Through our work with nonprofit organizations, grantmakers, movement networks, and other partners in the field, we have had the opportunity to work collaboratively with people deeply engaged in advancing love, dignity, and justice. Through these partnerships, we are getting increasingly clear that both deep and wide-scale change is found in the interconnected practices that weave together a set of five elements.
- Advancing Deep Equity
- Cultivating Leaderful Ecosystems
- Valuing Multiple Ways of Knowing
- Influencing Complex Systems Change
- Creating the Space for Inner Work
We first shared approaches and practices for embracing these elements through a series of articles published in the Nonprofit Quarterly where we looked at each element separately. The five articles in the series present each element in turn, exploring what it means and how people, organizations, and networks are putting it into practice.
Toward Love, Healing, Resilience & Alignment by Sheryl Petty, Kristen Zimmerman, and Mark Leach and is the final article in the series.
Many people across the justice ecosystem are intensely reflecting on what will make their work meaningful, impactful, and ultimately transformative. Of the emerging insights, many of us are finding answers in the vital connection between inner work – transforming ourselves, and outer work – transforming the world. In the context of generating thriving justice ecosystems, “inner work” may be one of the least discussed, but most essential elements. Our ability to create meaningful change as an “ecosystem” – depends on our ability to embody and reflect the transformation we wish to see inside ourselves at the same time we embody it in the systems around us. This relationship – between inner and outer change – is generative. The more we nurture and experience change in one, the more we long for and believe it can be so in the other.
Read Toward Love, Healing, Resilience & Alignment, published by the Nonprofit Quarterly.