Community Psychology

 Consider…

• What is the cultural or psychological inheritance in your organization or congregation? 

• What is it longing to let go of and what stories about itself does it keep repeating? 

• What culture are you longing to create – and what new story do you need to tell?

 • What rituals will you need to perform and what processes would you and your people need to have to allow that culture to take root and emerge?

Academic Research: Culture-Building for Anti-Racism

My academic research on organizational culture-building is focused on how organizations intentionally design for and embody a specific way of being. My theoretical work examines the history of identity development theory from the perspective of interdependent selves-in-relation, and the psychological and social implications of identities of interdependence on progressive culture-building and movement-making. 

My research focused on the culture-building strategies of a white, anti-racist organization in Southern California, committed to activating, organizing, and mobilizing thousands of white people in personal transformation towards political anti-racism. During the time of my research with them, they were shifting from an organization of a couple hundred participants to an organization of thousands. They were seeking ways to sustain the specific personal transformation and culture-building activities that they felt were necessary to anti-racist white organizing and imagining how to do that at scale while engaging in new political campaigns. 

This case study research included interviews and observational analysis of the organization as a participant-observer. The findings have important implications for organizations committed to culture-building that transforms people toward political action and identity – whether those are grassroots organizations, schools, or progressive congregations. 

The full dissertation is publicly available on ProQuest: click here. 

Research Highlights

• Culture-building organizations are both containers (for community) and response mechanisms (for political organizing). They are able to absorb and direct people in moments of political activation as well as support community-building and leadership development between periods of activation.

• Culture-building organizations are highly contextual: they know where they are located (in geo-cultural space and within an ecosystem of other progressive organizations) and who they serve. They do not try to serve everyone everywhere: they look for what is meaningful in their local context and their particular role in movement-making.

• Culture-building organizations that seek to challenge dominant culture and who want to grow to do so, need to emphasize a “big tent” politic that welcomes people where they are on a progressive journey. Seekers who are interested in challenging dominant culture often come with confusion, loss, and uncertainty – to meet these people where they are, the first experience must be one of “belonging on arrival.” This countercultural meeting space is a space of care and belonging – your choice to show up is what matters, not whether you know, do, or say “all the right things.” The emphasis begins with praxis, not ideology.

• Culture-building organizations value personal transformation – the journeys people make into their own understanding of cultural issues and identities. Identities are active (made through our behavior), relational (made in our relationships), and collective (made as part of contexts of people and place). We are interdependent and our identities are shaped interdependently – which makes collective work a core site for (re)shaping our identities.

• Personal transformation is always in support of political and collective efforts. Personal transformation is a leadership development process that supports the skills necessary for effective organizing and real political changes. These skills include:

  • Analysis and imagination: the ability to analyze a situation from a political antiracist perspective and to be part of imagining an alternative way of being that is not rooted in white supremacy and domination.

  • Language and persuasion: the ability to translate political analysis and imagination into accessible, persuasive language privately and publicly.

  • Emotional resilience: the ability to respond to challenging situations, setbacks, and the constant changes and adaptations required in antiracist organizing.

  • Conflict engagement: the ability to find restorative ways of moving through conflict and harm, as an alternative to throwing people away (indispensability culture as opposed to disposability culture)

  • Relationship building: the ability to attend to and value the well-being of your collaborators as whole human beings in real human bodies and embedded in networks of relationship and lineage.

  • Taking action and building alternatives: the ability to plan and execute actions and events as well as the ability to organize and participate in experiments that serve as alternatives to dominant culture.

• When someone in the organization has integrated these skills in active, relational, and collective ways, they are experienced as someone who is “carrying the culture” – this is true leadership development.

An Excerpt, from “Chapter 5: Discussion”: “What is the importance of an active, relational, and collective identity?”

“What is unique about this emphasis on personal transformation, however, is that it is active (skills are to develop and practice), relational (those skills are relationship skills, as in attending to horizontality and emotionality or embracing conflict as generative), and collective in specific ways. Participants shift from seeing themselves as individuals in transformation toward being part of collective, political, movements. This is in alignment with literature from Sandoval (2000) who focused on deindividualization: a process that weakens the nets of accountability to supremacist culture and domination and supports members in forming new commitments that are responsive, flexible, and adaptive to an antiracist community. This antiracist community consists of particular people, at a particular moment, in a particular place, which is not to say the commitment is limited, but that it is specific. These commitments are to real relationships, in real places, at real moments; they are not hypothetical or abstract commitments. These are “community-based” commitments in particular, “site[s] of struggle, and [sets] of activities” (Aanerud, 2007, p. 34). It is in this specificity that accountability is possible. One is not accountable to a “theory” of anti-racism in one’s own mind; one is accountable to specific relationships and specific places where domination is practiced and felt. Goodness is not in one’s perfection or expertise; it is in one’s willingness to respond and in one’s ability to respond to and stay in relationship when conflict or harm is present. What is better than being “good”? It is better being in relationship—and, more specifically, a relationship that is not based in domination.”