Become A Good Ancestor with Layla Saad
Ep002: This Here Flesh with Cole Arthur Riley

The Black history I carry with me: Cole Arthur Riley
By Jeneé Osterheldt

This column is a part of A BEAUTIFUL RESISTANCE: Black joy, Black lives, as celebrated by culture columnist Jeneé Osterheldt

Cole Arthur Riley created a literary communion in Black Liturgies.

On Instagram, she’s made a space to lift her innermost thoughts as well as the holy wisdom of our writing legends like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and the Bible, too.

“When I’m most honest, I tell people that Black Liturgies was born out of anger. I began the project in the wake of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, and the resurfacing of the murders of Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain,” says Riley, the spiritual teacher in residence with Cornell University’s Office of Spirituality and Meaning Making.

“I was hungry for a spiritual space where Black grief, Black anger, my Black body was honored in a meaningful way. I had belonged to white-dominated, Christian spaces for long enough that I was desperate for a community of spiritual liberation. So I began connecting Black literature and poems, sometimes with prayers, sometimes with a breath practice. And very quickly a community much larger than I had an imagination for began to form,” she says.

Having drawn in a “congregation” of over 140,000 followers in a year and a half, Riley is releasing her debut novel, “THIS HERE FLESH,” published by Penguin Random House later this month. Get to know her.

The Black History I carry with me is:

Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Zora Neale Hurston. All the Black women who’ve understood what their words were worth, particularly in times when the world was trying to convince them otherwise.

I sometimes walk around with the first line of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters in my head. It gets stuck in there like a song, and I’ll find myself kind of chanting, “Are you sure sweetheart, that you want to be well?” It has made a home in me. There is a magical canon of Black women authors who’ve expanded our imaginations for liberation, who’ve articulated nuanced Black characters with quirks and flaws and beauties. If I could write a sentence even a fraction as tender and complicated as theirs, I would feel proud.

Why is it so important for us to author our own stories and share them?

When I wrote THIS HERE FLESH, I didn’t immediately know it would be a book of storytelling. I thought it was just going to be this serious book of philosophical contemplation or something. But when I picked up the pen, all I was capable of writing were the stories that had formed me. I couldn’t talk about dignity without talking about my father lathering cocoa butter on us in the evenings. I couldn’t speak of lament, without telling of my gramma lying, trembling, on the linoleum floor. We must tell our own stories, because so many stories have been stolen from us. So many of us have not been allowed to tell the truth of us with the passion it demands, or without being censored and rewritten. We must become our own historians.

It was Toni Morrison who said, “Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald … But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”

So there is also something really powerful in knowing that as we share our stories, it doesn’t always need to be so literal and succinct. As I wrote THIS HERE FLESH, I kept reminding myself that I was free at last to unshackle my creativity. So you’ll find a bit of magic and myth in the book. Myth sadly can have a negative connotation; I’d like to reclaim this. It’s a beautiful and worthy form for our storytelling. The ancestors have shown us that much.

What gives you joy?

I’ve always loved being alone. A few years ago I would’ve felt too much shame to answer this question with “solitude,” but I’m learning to resist this. I rest best when I’m alone– when I’m not engulfed in the emotions or experiences of others. For some of us, solitude possesses a rare path into our interior worlds. And I feel so at peace, so alive with joy when I travel into myself. To remember who I am and all that has made me. It risks sounding self absorbed, but the reality is, my solitude often takes me into memories and stories of people that have passed on. And it also makes me more attuned to the interior lives of others. It makes me a better friend, a better daughter. Solitude is, maybe in paradox, a practice of collective care.

So I write and I stare at the wall and I watch Netflix documentaries and water the plants. And I’m alone, but there’s joy there.

My life is a beautiful resistance because:

I refuse to live a disembodied life. Even as I survive the violence of white supremacy, the judgment of white intellectualism, the pain of a body that is chronically ill, the memory of a body that has endured abuse, I refuse to abandon my body. It contains more beauty, more mystery than I am able to articulate. And in befriending and honoring it, I communicate belief in my inherent dignity.

Follow @blackliturgies and learn more at colearthurriley.com. This column was originally published by the Boston Globe.

To change the future of work for the better, let’s prioritize people-first, not tech-first, businesses.
By Sherrell Dorsey

In my hometown of Seattle, at the age of 14, I stepped onto the Microsoft campus for my first internship feeling like a big shot. My experience within this epicenter of tech innovation was a significant step in my career journey, but it was not the launching pad for my future in the workforce.

Before I built my chops on Bill Gates’ turf, I’d learned the world of work through Monica McAffee. “Auntie Monica,” as we called her, had been my mom’s nail technician since I was five years old. By the time I’d become a teenager, I’d mastered the art of styling my own hair in between visits to the salon. One day, observing my technical talent for tresses, Auntie Monica invited me onto her team to assist her with styling clients in the shop a few hours a week.

The shop was a masterclass in business and developing a supportive workplace culture. Auntie Monica was precise. She’d run her business for over 25 years, with clients who grew up with her. She served church folk, regular people, Black women of all backgrounds, shapes, sizes, and styles. Some were grandmothers. Moms. Wives. Sisters. Cousins. All were like family to her.

Auntie Monica saw them grow up. She nurtured them, and often fed them when Uncle Kev, her husband and business partner, would fry chicken after a long week and serve up guests when appointments would seep into the late evening.

Auntie Monica represented fullness in entrepreneurship. She ran a business that enabled her own personal wealth journey, which consisted of a hefty real estate portfolio and a well-traveled life—on her terms. For me, she set a standard for hard work, relationship development, company culture, customer service and financial intelligence. This valuable incubation, which was skipped over by leaders who downplayed the genius on our side of town, is at the core of my audacious dream for the future of work.

Imagine for a second if startups were understood to be more than just what occurs in a garage, dorm room, kitchen table, or tech conference—but also what builds a community, wherever that may be. Consider what would happen if we didn’t only focus our attention and investment in what is high growth and high tech, but also paid attention to the microcosms of communities that are people-first versus tech-first: the daycares, coffee shops, bakeries, plumbing services, and more. What would our cities look like in that case?

I’ll tell you.

We would see widespread development. Inner cities and lower-income or disadvantaged communities, for the first time in history, would be deemed hubs for innovation instead of urban problems. The creators and trailblazers who live in these underserved hotspots would no longer be neglected.

Imagine for a second if startups were seen to be more than just what occurs in a garage, dorm room or tech conference—but also what builds a community, wherever that may be.

Black women entrepreneurs who, like Auntie Monica, are skilled in effectively incubating young Black entrepreneurs would be recognized as the training institutions that they are for the future of work. Thus, the nature of the service and vocational industries become centers of empowerment, job training, economic mobility and community stability during a time where the sector at large is experiencing high turnover.

This would hold especially true in the service industry, where Black women are overrepresented. In 2021, 25% of Black women workers worked in service occupations, compared with just 18% of white women workers and 12% of white men. As a result, if nothing else, we must direct our focus in that direction.

I imagine a city concerned with inclusive innovation and job growth as one that undoubtedly intends to provide Black women-owned service businesses with the utmost support they deserve. At the surface, this support means funding them to become accelerators to small business growth and providing resources for them to offer paid internship programs for locals.

A 2021 census report found that businesses owned and operated by people of color tend to employ people within their own communities. And yet, these aren’t the business owners often considered to be launching pads for educating and training the future of the workforce. Reshaping a city to be conscious of this would yield a significant impact on the local service industry.

When Black women are let down and left out of the growth equation, cities lose a valuable source of economic and social capital.

Now, the urge to argue that service occupations are a source of automation risk, particularly for the African-American workforce, is understandable. But I would counter that notion by presenting this as an opportunity to invest in training. Progressive cities must consider taking steps toward up-skilling and retraining Black-owned service-sector businesses for positions that can’t yet be claimed by automation.

According to a 2017 McKinsey Global Institute analysis, Black service-industry workers have access to fewer economic resources to address their potential displacement on their own, so it will take collaboration across the private, public and social sectors to promote retraining opportunities for African Americans. I’d like to see us do it, changing our approach and making an effort to build forward-thinking communities, even in the inner cities. By dismissing opportunities like this all around us, we have consistently squandered possibilities to be revolutionary in our communities.

Take a snapshot of any city in the United States today, and please, zoom in. You’ll notice that much more can be done to drastically improve the livability for Black women and to prioritize them in the work landscape of the future. From the west coast to the east, I’ve spent years living and working across the country, and the root of the disappointment is the same: a lack of support and accessibility.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, I worked alongside Black women who fought tooth and nail to no avail for their voices to be heard, the value of their work understood, and adequate resources put in their reach.

Illustrated by Steffi Walthall for Bloomberg Magazine

It’s obvious that when Black women are let down and left out of the growth equation, cities lose a valuable source of economic and social capital. So why not reshape a city designed to work for them rather than against them in every way possible? For the workforce that extends beyond the workplace, let us also rethink how we structure coworking spaces.

My best friend and business partner of over 10 years, Enovia Bedford, enrolled her son in a school with a coworking space on campus. She is able to run her remote business in close proximity to her son during work and school hours. What a lovely sight! He is taken care of, while she handles what she needs to in order to provide for their family.

Consider reshaping a city with more setups like this. Rather than jumping through hurdles of discrimination and facing the psychological warfare of male-centered corporate systems, Black mothers who want to focus on growing businesses and creating their own income can do so without jeopardizing their availability for their children.

The worth of Black women’s contributions to building communities is not exclusively measured in terms of their output. With education and careers being the focus for many policymakers, it can be easy to forget about the minds and bodies behind those institutions. Wellness amenities, as of now, are a luxury for many, mainly located in places where white folks raise their families.

I would like to reimagine such environments and centers as a requirement for health and productivity in spaces where Black women live. Dare to provide neighborhoods populated by Black families with top-tier therapeutic services, a comprehensive spectrum of maternal care, nutrition and exercise, and fill every corner with green space. Through the collaborative effort of public and private partnerships, we can create safe, culturally rich environments that prioritize services for physical and mental health.

This future I speak of may take time and directed investments to realize, but it is not out of reach if we can agree on where the movement must begin—at the top. The lack of representation at higher levels of business and government pervades our cities, resulting in the disproportionate work landscape we see locally.

Through it all, the Black woman has been an underrated pioneer, an overlooked incubator, an interrupted power, and—far too often—a missed opportunity for investment. It is past time to reevaluate our priorities and reimagine the destinies of our cities to say no more.

This excerpt was originally published by Bloomberg Magazine with permission from the publisher, Wiley, from Upper Hand: The Future of Work for the Rest of Us. by Sherrell Dorsey. Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. All rights reserved. Dorsey is also the founder and chief executive officer of The Plug-a news platform covering the Black innovation economy and available on the Bloomberg Terminal.

Editors: Brentin Mock, Jennifer Sondag
With assistance from Kelsey Butler and Jordyn Holman

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Featured Curator: Courtney Napier

Courtney Napier is a writer, journalist, gatherer, and liberation coach from Raleigh, North Carolina. She has written for national outlets like NewsOne and The Appeal, as well as regional and local publications such as Scalawag Magazine, WALTER Magazine, The Carolinian, and INDY Week. She is also the founder of Black Oak Society, a collective of Black creatives in the greater Raleigh area. Their flagship publication, BOS Magazine, is a literary magazine focused on giving Black Raleigh her flowers now. Finally, Courtney has coached individuals and organizations as they seek to lead and live in a way that undermines white supremacy and honors the humanity of all people. She loves to love her spouse, David, of ten years, and her two little humans who are endless hilarious meme reels.

New Motherhood, a Dictionary
By Namrata Poddar

Motherhood: Goddess squad gracing the walls of Hindu temples, wifehood and motherhood balanced perfectly in those slender waists and big breasts, ever ready to nurse.

Motherhood of the Goddess Consort, a male fantasy like their Virgin Mother.

Motherhood: a border, a wall sundering your life into prebaby and post-baby days. Wait till he grows up, they say. It comes back—the physical mobility, the energy, the yoga, the reading, brunches with girlfriends, happy hour with colleagues, the love-making too.

Motherhood: your new role—now  that you’ve given them a legacy with a baby boy—as an addendum in their parties, neither the text you’ve aspired to be nor the footnote you used to be.

Motherhood: its own game of power in heterodomesticity, one you keep fighting for dignity, one you keep losing for sanity.

Motherhood: shield for your baby boy from the silence and self-hatred of those mother figures, wired to perpetuate toxic masculinity.

Motherhood: quarantine before quarantine becomes a global thing, worthy of empathy.

Motherhood: a feminine logic of love. How it strips romantic love of its luster, that transactional love between adults driven by a capitalist logic of profit.

Motherhood: an unending play of paradox, a dance in chiaroscuro.

Motherhood: Adi Shakti, primordial Goddess Mother, Creatrix to all that was, is, will be. How she empties you of the masculine drive to possess meaning. How she anchors you into the fleeting, into what is yet to be born. Your alignment with eternal becoming.

This piece was originally published by Raising Mothers.

Treva Lindsay and Melissa Harris-Perry on misogynoir, poverty, and violence
By Courtney Napier

On a recent girls’ trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, my friends and I made the visual arts exhibit our final stop. I glimpsed the work of Bisa Butler out of the corner of my eye and ran towards it, giddy with admiration. Before me was Butler’s quilted portrait of Harriet Tubman, with her black velveteen hair and full skirt adorned with purple and yellow flora—an icon of liberation, wrested by the hands of Black women.

Just over my shoulder, the presence of a vacuous black space interrupted the triumphant moment. I slowly turned until I was face-to-face with Amy Sherald’s arresting portrait of Breonna Taylor, hanging in solitude in a blackened enclave. The people who stood in line waiting to both admire its beauty and pay their respects could not hold back their cries. In front of me, a Black teenage girl buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. My friend Gloria did the same in mine while she wept.

The visceral sense of anger and hopelessness that we experienced in the presence of Breonna Taylor’s portrait captured some of the same emotions that propelled Dr. Treva B. Lindsay to write her latest book, America Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice. 

On April 22, media host and scholar Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry joined Dr. Lindsay at Rofhiwa Book Café, a Black owned bookstore, for the Durham launch of America Goddam. There the two discussed Lindsay’s new book and the ways that harm—economic, medical, police, and intimate partner violence—shows up in the lives of Black women.

“I want Black girls and gender-expansive people to curl up with my book and feel like, ‘Wow, she sees these issues that I’ve experienced, that friends have experienced. I’m not alone.'”

Dr. Lindsay has experienced these kinds of violence first hand. Her book names the same truth that the murder of Breonna Taylor and the layers of political violence that followed, revealed to the rest of the world. It’s a truth that Black women have known our entire lives: America doesn’t give a damn about us. The fact that we only learned about Taylor’s killing in the wake of the murder of George Floyd—which occurred three months later—along with the fact that none of Taylors’ killers were sentenced for her death, proves that Black women have never been regarded as full humans, let alone full American citizens.

What makes Lindsay’s book unique from others that deal with the violence against women is its expansive definition of the word “violence” itself. Each chapter of America Goddam addresses a distinct, death-dealing system that causes harm to Black women and gender expressive people.

Lindsay wrote of her book, “I bear witness and with-ness to what’s on these pages.” America Goddam is a mandate from her ancestors to pass down not just her intellectual knowledge of how our country became such a violent place, but her hard-won wisdom on how to survive it.

Lindsay’s own journey began in Washington D.C. “I grew up in Chocolate City when it was still Chocolate City,” she said with a wry chuckle. Her parents, both North Carolina-bred Fayetteville State University graduates, instilled in her both a love for the South and a love for Black people.

Too often, Americans from the North and the West love scapegoating the South as the nation’s Superpredator. America Goddam examines the murders of Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor, two women slain in Southern states. The last chapter of her book, however, is written as a letter addressed to Ma’Khia Bryant, the teenage girl murdered by the police in Columbus, Ohio, where Dr. Treva Lindsay lives and teaches as Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University.

“I always wince when I hear people over-determine that the South is uniquely violent in the context of America,” she explained. “As though once you move from there, somehow the anti-Blackness, the patriarchy and all of that just just disappears and that it’s not entrenched in these other regions across the nation. I’m very intentional in talking about violence that’s happening all over America to really make it America Goddam.”

She also acknowledges that certain cases of violence that stood out to her needed to be examined and written about specifically in their Southern context, which made her conversation with Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry at Rofhiwa all the more significant.

“Each region—and sometimes regions within regions—have their own distinct histories and have their own resistance histories that I think are super important to put [certain cases] into context.” But while the South has a uniquely oppressive history, it also carries an amazing organizing history, rich with incredible traditions of Black radical resistance and reverberated throughout the country.

Lindsay shared the story of Francis Thompson, a trans woman who, in 1866, was one of the first people to testify before Congress about being sexually violated. “It’s a Black woman from the South who is speaking in front of Congress—one hundred plus years before Anita Hill, and later Christine Blasey Ford—about sexual violence. The South to me means so much in terms of the documenting of the violence, and the documenting of the incredible resistance.”

“We see such an acute attack on Black communities, Black kinship networks, Black families, and then at the core of that Black women and girls who feel that disparate impact of this targeted divestment from the public good.”

Lindsay herself is another living example Southern femme resistance, and looms large in the field of Black feminism as a historian and prolific writer. She has also been awarded an array of awards, fellowships, and grants for her work, including the ACLS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellowship, The Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellowship at Harvard University, and The Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship—and has made a significant impact on her community outside of academia, founding the Transformative Black Feminisms Initiative and co-founding the Black Feminist Night School at Zora’s House, both in Ohio.

Appearing on my computer screen with a crown of locs down past her shoulders and a stunning dress in a springtime green, her smile accented a soft yet focused countenance. Her presence was powerful, like her words that followed. The depth of her love for Black women and gender expansive people was effervescent.

“This book is for Black girls and Black women,” Lindsay replied with pride when asked about her intended audience of readers. “I wanted them to know that there are those of us who deeply care about our stories, who deeply care about the lives we live before this moment of harm, that deeply care about highlighting and amplifying the work of those who are working to end violence against Black women and girls.”

She has made herself accountable to Black women and girls concerning the impact of America Goddam, too. “If other people find it and can take something away from it, that’s awesome,” Lindsay explained. “But I want Black girls and gender-expansive people to curl up with my book and feel like, ‘Wow, she sees these issues that I’ve experienced, that friends have experienced. I’m not alone.'”

One chapter that especially struck me is entitled “Unlivable: The Deadly Consequences of Poverty.” I had recently been introduced to the term “the feminization of poverty” in my Introduction to Sociology class, and it resonated deeply as memories of various family members, nightly news clips, and my own past experiences of trading WIC vouchers for milk and eggs swirled together in my mind. It also reminded me of one of a famous quotation by one of America’s unsung orators and activists, Coretta Scott King:

“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” 

Lindsay was unsatisfied with the treatment of poverty in mainstream conversations about violence against Black women as incidental instead of a system of violence in its own right. “We have millions of Black women and girls who are barely surviving, without resources, but overworked, underpaid, and hyper exploited,” she said.

It is common to hear a poor Black woman or gender-expansive person describe their lifestyle as “making a way out of no way.” Lindsay points out that this effort of navigating the impossible nature of poverty with a disappearing social safety net is just that: Impossible. “We see such an acute attack on Black communities, Black kinship networks, Black families, and then at the core of that Black women and girls who feel that disparate impact of this targeted divestment from the public good.” Here, she is referring to the “welfare queen” and “crack baby” tropes that were created to dehumanize and demonize Black women and girls and turn white voters against everything from public housing, to unemployment insurance, to pell grants.

She also reminds the women, girls, and gender-expansive people of color that we gave birth to the wealth this country works so hard to keep from us. The impact of this lack of access to wealth, plus the hyper-exploitation of our bodies for productive and reproductive labor, results in multiple layers of violence including kidnapping and trafficking, workplace injuries and abuse, mental health decline, and “weathering,” or physiological decline due to chronic racism-induced stress—which, studies have shown, are linked to the most common killers of Black women: heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

In our conversation, Lindsay pointed to the internalization of these tropes as evidence of capitalist violence. “Why have we constructed an imagination in which we maligned welfare, so much to the point that we then do the work to dissociate from it?” she asked, rhetorically. “The impulse to dispute the stereotype of [the welfare queen] as a Black woman still leaves intact the lie that receiving welfare is a negative or something to be maligned for, instead of a part of the robust safety net of a nation that proclaims to care.”

Much in the manner that James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens inspired a generation of Black people to not settle for survival, America Goddam grasped the torch and carried it passionately into the 21st century.

In her endorsement, journalist and author Melissa Harris-Perry says America Goddam is “not a memoir, but it’s personal. This is not journalism, but it reports. It is not an easy book, but it’s necessary. And in the end, Lindsey challenges you to choose hope.”

Dr. Lindsay’s book is, indeed, a work that defies category. It is a tapestry of narratives from the past and the present, from the personal to the global, and from the familial to the political. These narratives tear off the cape of invincibility forced upon Black women in an anti-Black world and instead wrap us in quilts that gather us up in a future safety.

This article was originally published by Scalawag Magazine.

Click the image or here to hear “Careful”.

“Careful”
By Devin Bustin

Careful
You’re about to get an earful
Or even get a mouthful
And wouldn’t that suck?

You’re not
The only story at the bus stop
The only one who needs a day off
But you’re the loud one on the phone

I know
I’m the one who’s got the headphones
With the monologues of my own
But it’s the one that I choose

I’m not
Trying to keep you within earshot
So I’m applying earlock
To hear myself think

Take me
Where I can think clearly
And maybe
I won’t mind my mind

This city
Where everybody sits near me
And I’m learning how to sit beside myself

Tell me
Who’s the tallest in your family
Who’s carrying a baby
Who’s carrying grief

Me, I was an ocean in my past life
I don’t know why I look away
When people wave

Pádraig Ó Tuama on Finding Uncommon Ground

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Pádraig Ó Tuama, originally aired in September of 2019. The Isle of Éire (Ireland) is rich with stories held by the land, both ancient and modern, laden with both fierce culture and colonial violence. Pádraig Ó Tuama perceives these complex layers of history with acute insights into the lingering impacts of imperialism and sectarianism that have divided Ireland. By acknowledging deeply rooted cultural pain, Pádraig calls for Irish, English, and the rest of us to heal by reckoning with the past and embracing the creative potential held within our differences. Enter a poetic journey where the land awaits us beyond the divide of borders, history, and suffering. Ayana and Pádraig explore the language of uncommon belonging; how we must learn from our shame, the life cycle of violence, and how to confront the inheritance of privilege. Poet and theologian, Pádraig Ó Tuama’s work centers around themes of language, power, conflict, and religion. Pádraig presents Poetry Unbound with On Being Studios and in late 2019 was named Theologian in Residence for On Being, innovating in bringing art and theology into public and civic life. From 2014-2019 he was the leader of the Corrymeela Community, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation community.

I’m Making Real Change in My City
By Allen Alderman*

*Note to Readers: If you ever wanted to REALLY make a change in your town, instead of just starting a fight, consider this your manifesto. It was submitted by a Strong Towns member who represents their community in local government. The author, who wanted to write freely, requested we publish this column under a pseudonym.

I’m making real change in my city, with more exciting things to come. Do you want your city to be a resilient place built for people? Here’s what is working for me:

1. Get involved in local politics.

Your local government is run by hard-working nerds who show up to meetings. You can be one of them. But if that’s definitely not for you, you should at least be emailing your representatives every few months. You would be amazed at how much weight is placed on correspondence from constituents who speak up. You can do what I did and run for your City Council. But you don’t have to. Find out when your Planning and Zoning, Adjustment Board, and City Council meets. Email your representatives your perspective about specific items on the agenda. Volunteer to be part of a citizen review process. Volunteer to be on your town’s tree commission or whatever so that you start making connections and have a longer resume when there’s an opening on a Planning Board or neighborhood steering committee to apply for. Changing the place you live is incredibly rewarding. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had with a hobby. People in your town are going to accumulate power and then shape the way it looks in 25 years. Why not you? And your chances will be better if you…

2. Get informed.

Read books about development and the looming fiscal and infrastructure disaster car-oriented cities are headed toward. Learn what your city spends taxpayer money on (“What does it say about our values that we spend $4.7 million on roads and only $27,000 on sidewalks?”). Learn the extent to which quick-moving traffic and ubiquitous free parking make everything worse for people. The more you learn, the more equipped you’ll be to…

3. Learn to make your case.

If your goal is to get angrier and angrier alongside people who think exactly like you without ever improving things, then you can skip this part and stick to posting memes on social media. But for most of us, it is important to learn to persuade conventional thinkers. A radical is easily dismissed. It’s harder to dismiss someone who can appeal to perspectives everyone shares. When I try to persuade my progressive friends, I talk about pedestrian access for the people who can’t drive and the disproportionate burdens parking minimums place on the poor. Oh, and climate change. When I talk to my Trump-loving family, I say I’m trying to bring back the fiscally responsible, traditional building patterns that our forefathers understood. I’m bringing back the front porch and kids playing outside and knowing your neighbors and supporting local businesses. “Of course if someone wants a big house and a big acreage and to drive and park everywhere, that’s their right. I just don’t think they should expect other people to subsidize it, which is how things work out now.”

Remember that people don’t usually change their minds if you engage them in an argument. If your interlocutor says something stupid, ask them why they think that’s true. If they say, “why should we build bike lanes when hardly anybody bikes,” then you say, “That’s a good question, but in my opinion that’s like asking why we should build bridges when hardly anybody swims across the river?” The more you practice this, the better you’ll get at bringing people along, which means you’re starting to…

4. Build a coalition.

Asking most people you know to change their minds about auto-oriented infrastructure is like asking a fish to change its mind about water. So you have to meet them where they are. But if you can convince one person every three months that things need to change in your city, and then over the next three months you each convince a person and so on, then in 3 years you will have a coalition 2000+ strong. Unless your city is enormous, that is far more than you need to effect real change. Especially if the people you influence are involved in local politics (see Step 1). And while you’re building your coalition, you need to…

5. Patiently persist.

Stupid developments with too much off-street parking will be built and you won’t be able to stop them. Ask questions. Suggest alternatives. But don’t be the angry person everyone ignores. Be patient. Persist. Local government moves slowly. Even if the city staff agrees with you, that doesn’t mean they assign the same priority to things you do. So learn to send an email every six weeks: “Hey, where are we at on looking at parking minimums?” It’s satisfying to finally get something to completion, but it’s not like a race. It’s like professional kitten herding. And even when you get things done, it probably won’t be all you want, so you have to learn to…

6. Be content with incremental progress.

I’m on a city council with six other people and three of them are starting to come along. We just hired a Strong Towns-friendly city manager. Our engineer cares about pedestrian access and is open to learning. And in spite of all that, I still know that things won’t be completely different next year. I wish I could snap my fingers and pedestrianize our main street. I wish I could fund a pilot project running a frequent bus back and forth on a fixed route through our transit-free midsize town. I wish I could eliminate parking minimums everywhere tomorrow. But the hurdles to those achievements are high and if I attempted to do all of that at once there’s a decent chance someone who ran against me in the next election would win. What I can do (and have done) is help get our streets blocked off for evenings and weekends in the summer. Two years ago, we had a few restaurants do outdoor dining on city property where a parking spot used to be. It was highly contentious at the time, but now we have a lot more and they’re widely embraced! Local change happens incrementally and experimentally. And the obstacles and barriers will tempt you to cynicism and despair, but change does happen steadily. You can accomplish almost nothing in a year. But you’ll be amazed at how different things can be in five years.

It’s worth it. You have no idea how gratifying it feels for me to walk with my children along a sidewalk in our town that is there because I helped make it happen, protected from traffic by a boulevard that used to have an unnecessary lane of travel, on the way to an outdoor patio at our favorite restaurant that would not exist if I hadn’t gotten involved. And good design is contagious. I get that it’s not possible for everyone, but if you’ve ever thought about getting more involved in local politics, I strongly encourage you to do it. Somebody else is thinking about the same, and they’re probably wrong about how to build the urban environment. So why not you?

This article was originally published by StrongTowns.

Some provide an opportunity to reconcile externally by repairing the damage we’ve caused through our political, economic, environmental, or relational acts.  

Others give us a chance to reconcile internally through shedding the expectations of others, reframing our circumstances. The pieces below illuminate these opportunities, and just may help you notice some in your own life.

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Meet the Curator: Brodie Theis

Brodie teaches career education courses that help students discover meaningful work that contributes to the common good. Prior to his faculty and consulting work, Brodie spent a decade in real estate development, small business lending, and the tech start-up space. He’s inspired by the cultivation of wonder, the courage to explore, and not knowing.