Power Within Our Groups

Ricia over at Impetus Java House has an ongoing series that she calls About Power. Recently, she decided to open the series up for contributions from other writers, and she asked me to submit something. I have done so: "Power Within Our Groups."

Here are the first couple of paragraphs as a teaser to get you over to the Java House to read the rest!

I've always sort of pictured it as something as big as the sky that gets squeezed down to a point and then spills from that point like vomit, to pollute everything it touches.

I'm talking about power and how it messes with our social change groups from within, makes them less functional and less pleasant, makes them exclude or silence or shatter to bits. The origins of that are society-wide, so we can't stop it completely -- we can never create complete health in one microcosm while our society remains so sick. But we can take responsibility for knowing what's going on, for expecting it, and for developing skills to navigate it and nudge the spaces we co-create in more liberatory and effective directions. We need to see the nurturing of such awareness and skills, in ourselves and others, not as something to worry about when we have time and energy left over at the end of the day, not as an add-on to the "real work," but as a core, fundamental task in our quests for radical social change.

Read more!

Go check it out!