Category: Synthesis

As the leaves are falling and the midterm elections are in full swing, we’ve been carving out time to focus on long term power building and care for our Northstar Network. We’re inviting guests to join us at our December Northstar Network meeting! Also we are reworking our framework in a big way.

Undercurrents —-> Transformative Opportunities

We’re still trying to keep getting clearer. We will be focusing on what transformative opportunities we have as a network to move together. We know some of how we want to collaborate in terms of working with intersectionality and relationality.   More on this and how it connects to the Bat Signal soon.

Design team members also expressed interested in long term scenario planning and in naming specific north stars, for example 50% of public companies owned by people in them.

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We’ve changed our name to Northstar Network!  This name change focuses on us being a network and being focused on long term power building towards a shared vision, eg. our north star constellation.

Members of the Northstar Network will all have power building visualizations by December, thanks to all who participated with our data visualist, Catherine Madden, and storyteller, Pendarvis Harshaw.   

We are playing with the frame of Undercurrents and Structural Threats.

In one call, we tried to define structural threats.

• Structural Threats are any sort of fundamental, structural and institutionalized shift.
  • The set of interlocking systems that are designed to be opaque and difficult to change, affect lives, relate to structure of economy, relationships (inequality and systems), planetary boundaries that are finite – weaving in. Need more clarity in my language about this.
  • There is a notion of power – structural forces (visible/not), where a select group has power and others don’t. Continuing status quo and growing this, keeping system in tact.
  • Intersectionality – structural forces have disproportionate impact on different communities. Solution has to be intersectional – can’t make changes that don’t consider plurality of communities.

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APEN  is having an inquiry into how we build power with a State Membership Experiment, asking What does it take to actually have the numbers and the community support and shift in overall world view in our communities? How might we determine our focus on initial approach to individual membership?

Mackenzie at Jobs with Justice has been focusing on experiments with in the JwJ membership lab including West Virginia, Working People Issues and Debit Card experiments.

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• We’re deciding on a new name for Wye River!
• We are aligned on trying to change the system. We know the tensions about how to work with a specific constituency, and we know how it’s all connected. We are practicing how to be specific and focused on intersectionality and relationality and create structural change. We’ve had strategic questions around “centering marginalized communities”, and how that conversation connected to relationality. We are looking for the places for collaboration.
• We are focusing on the practice element: how can we be doing more than talking? We are building up a library of things we’ve tried as individual orgs and strategic questions through experiments. Many of these experiments are focused on base building and organizing.

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