study beauty, you should go to art school.”)
But as the ecologist documents, bees perceive flowers differently than humans do, due to their perception of spectra like ultraviolet radiation. So when asters and goldenrods grow together, they each receive more pollinator visits than they would if they were growing alone. Thus, her question is actually one of science and of beauty, synergy, and harmony.
Many working for social change like to fancy ourselves scientists. We want to believe that the more data we have, the more we can organize and fine-tune the mechanics of transformation. But the reality is that data collection is rarely about change out in the world — it is about vanity within ourselves.
In my experience, people with power and wealth tend to overestimate their own talents. They are more likely to attribute successes to internal factors (e.g. their own abilities), while attributing setbacks to factors beyond their control (e.g. other people’s shortcomings). Taking credit for positive outcomes and deflecting blame for negative ones is what psychologists call self-serving attribution bias.
Much of the push for quantification comes from the desire of those with power to prove the brilliance of their ideas. This has spawned vast infrastructure rooted in vanity. The challenge: Those who most desire validation are often farthest from where “change happens”. This leads them to place unfair demands on people doing the work to “explain the impact” via elaborate measuring and reporting, distracting from the work itself.
We don’t need more data about granular activities; we need to remake overall structures. Colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and neoliberalism have caused immense suffering for certain communities — it is time to right this by drastically transferring resources. At an individual level, we could start with unconditional cash transfers to those living in precarity. People know how to help themselves; they just need money — and not your ideas — to do so. (The evidence is clear: cash programs have been linked to positive outcomes in areas including health, education, suicide rates, intimate partner violence, mental health, and deforestation) At the global level, let’s start with debt jubilee.
Despite communities long advocating for them, the energy invested in cash transfers, debt forgiveness, and other approaches that could drastically shift power is miniscule. Because doing so is not in the interests of the privileged — it doesn’t show how smart and special they are, and requires them to concede power.
So let us not pretend that all the noise around evidence-based policymaking is about “what is most effective” or about finding new ways to “give voice to the voiceless”. The earless just need to grow some damn ears.
For truest things in life are also the least measurable: Harmony and balance is the natural state of the universe to which we must return. Your suffering is my suffering, your liberation is my liberation. Love is the only force that can drive lasting, structural change.
So rather than get distracted by the toxic circus of data-driven statusquoism, let us remember and embody these fundamental truths, and move from this place of deep knowingness.
5. Never stop refining your theory of change — but ditch the purity tests.
For too long, I was obsessed with the “best” way to change our world. The callous greed we were fighting had coalesced under one dark yet thriving vision: Those with the power to dominate are entitled to exploit the natural world and all people for their benefit. What was the equivalent vision and strategy that could beat this — culturally, politically, institutionally, spiritually? Where and how best should we work to realize a world rooted in solidarity and love?
Of course, we had no idea. So over the course of 13 years, Reboot changed. A lot.
Based on our ongoing political education and understanding of our own positionality, we experimented with various focuses (including human rights, education, democracy, governance, public health, global development, media justice) and approaches (including design, co-creation, organizing, facilitation, implementation, teaching), then adjusted based on what we learned. Our seasons included:
- Designing and delivering social services for vulnerable populations in the majority world
- Advocating for greater equity and justice in global development policy and practice
- Designing and building technology to enable greater civic participation and government accountability
- Facilitating co-creation of and running open government programs
- Architecting and facilitating co-creation of new global initiatives and movement strategies
- Supporting strategy and reform processes for public and international agencies
- Advising US-based nonprofits and movement organizations on strategy and coalition-building
- Supporting US foundations in designing programs that centered equity and justice
This was in addition to team members’ nights and weekends work, which informed our organizational point-of-view. These inputs were diverse, from participatory documentary filmmaking to feminist organizing to jazz improvisation; my own included freelance journalism, economic justice organizing, mutual aid work, and cultural organizing.
Our organizational pivots were frustrating to some staff. After they had just gotten the hang of something — building relationships within a space, learning the ins and outs of an issue, honing the craft of a particular approach — we would evolve what we were doing. Of course, elements of past work always informed each iteration, but it didn’t make the shifts any less uncomfortable. Besides, some argued, it was unstrategic: After we became known and even celebrated for a certain type of work, we’d often move on and start doing something else. This sometimes made it difficult to explain to partners and funders just what, exactly, we were doing.
I bear a lot of responsibility for this dynamic, but I also couldn’t help it. From the start, our vision was clear: To fight for structural justice by amplifying the voices and dreams of those who have been systematically excluded from power. This never wavered. But as our political analyses evolved, so did our choice of entrypoints and tactics.
The more we learned about the limitations of a particular space — the hot air, the hypocrisy, the unjust power relations — we would move on. This may not have been strategic but, to a younger me, it felt imperative. I wasn’t willing to overlook the contradictions of a particular space just so we could continue to be part of that community.
Across each iteration of our work, I was quick to judge: Did it go deep enough? Was the change realized structural enough? The answer, of course, was always no. Because I was harsh with myself and our work, I’d often bring the same (overly) critical eye to others’ efforts. I scrutinized them as if they were frozen in time, rather than as the current experiments of ever-evolving humans. As I jumped from community to community, searching for the “best” way, I grew increasingly isolated. I distanced myself from partners whose theories of change I deemed “not radical enough” and from allies “not committed enough”, when these were in fact partners we should have been aligning and organizing with. Ah, the conceit of youth.
For depth and radicalism are practices to cultivate, not purity tests to apply. To fight callous greed, we need to unite — but we need not do the same things. Our fights for justice require a multitude of approaches, and there is nothing gained from ranking them. Hong Kong’s leftist collective Lausan recognizes there are many paths to change, and celebrates all that its members do, false notions of strategic coherence be damned.
We live in a world built on hypercapitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, patriarchy, and power-over relations. As we fight to imagine and build our world anew, we must accept that these diseases will surface in our work, our collectives, and ourselves. But the real toxicity comes from the purity tests we subject each other to. Instead, we must learn to simultaneously offer grace and demand accountability.
In hindsight, I probably should have cut my teeth at different organizations pursuing different strategies to refine my own theory of change. But since I was tethered to my own, I simply took Reboot through the stages of experimentation, learning, and growth that any young professional goes through. Whether this was net positive or negative depends on your metrics of success — my co-founder and I certainly didn’t have the same ones. But for those in positions of leadership, I believe the balancing act is being disciplined both in interrogating and refining how you move, and in upholding your duty of care to staff.
I see now that my purity tests were born of my own anxiety: of not doing enough, of falling into the trap of hypocrisy, of letting down communities I loved. But in casting a judgmental eye on each effort, I was shirking the work of developing my own philosophy. It is far easier to smugly deconstruct a strategy — and, indeed, that is what many ask of me — than to contend with “what is the beauty and truth here?”
With the privilege of accessing different knowledge traditions and disciplines comes the responsibility of examining each critically. Today, when I am introduced to new approaches, I find myself asking: What is their provenance, motivation, and ultimate goal? Where do their values align with or diverge from mine? What aspects resonate in heart, spirit, and mind? From there, I work to integrate what resonates in my practice and to leave the rest for others — and to offer them gratitude for picking up another piece of the puzzle. It is much juicier and abundant place from which to move.
6. Uplift the small and beautiful while pursuing subversive scale.
Early in Reboot’s life, the seduction of scale was immense. Given the scale of injustice confronting our world, we believed our efforts needed to rise to the same — this brought us to work with international agencies, leading NGOs, presidential offices, and more. After all, they had the resources and infrastructure to make things happen. But over time, I saw the most passionate people leave, disheartened by the lack of ambition and creativity, or by the snail’s pace of change. Often, those who rose to the top were those who excelled at organizational politics. This meant that beautiful, heart-led work often suffered.
Some friends in those positions have resigned themselves to other bureaucracies or simply tapped out, but most moved on to pursue gorgeous, smaller-scale work. I don’t blame them: At big institutions, there is tremendous energy spent rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. And small is indeed beautiful. Yet at the same time, I can’t help but think: Given the scale of rapacious, interconnected systems of global capital, neoliberal governance, and oligarchic rule, we can’t afford to stay small.
At a personal level, small is tempting. I cherish building close relationships with my collaborators. I love being able to see and touch the “results” of my work. And traditional scaling often forces a loss of intimacy and a move toward greater abstraction, not to mention the accompanying strategic tussles and operational headaches. But it is a privilege to have the choice of staying small. I have locational privilege, passport privilege, ability privilege, and class privilege. I am not and will not be first or most impacted by the crises that consume our world. And so I can choose to stay in the comfort of small—but should I? Because if enough of us make this choice, we are essentially sacrificing our most oppressed to the death-machine of modern capitalism.
I see many folks quoting adrienne maree brown’s “small is good, small is all” from Emergent Strategy to explain why they work at smaller scales, but we must remember that brown framed this principle in the context of fractals. That is, the patterns of the universe repeat, so what we practice at a small scale reverberates into the large. So “small is all” doesn’t mean small as an endpoint — rather, it means we must adopt and link new practices to repattern society at the grandest scale.
Many have an instinctive reaction against scaling. And I get it: All around us, we see the psychosis of endless growth, and we see inertia and corruption in our largest institutions. “We’re scared of scale because we live in a society that doesn’t ever know how to say ‘enough’,” reflected my friend Farzana Khan in a recent chat.
The problem isn’t scale itself, but how we go about scaling. The traditional model is to find an approach that works (in a particular context), break it down into its component parts (without accounting for the contextual factors that made it successful), then replicate it (in many different contexts). This is why scaling efforts so often fail: We can’t extract something that works in one context, and expect it to be universally successful. “We didn’t understand X thing about Y context!” is probably the most-uttered phrase in all post-mortems across time. But what if instead of trying to find one magic model, we invested in many groups in many places doing what works in their space and time?
We must seed, nurture, and connect a symphony of small-is-beautiful, so they can support and learn from each other. Authoritarians understand this: Far-right groups in countries like Brazil, Poland, Hungary, and Spain have been trading notes and collaborating to spread new forms of repression. They recognize that tactics in one context may not translate to another, and adapt accordingly. Let’s draw from the same playbook: Forget scaling up, let’s scale across.
As Bayo Akomolafe writes:
The danger of scaling up is that we lose sight of our wideness or an abundance of spaces and ethical positions that may help us make sense of our troubles. We perpetuate the old Cartesian promulgation of disconnection, and impose our temporalities on ‘nature’ — as if we are above ‘it’. But, what can we do differently today? How are we being called to smallness? […]
What does a politics of many streams, instead of the mainstream, look like? What if hugging were just as much a response to crisis as marching on the streets? What about photographing stones, reading stories to trees, planting one’s own food, unschooling one’s child, painting seashells in unabashedly bright colours, or taking a walk barefooted? What if we gave room for the genius of grief to mature — instead of truncating its logic with hammer blows of contrived positivity? An activism of grief, of touching, of sighing, of grandmothers telling stories, and of singing pollination songs with bees?
Let us heed Akomolafe’s call and marvel at the beauty of our diverse talents. Of all the ways we protest, love, dream, steward, fight — and manifest our most dazzling visions. Let us celebrate one another’s genius, and link up to unleash an avalanche of audacious magic worthy of Gaia and all that she has given us, all that we have inherited.
7. Practice love and liberation.
The roots of Western philosophy rest on Rene Descartes’ famous 1637 dictum “I think therefore I am”. Living under Western cultural hegemony, this idea permeates every aspect of how we organize ourselves and our world — and contributes to a lot of futile intellectualization.
Many Eastern spiritual traditions contend that anything that we have not experienced is immaterial. Thinking is a useful way to interpret our experience, but it must not dominate consciousness. As the yogi Sadhguru says, “Any information you have about that which is not a living experience for you is irrelevant. Maybe it is very holy irrelevance, but it does not liberate you, it only entangles you.”
Every day, I appreciate more and more the truth of this statement, and the value of embodied experience. For all the ink spilled about moral virtue, justice, equality, and liberty in Western philosophy — and all the institutions theoretically founded on these values — it is these values’ antitheses that have come to rule our world.
I, too, was attracted to theory. As a young person, I was relieved to find language and frameworks to make sense of what my family and communities had gone through — and to point towards a way out. My ancestors didn’t have access to such knowledge, and so I believed I had a duty to my lineage to stuff my mind with theory. For various childhood reasons, I also had a tendency to dissociate from my body — doing so saved me from the pain of feeling and remembering difficult experiences—and live in my head. I was a voracious reader and eventually became a journalist so that I could call up diverse experts and pepper them with questions about whatever topic I was nerding out on that week.
I was rewarded for being intellectual. Reboot did well because we were fluent in political theories, and in the attendant technical frameworks on how to realize them. But over time, the limitations of such rationalism became clear.
In various spaces, we talk endlessly of justice and liberation — yet we have no idea what justice and liberation actually feel like in ourselves, in our families, and in our communities. How can we fight for something if we don’t have any experience of it? Without embodied knowing, how do we know whether we’re on the right path? What does it mean to practice love, courage, and integrity every day, so that we can move with love, courage, and integrity in our broader fights for justice?
Alnoor Ladha reminds us that to detangle ourselves from dominant culture requires a decolonization of our entire being. He writes:
The political transmutates into the somatic whether we are conscious of it or not. We carry the scars of history in our bodies, physically, genetically, epi-genetically and memetically.
It is an ongoing praxis of deprogramming old constructs of greed, selfishness, short-termism, extraction, commodification, usury, disconnection, numbing and other life-denying tendencies. And reprogramming our mind-soul-heart-body complex with intrinsic values such as interdependence, altruism, generosity, cooperation, empathy, non-violence and solidarity with all life.
This reprogramming is essential if we are to steward the world we know is possible, and if we want others to join us. Activist culture, especially on the left, Ladha notes, tends to value self-flagellation, which has contributed to a political climate bereft of pleasure. As the adage goes, the Right builds community, and the Left hunts heretics. Unsurprisingly, this repel allies. To build the movements these times demand of us require first building cultures of respect, connection, and beauty, which then attract folks to join us.
I’ve been grateful to deepen my own embodiment practices, learning from teachers like Nkem Ndefo, Nami Soga, Johannes Weidenmueller, Staci Haines, Rev angel Kyodo williams, and Karine Bell. I am working to recall and discern what sovereignty, centeredness, connection, liberation, and power feel like in my body — then to move from these places of intimate knowing. As a person both of privilege globally and of multiple marginalized identities in the West, this is some of the most complex, challenging, and rewarding work I have done.
As I look out, I am grateful to beloveds like Gabriella Gomez-Mont for working to build cities rooted in care, and to The Laundromat Project and Healing Justice London for showing us how to do this work in community. HJL’s Rehearsing Freedoms brings together movement leaders from across the UK to practice the collective skills we need to realize liberatory health and sustainable futures. It is inspired by Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s belief that we need to “rehearse the social order coming into being” in order to collectively envision and practice futures free from oppression.
In a world that seeks to entrap and disconnect us through empty intellectualization, reclaiming embodied connection and liberation is the ultimate act of defiance. I am still on this journey. But fanciful intellectual arguments no longer impress me. Sure, I can make an impressive framework, use $10 words, and persuade folks into a certain way of thinking. But any change accomplished in this way is precarious, and can be easily undone. True lasting change will come from a groundswell of embodied conviction that we are all one and that our struggles and thus our freedoms are intertwined. This is the place from which we must move.
8. Demand that healing be collective and structural.
Many of us settle for incrementalism because we are disconnected from ourselves, from each other, and from Spirit. Many social change efforts see success as keeping people just barely alive — just above the poverty line, just physically well enough to continue contributing to economic growth.
Too beat down to imagine or fight for what we truly deserve, many no longer believe revolution is possible. Given the endless onslaught of greed and violence we witness, dissociation sometimes feels like the only way to get through a day. To keep capitalism humming, mainstream culture perpetually questions and demeans our worth — then tells us that happiness will come from doing more, earning more, having more. This has wrought hell for our fellow humans, our non-human kin, and Gaia.
In thinking about how to live our lives, many historically turned to religion for answers — then lived lives of perpetual guilt because we’re unable to adhere to the moral codes prescribed by our faith. In an increasingly secular society, many subscribe to forms of neoliberal spirituality, believing that doing so can help them evade challenging personal and social realities. But there is no personal salvation when we swim in poisoned waters.
Our crises of meaning and spirituality are killing us. In America, rates of depression have reached new heights, affecting nearly one in three adults. Globally, depressive and anxiety disorders are major contributors to the global disease burden.
What if such distress, pathologized as illness or madness, are perfectly sane responses to a world gone mad? As China Mills points out in Decolonizing Global Mental Health, instead of critiquing the social, economic, and political conditions that are the roots of our distress, the health profession largely focuses on locating the problem within individual brains: “You have a chemical imbalance. Here’s a pill so you can feel better and get back to being productive for capitalism.” We recognize the symptoms, but misdiagnose the cause. Today, survivors of psychiatric systems are arguing for the right to non-medical, non-Western healing spaces. They demand that we frame their experience as distress and not depoliticize it as illness.
Neoliberalism insists that that healing can be found in individual experiences that are packaged, sold, and bought: Want to feel better? Download this meditation app, hit up a sound bath, or escape to a yoga retreat. But in these ways, “wellness practices” are largely the preserve of the privileged — and can paradoxically make us more disconnected from the world, and more efficient in its destruction. Employers are increasingly supporting and subsidizing wellness programs. Your boss also wants you to feel better and get back to hitting those targets.
This is a perversion of spiritual practice. Take yoga. I first learned yoga in my 20s as a way of aligning my body in precise ways so I could tap into universal energy — that is, so I could connect with the cosmic force coursing through us all. It was a practice to nurture connection and compassion. Today in the West, yogic practices have been coopted to help us disconnect, creating individual bubbles of calm where we are impervious to the suffering around us.
But the idea that we can detach from collective suffering is an illusion. In Taoism, each person is understood as the cosmos in miniature; that is, each person manifests the patterns of the universe. Thus in Traditional Chinese Medicine, in order to assess a person’s health, a doctor must first understand the impact of larger social and cultural webs on their client. Since social distress manifests as individual distress, it also follows that there is no individual healing without collective healing.
Of course, experiences of trauma are unevenly distributed within and across societies, and more frequent and severe in individuals of multiple marginalized identities. Given this, any moves toward healing must center those who have suffered most — and work to address systemic, not just acute, violence.
As Bessel van der Kolk teaches us, trauma is not the story of what happened a long time ago. Trauma is residue that’s living inside of us now. Thus, in order to heal, we must first remember and tell the truth about horrific past events and ongoing structural harm, while recognizing that there is no singular truth and memory is multidirectional.
A great deal of human suffering persists due to widespread societal gaslighting — that is, due to denial of the past and an inability to acknowledge and integrate it. Collective truth-telling, witnessing, and processing are therefore essential for both the healing of individuals and of society. Ways of doing so include gathering and storytelling, artistic practices, and transitional and reparative justice initiatives. While most conversations around reparations focus on its economic components — and the transfer of resources is indeed essential — we must also elevate its spiritual, psychosocial, and political dimensions. In this way, as Adom Getachew has suggested, reparations are projects of revolutionary worldmaking.
Struggling together to unravel the truth about our histories can yield greater compassion and understanding. It can help us cultivate the strength to remain steadfast, and not be coopted by hollow concessions, in our fights for justice. It can help us recall and integrate fragmented parts of ourselves and of our ancestors. And in doing so, we can find solace and inspiration in our miraculous interdependence — and honour the dignity and flourishing of all our kin.
9. Expand our imagination about what is possible.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz believed that the human is an animal suspended in webs of significance that we ourselves have spun. Today, the webs within which we’ve become entangled are, per Walida Imarisha, the result of someone else’s fucked up imagination.
Capitalism is an economic system organized around concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few while exploiting and marginalizing the majority. It commodifies everything from human labor to the natural world and prioritizes profit over people. Its gluttonous demand for ever-more has led to our intersecting crises of spiritual, political, social, and ecological collapse.
According to the Transition Resource Circle, for every dollar of new economic growth, 93 cents ends up in the hands of the 1% — and 5 cents in the hands of the world’s majority, or 60% of humanity. Therefore, by definition, capitalism actively creates inequality and poverty, the burden of which is primarily born by those who have suffered from colonialism, enslavement, genocide, white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, perpetual war, and pillage. “Within the context of the existing operating system,” explains TRC, “no amount of reform, whether it be green investment or otherwise, can change the structure and trajectory of this self-terminating, exponential function.”
What are we to do? To mount an offense capable of destroying the murderous webs we find ourselves in, we must first recover our broadest sense of possibility. We must seek and heed the wisdom of communities who have long stewarded this planet, in harmony with all beings. We must find our way back to wholeness, generosity, and love.
In A Poetics of Resistance, an account of the ideologies and strategies of the Zapatistas, Jeff Conant writes:
The assault on imagination is the first front of violence in the war against everything. It follows, then, that the counteroffensive should take the form of poetry — necessarily accompanied, of course, by physical resistance in all of its diverse renderings. […]
If the torturer’s desire is prosaic — the desire to serve money and power in all their merciless guises — then the desire of the liberator is itself poetic, a voice against torture and against the closed chambers, metaphorical or real, where torture takes place. It is a struggle to restore a social order that terror has all but destroyed.
Conant notes that throughout villages in Chiapas, there is a belief that gringos (American foreigners) eat human children. And indeed, the dominant American cosmovision, which promotes endless consumption of natural resources without regard for future generations, is cannibalistic. We must find other ways to nourish ourselves and fill the holes that capitalism — and its attendant diseases of disconnection, greed, and selfishness — have left.
Here is where I look to art. At its best, art creates spaces where we can (temporarily) suspend reality, challenge the hegemonic, and subvert existing orders. Artistic spaces help us come together to process, heal, and practice new ways of imagining and being.
As Senegalese poet and politician Leopold Senghor has observed, in most cultures historically, art was done “by all, for all” as acts of creative interdependence. The concepts of rarified art and artists as beacons of individual freedom are quite new in human history, the result of a U.S. Cold War strategy to replace the Soviet narrative of the stakes (“peace-loving progressives versus imperialist warmongers”), with one more flattering to America (“totalitarianism versus freedom”). The CIA-led propaganda campaign unleashed the largest cultural funding program the world has ever seen and, in the process, largely shattered the communal nature of artmaking.
What might our world look like if some of the most celebrated writers, artists, and social scientists of the past two generations had not been lured to prioritize individual introspection over collective struggle? What would alternative paths of imagination have yielded? I am haunted by these questions. We will never know. But I see signs of art helping us expand our imagination about the world that is possible.
Last year, I traveled to documenta 15, the 100-day art exhibition that takes over the German town of Kassel every five years. It was my first time, and I was compelled because this edition was directed by ruangrupa, a Jakarta-based art collective. They were the second-ever Global South curator and the first-ever collective to direct the storied exhibit.
Early in their history, ruangrupa had partnered with activists and nonprofits on social justice campaigns. Soon, they grew disillusioned by the fragmented and incrementalist nature of most such work. “Political activism has often failed us because it’s divided, based on ethnicity, class, political belief,” said member Farid Rakun, naming a Gordian knot of today’s movements. Realizing the limits of protesting what exists, ruangrupa shifted its focus to modeling what could be.
Living though the brutality of the Suharto regime had taught them that caring for each other was essential — how far could these cosmologies of care extend? Ruangrupa knew that other collectives were also doing important work to birth a new world — could they use documenta 15 to build solidarity and learn from one another?
The results were extraordinary, so much so that I wrote an entire essay about it. But in short: the collaborators ballooned to a record 1,500 artists, 95 percent of which did not have gallery representation (and illustrating the irrelevance of the commercial art world in projects of equitable worldmaking). They fed and housed one another. They illuminated the necessity of neurodivergent perspectives. They traded practices and wisdom. They hosted a planetary summit to fight back against sociopathic, GDP-boosting arguments for urbanization and to prove another way. For one week, I walked around Kassel taking notes on how to imagine, organize and build. My body was fully alive, my heart was open, and my imagination ran wild. It was glorious.
In recent years, I’ve noticed much more griping about the lack of imagination in the social sector — and in many ways, it’s true: The sector’s professionalized camp is enmeshed in dominant culture logic and thus unfit to push the boundaries needed for true transformation. But there is boundless creativity if we just stop the navel-gazing, and if we treat social practice artists, creative grassroots groups, and others on the frontlines of political, economic, and ecological battles with the reverence they deserve. They are modeling the way, we just need to get behind them.
10. Honour sacred weaving, translation, and facilitation work.
I started facilitating out of necessity. Reboot’s work was at the intersection of many issues, disciplines, and stakeholders, and we believed in harnessing this diversity. We also believed it essential to make decisions in ways that challenged conventional dynamics: Those with power set the terms of debate, and those without beg for incremental adjustments.
I was good at it. As an ethnographer, I was predisposed to reading each room through the backgrounds and motivations of each individual. As a designer, I was skilled in conceptually and visually breaking down thorny challenges in ways that various folks could engage with. As a former community theater director, I relished finding ways to weave isolated talents into gorgeous collective strategies.
Soon, we were being asked to facilitate more and more efforts, with increasingly higher stakes. Yet I resisted being labeled a facilitator. To me, a facilitator was the person that regurgitated diluted versions of what everyone else said, cut off conversations just as they were getting good, and tried to force toxic consensus that dulled the merits of each position. Having seen many gatherings undermined by poor energetic and technical management, I did not hold a high view of facilitators.
But as I did the work, my passion was undeniable. I loved learning about the makeup, contours, and dynamics of different collectives struggling together for change — and scheming to help them realize their full potential. How to bring out each individual’s brilliance and weave them into shared magic? How to, in the course of just a few days, help strangers become friends, then allies, and then comrades, once again proving that fundamental truth: We are stronger together.
Through transdisciplinary facilitation, we helped architect a global network to support human rights activists; unite a global anti-corruption movement under a new strategy; launch a pioneering media innovation lab; ensure international agencies could leverage Big Tech to reach vulnerable populations, and seed a new global union for participatory democracy.
As our theory of change evolved, and my own political and spiritual journey progressed, I found myself in diverse fields that don’t usually talk to each other: documentary poetics and global development, media justice and public procurement reform, Buddhist philosophy and deliberative democracy. I soon saw how the limitations of one field were often addressed by the strengths of another, so I started queering how I curated and facilitated gatherings. I had always worked at the intersection of activists and government, folks with power and folks without. But now I started folding in artists with economists, healers with technocrats, psychiatrists with lawyers, helping them challenge and strengthen one another, and find common ground.
As Adam Kahane once told me, the greatest social innovations are born not of technical breakthroughs, but of relational ones. Often, when there is a relational breakthrough, someone goes to a back office filing cabinet, digs up some plan written 20 years ago, dusts it off, then implements it. We don’t need better ideas — we need better relationships.
Yet we spend so much time focusing on the “right” answers, and when they are not adopted, we simply shrug and chalk it up to “politics”. But politics are simply self-interested humans vying for a narrow conception of power. They are disarmable, but it takes intention and care.
Often, when we enter rooms with those different from us, we dig into our own convictions and seek to prove our rightness — despite knowing we don’t have all the answers. Traditional dynamics often require those with less economic power to perform their trauma for institutional attention — yet it is these same communities who can teach us how to address crises with creativity and resilience. We need strong weaving, translating, and facilitation that can overturn broken ways of gathering and co-creating, and unlock blessed alchemy.
Over the years, I’ve been honoured to experience and learn from brilliant facilitators — Akaya Windwood, Xóchicoatl Bello, ruangrupa, Rusia Mohiuddin, to name a few — who showed me that facilitation is sacred work. Done right, it helps humans feel witnessed and affirmed, it channels their wisdom in important ways, and it creates the pathways towards the relational breakthroughs for which our world aches.
11. Choose depth over speed.
As Anasuya Sengupta reminded me recently, the work of social transformation is urgent but it need not be fast. To do the work these times demand of us requires wholehearted commitments to relationships and rigour, both of which take time to cultivate. Yet because our world is literally on fire, many of us jump onto whatever vehicle or tactic that can quickly soothe our egos and our need to “do something”. But such “solutions” often overlook the historical and root causes of our contemporary crises.
In Reconsidering Reparations, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò observes:
Much of the political discussion in the world’s rich countries — whether about their own racial politics or its relationship to the ‘developing world’ — simply prefers not to explain what our present social reality is built to do.
The conversation just maps a simple space onto a narrow present: here’s some poverty, there’s some wealth, it’s a shame things somehow ended up this way.” From this ahistorical and apolitical place, there is an astonishing level of resources invested in doing not very much.
But what is deep and sufficiently political work? According to Antonio Gramsci, whether a certain approach is political depends on the extent to which it engages with existing power relations and structure. An apolitical approach doesn’t mean that it is not informed by or in reaction to political events or relationships, or that its champions lack political views. Rather, it means that these approaches are not genuinely political interventions — that is, they are not strategic attempts to shift power relations and the outcomes thereof.
By Gramsci’s definition, many projects aspiring to social change are apolitical. In some grassroots work, this comes from a lack of access or knowledge about how to shift structures of power. In most institutionally driven work, it is born of biases toward maintaining existing power relationships. Many in the latter camp are enthusiastic about doing “root cause analysis” — but only up to a point. When their own identities and institutions are implicated in the root causes, the mood shifts to a shrugging “aww shucks, that’s above our pay grade.”
We cannot afford to reduce political problems into technical ones. Given the root causes of our polycrises, every action must be political, per Gramsci’s definition, in that every action must seek to fundamentally transform existing power structures.
I recently listened to Tyson Yunkaporta reflect on a dynamic I increasingly notice around me: because changing material conditions seems too difficult, many are instead focusing on shifting cultural norms. Today, some folks see themselves as individual brands pushing for change from their specific positionality and blend of micro-identities. This in itself is neither good nor bad — the question is, to what end? It is fantastic that we now have richer insights into individual experiences across a dazzling breadth of human identities. And human stories are highly effective in illustrating true cost of injustices that can sometimes feel abstract.
But the work cannot stop here. Political education is an essential building block of revolution, but without strategies to ladder it into broader material change, we are, as Yunkaporta points out, simply engaged in battles of neurolinguistic programming. Case in point: Most New Yorkers I know now use “unhoused” instead of “homeless” when referring to populations who don’t currently have a fixed address; this is a positive step. And yet, few are talking about — let alone taking action on — the fact that NYC’s unhoused population is now at an all-time high. We need to win both the cultural contest and the material one.
There are endless opportunities to “do good” that are largely cosmetic, and rewarded in eyeballs, likes, news hits, donor metrics. At an ego level, these forms of feedback feel good; we love us our dopamine hits. In terms of our funding and political landscapes, quick wins are incentivized. But therein lies the danger: We can simply pat ourselves on the back for an incrementalist job well done as our most vulnerable continue to suffer.
It requires fortitude to extricate ourselves from these productions and nurture an inner compass that prioritizes depth. The results of deep work are not immediate and often defy quantification — and thus measurement and optimization, all things capitalism craves — and there are fewer signposts and fellow travelers. You often feel lost because it takes time to unlearn orthodoxy and purge its poison. But we turn to this path when the others will no longer do.
To be clear: Policy follows culture, because policy is just institutionalized norms. So cultural change is essential — but it must ladder into political change, ecological change, and material change, as reinforced by our institutions. Otherwise, it’s just privileged people performing wokeness for each other.
This work will break your heart. To remain steadfast in demanding that nothing but structural transformation will do is excruciating, given the incentives to settle for flashy bandaids. And we each make compromises and fall short every day. But audacious worldmaking requires a deep well of imagination and an inner strength beyond what’s required when we’re fighting against. So let us each take the time and space necessary to cultivate these traits within ourselves, and to love and support each other on these journeys.
I began writing this piece while traveling in Southern India, where people kept telling me how unseasonably hot it was. And indeed, India’s heatwave this year challenged human survivability; temperatures in many parts of the country surpassed 49°C (120°F). I am finishing it now, at home in Brooklyn, USA, where neighbours pass my window in masks, as smoke from Canada’s devastating wildfires continue to roll in.
These times make me think of Reboot’s first project, which was supporting the humanitarian response for Pakistan’s 2010 Indus River floods, which affected 20 million people. The system for delivering aid to impacted families was riddled with problems, and we were tasked with figuring out how to fix it. We did well on the assignment, and the system improved. But ultimately, we were mere troubleshooters for a targeted technical issue in a much larger political and ecological crisis.
Last year, as Reboot was wrapping our final work, the Indus River was again flooded. I watched as one-third of Pakistan was again submerged under water, and international organizations again lined up to pledge aid. But what Pakistan needs is not just emergency aid—it needs structural change, around corruption (which is often not as straightforward an issue as Western media and NGOs like to portray) and around climate change. The country is responsible for only 0.4 percent of the world’s historic CO2 emissions — by contrast, America is responsible for 21.5 percent — but given its geography, is extremely vulnerable to climate disaster. I dug up a talk I’d given on our flood relief work back in 2011; it was depressing to realize that I could deliver the same opening and closing today, and just swap out the specifics in the middle. The closing:
As Junot Diaz has said: “We must refuse the old stories that tell us to interpret social disasters as natural disasters. We must refuse the familiar scripts of victims and rescuers that focus our energies solely on charity instead of systemic change.”
We must take responsibility for the Frankensteins weʼve created and pledge to never let them repeat again. Let us take advantage of the opportunities provided by disasters to think beyond short-term solutions. Because a disaster, and its accompanying clarity, is a terrible thing to waste.
Yet if the last 15 years have taught me anything, it is that global capitalists and white saviours are all too happy to treat disasters as anomalies. And from a place of convenient amnesia, they continue to sacrifice our most vulnerable.
Last month, in neighbouring India, I spoke with activists about the country’s farmer suicide crisis. The Green Revolution, pushed by American corporations like Monsanto and supported by its philanthropists like The Rockefeller Foundation, aggressively pushed pesticides to Indian farmers and doled out massive subsidies to fertilizer companies: Over time, it effectively destroyed traditional, sustainable farming practices.
In 2020, over 10,000 farmers and agricultural labourers took their own lives — that’s 30 suicides a day — largely due to overwhelming debt and, because of climate change, dire prospects for recovery. As China Mills writes: “Pesticides, swallowed as a means for escaping poverty, are also part of the reason an escape is required in the first place. Both life and death are dependent on, and made possible through, the workings of the global capitalist market.”
Despite these horrors, The Rockfeller Foundation—now joined by The Gates Foundation and others—have continued to take the Green Revolution to Africa, despite protests from local farmers’ groups and evidence that industrialized agriculture contributes to climate change. Results thus far show this effort is failing, even on its own terms.
Given all this, it has been surreal to watch New Yorkers, some of the world’s most self-absorbed people, recently take to Twitter to scream “CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL” while eating lunch delivered to their home offices by gig workers of color who largely hail from countries devastated by climate change. These communities didn’t need a bright orange sky to know that climate change is all too real.
Will these record-setting wildfires be the wake-up call for those in the heart of capitalism? Sadly, it seems unlikely. In NYC, since the worst of the smoke three weeks ago, when climate chatter crescendoed, the mood has since “returned to normal”: The air quality is a bummer, but let’s get back to the play-by-play of five rich people who died while trying to visit an underwater mass grave.
Some of the ultra rich speak casually of an upcoming “shedding”, treating the death of a majority of humans as inevitable; they’ll be weeping crocodile tears from their luxury bunkers. What must it take to break free of this genocidal hellscape? What must it take to steward a return to wholeness? These are the questions that now consume me.
As Reboot was wrapping administrative tasks in recent months, I’ve spent time in Germany, Taiwan, Canada, India, and various corners of America, dancing with these questions and following curiosities that I didn’t have time for when I was running an organization. With the myth of objectivity in journalism crumbling, and the rise of movement journalism, I’ve been happily dipping my toes back in to writing. I’ve been growing and imagining at the intersection of transitional and reparative justice, cultural organizing, collective healing, climate justice, and global solidarity. It has been sweet and stimulating.
I’m grateful to the Center for Science & the Imagination at Arizona State University; the Digital Civil Society Lab and Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University; and the Narrative Initiative and Unicorn Authors Club for fellowships that gave me the space and support to imagine anew; and to Corey Chao and Mohammed Maikudi for supporting a graceful wind-down. As I reflect on Reboot’s journey, I burst with gratitude for all the gorgeous efforts we’ve been honoured to play a role in, and I feel blessed to now be called towards so many shimmering new constellations.
For the rest of 2023, my focus is inward. If I am to be of greater service towards collective expansion and harmony, I must first myself expand and center. As a creator and holder of spaces, and a facilitator of transformation, continuing to do this work with integrity means I must become more capacious, more rigorous, more graceful, more accountable. (Thomas Hübl speaks of facilitators as the consciousness in the room; without having done enough inner work, we cannot be effective in this role.) This is some of the most difficult work I have done, and the signposts are few, but I know, with my entire being, that this is the path.
If you have made it this far, I offer you a deep bow of gratitude. I don’t take your time and attention for granted, and I sincerely hope you found something in all this that can support you in your journey.
This piece was a labour of love. I put it out in the spirit of learning in public, and in the hopes of connecting with allies and fellow travelers. If you feel so moved, some ways to connect:
- If this resonated with you, do reach out — I’m on Twitter, Instagram, or via my website.
- If you appreciated the effort that went into this, I’d gratefully accept a contribution for my time — doing so enables me to continue thinking and creating independently, which are the greatest gifts.
- If you’d like more such reflections, I’m starting a newsletter — for now, an irregular and experimental space to be in dialogue on the politics and processes of transformation. If this resonates, please subscribe.
- If you’d like me to speak to your group, I’m starting to do talks again, after a yearlong hiatus to refresh my thinking. I’m happy to speak on the above, or what I explored through my Stanford fellowship: What are the impacts of unaddressed trauma on our societies? What can the realms of participatory democracy, international development, and global governance learn from practices in the arts and healing justice? What are pathways towards societal healing that center structural and reparative justice?
- If you’d like to dream / explore / build together, come 2024, I will be exploring new collaborations. If you’re working at similar or related junctures, I’d love to hear what you’re seeding and learning.
Again, thank you for reading and engaging, and for all you carry and do in and for our world. The light in me honours the light in you.
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With thanks to Farzana Khan and Camille Barton for talking through some of these ideas over a magical weekend in Colorado, and to Kenyatta Cheese for the same in California; to Charmaine Mercer and Trishala Deb for encouraging me to write this; and to Akaya Windwood and Ling Lo for creating the delicious container for us to gather and play.
To all former Rebooters, my deepest gratitude for the chance to imagine and fight together over the last 13 years — it has been my greatest honour. Thank you to these kindred souls who provided counsel and friendship as I stewarded the organization to a close: Aarathi Krishnan, Ana Polanco, Anand Pandian, Anasuya Sengupta, Andrew Haupt, CM Samala, Candy Chang, Cassie Robinson, Chioma Agwuegbo, Claudia Chwalisz, Corey Chao, Courtney Martin, Danielle Olsen, Dominic Rovano, Erica Kochi, Farzana Khan, Fatou Wurie, Gabe Tobias, Gabor Cselle, Gabriella Gomez-Mont, Georgia Frances King, Gislaine Ngounou, Giulio Quaggiotto, Heather Lord, James Reeves, JD D’Cruz, Johannes Weidenmueller, Jordan Fletcher, Josh Powell, Josh Stearns, Lucy Berhnolz, Katherine Maher, Kate Reed Petty, Katie Williams, Kenyatta Cheese, Keshia Hannam, Kidus Asfaw, Liz Ogbu, Lori Meyer, Marisa Morán Jahn, Micah Sifry, Michelle Shevin, Mohammed Maikudi, Nadia Firozvi, Nami Soga, Olivia Wu, Omayma El Ella, Rose Longhurst, Timothy Kiprono, Tricia Wang, Troels Steenholdt Heiredal, Sabrina Hersi Issa, Samir Doshi, Shiree Teng, Shu Ohno, Susan Schoning.
