What’s the bottom line?
Last week, I learned that a non-profit I admire had stopped providing support to incarcerated women. When I asked why, the answer was straightforward: we won’t work with corrections professionals, because we don’t support incarceration.
Another non-profit I admire (and have often mentioned here), Roca, Inc, takes a different approach. The young people Roca works with are already involved in the criminal justice system. Many are active in gangs, and most of their lives are ringed with guns and street drugs. This year, Roca worked with over 1200 young men. 98% had no new incarcerations.
Tha Thai, the Assistant Director of Roca’s program in Boston, is quoted on Roca’s webpage, insisting that without relentlessly pursuing “strong relationship[s] with probation and police officers, DA’s, judges” Roca would not achieve those results.
When I began to study liberatory systems change, I interviewed dozens of people about what it takes to drive it. Over and over, I heard focus on the bottom line.
The stories of those two non-profits offer a case in point. The first chose a bottom line built on principle: because a system is wrong, engaging with it is also wrong. The women they left in that system lost precious resources as a result.
The second built a strategy of engaging with a deeply flawed system, a strategy that delivers liberation: year after year, in communities where Roca works, there are fewer young men in prison.
Yet engagement like that is often met with suspicion and accusations of complicity, even collusion. I understand some reasons for those concerns: if engaging with unjust systems is undertaken as a path to unity, or bridging a divide, or peace defined by calm waters, it can indeed invite complicity.
The antidote to that, I think, is a bottom line defined by a changed experience: For me, that means liberation from violence and cruelty, and thriving unfettered by bigotry.
I’m more likely to get those results with engagement, with steely compassion and grace, than by diminishment and exclusion.
I subscribe to the newsletter of Reos Partners, a systems change consultancy dedicated to liberatory social impact. In a recent issue, Mahmood Sonday, who leads Reos’ work on the African continent, wrote, “If we can stare into the eye of the storm long enough, with curiosity and openness, something shifts. When the machinery of the old order creaks under its own obsolescence, new opportunities emerge.”
Long-cherished principles of liberation movements can “creak under their obsolescence” too. The way past that is just what Mahmood describes: staring injustice in the eye, with earnest curiosity, leaving principle aside, staying focused on the bottom line.
I have to remind myself of this almost every day. Do I want to be right, or do I want more people to behave in ways that make it possible for others to thrive? Do I stand on principle, or leave it aside in favor of actions that will result in change?
Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Founding Executive Director
PS. When we work with partners, we only ask them to accept one ideology: that they all agree that every person in their community deserves to thrive. We are engaging with the deeply flawed systems in which we exist, and focusing on changing behaviors to alter those systems. Our work is needed and we need your support to continue. If you’ve ever thought about supporting us, you don’t need to start big. A simple $5 monthly gift helps more than you might imagine — and if you ever want to increase it later, wonderful. For now, starting small is more than enough.
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