Slack Global Consulting

06/27/2024

Less than two weeks until the California Black Women's Health Project Family Reunion! Sunday, June 30th, from 12PM-6PM at SoFi Stadium!

Entry is FREE and registration is required. Parking is FREE for the first 500 vehicles. Register today: bit.ly/FAMREUNION (case sensitive)

There will be food, performances, a kids zone, games, resources, live discussions, giveaways, wellness activities for all ages, exhibitions, special guests & more! It’ll be an opportunity to connect with community, reminisce about the 30 year legacy and get involved in the journey F.O.R.W.A.R.D. (For Our Rights, Wellness, Advocacy, Resources and Descendants).

04/26/2023

"Long-term thinking is urgently needed as humankind grapples with climate change and other burning issues, like fossil fuel extraction and plastic use, that will have huge and irreversible impacts for generations to come. Luckily, communities around the world have long shown it is very much possible.

One oft-cited example is the Seventh Generation Principle from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (known during colonial times as the Iroquois Confederacy), which spans present-day upstate New York in the U.S. and adjoining areas in Canada. “The Haudenosaunee believe that what we do in our lives can have either positive or negative ramifications to the seventh generation yet to come,” says Dave Kanietakeron Fadden, an artist and illustrator from the Mohawk nation, one of six nations that make up the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, along with the Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations."

As humankind grapples with climate change, communities around the world show what’s possible by planning hundreds of years ahead.

04/25/2023

"We are living through a syndemic—a time of multiple crises causing seismic economic, political, environmental, technological, and social shifts, which are long from being settled.1 Black, Indigenous, people of color, and Global South communities are at the frontlines and faultlines of these changes that are reshaping the world. Institutions, hierarchies, and forms of leadership rooted in Western colonial ideology are failing, being renegotiated, and getting deconstructed—even in the face of intense backlash.

In this liminal time, BIPOC leaders are being asked to simultaneously dismantle the past, survive in the present, and create an alternative future. Our leadership, needed now more than ever, is being tested like never before. We are tasked with fighting for short- and long-term goals in tandem. We are called on to hold space for grief, trauma, and despair while also uplifting hope, courage, and vision. We have to navigate the scarcity created by economic, racial, and gender inequality while tapping into an abundance mentality to demand what we need. We must lift up our unique histories and conditions while also stepping up our practice of transforming conflict, resisting divide-and-conquer tactics, and deepening solidarity with one another. "

Transformative healing work is essential to getting us from the world that exists to the world we are calling. We do this work from the belief that we will hit a tipping point when leaders who truly want to transform our conditions, the ecosystem, and the way we lead reach a critical mass.

01/17/2023

"All of these overlapping crises stem from similar root causes: anti-Black racism, imperialism and colonialism, extractive capitalist models, and histories of oppressive treatment toward communities. People over generations have been addressing and eliminating many of these root causes, and there is still much more work to be done. I am often reminded of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote about “the urgency of now,” a phrase that is in conversation with Grace Lee Boggs’s question about the time on the clock of the world. In his famous 1967 speech on Vietnam, Dr. King said: 'We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.'"

Whether you’re ready, weary, or wise, you can take your movement engagement to the next level.

01/16/2023

"The concept of cuerpo-territorio (“body-territory”) around which the Xinka women in Guatemala organize themselves recognizes the interconnectedness between human bodies and all other living beings.

Within this Indigenous philosophy, the body is understood as disputed political territory that is part of the land that has been colonized, exploited, and destroyed by a capitalist, patriarchal system. Both individual and collective subjugation are important pieces of this concept: The colonization of land is interconnected to the hierarchies placed on our bodies to maintain capitalism.

Our intersections—from gender and racialization to (dis)ability and sexual orientation—are what define our place in the hierarchy of capitalism. These predefined roles become even stricter in times of crisis. Take the COVID-19 pandemic—not only did it disconnect us from our communities and reveal the fragility of our bodies, but it also continues to disproportionately impact the most vulnerable among us. But what happens when we step into our autonomy and shed the trappings of heteropatriarchal capitalism? What is the ripple effect of that autonomy in the communities we’re a part of?

These are deeply personal and potentially transformative questions, which is why it’s helpful to learn from the lived experiences of activists who have shifted their relationships with their own bodies and discovered how embracing their autonomy helped them build community. Divorcing ourselves from harmful systems can usher in a collective, revolutionary vision that allows us to live as our most authentic selves without judgment, in community with others who are also free. It’s only by owning the desires of our bodies outside the constraints of capitalism that we can begin building the world we desire. "

Five activists share how shifting their relationships with their own bodies helped them build community.

01/13/2023

"Framework 2 for Living Liberation: Just Transition. I was introduced to the Just Transition framework at a Facing Race conference in 2018, and it immediately resonated with me because it is so honest. In the same way that the Transformative Organizing framework encourages us to confront and work to free our individual selves from the ways we have internalized oppression, the Just Transition framework pushes us to be honest about the ways that we are actually dependent on harmful or extractive systems. It is a strategic framework that was developed by Indigenous communities and has been adopted by transformative justice groups like Movement Generation as a way of broadly mapping the steps for moving from dependence on these harmful systems to interdependence with each other.

Philanthropy and the nonprofit sector are not only the spaces through which I have worked for justice for my entire career, they are also the spaces that support my and my extended family’s livelihood - including family back in Ghana. I am, like so many people I know, love, and respect, fully dependent on these systems that are both extractive and in many ways, work against the justice we seek for our communities. A Just Transition framework recognizes that, because of this conundrum, it is not possible to simply abandon current systems and magically arrive in new, liberated systems. It offers us a strategy to guide our work in this current moment - the space between the old world and the new. And it’s become how I try to shape my own life and livelihood:

Stop the bad & Divest from their Power. Yes we are working within giant systems or complex organizations, but within those systems and organizations, there are a set of policies and decisions that are within my sphere of influence or control. Where I work, this includes everything from weighing in on our endowment investment strategy to how I treat other Black women on staff. In these spaces, even if I don’t have the power to do the most liberatory thing, can I at the very least stop our/my worst practices and create new, even small centers of power?

Build the New & Invest in Our Power. Often our commitment to even the harmful status quo comes from a lack of vision for what else might be possible for us. I’ve been incredibly fortunate that in my places of work, I’ve been given space and resources to not only name what is not working about philanthropy and (in my case) leadership development, but to also create demonstration projects that offer a small window into what else might be possible. A team of us at the Center for Community Change developed the The Calling In and Up curriculum, as a new approach to supporting the leadership of women of color organizers who were stifled by traditional organizer training programs is one example."

Liberation is a practice. We have to live it everywhere we are and everywhere we go.

01/11/2023

"Framework 1 for Living Liberation: Transformative Organizing. One lie many of us tell ourselves is that it is the system solely that holds us back from living our most liberated lives. So the focus of our frustration and, by extension, our organizing is external: we focus on our government and our legislators. We focus on our organizations and our bosses. While it’s true that these structures create the conditions of our oppression, Transformative Organizing as a framework recognizes that we have to work for liberation from both societal oppression (an external, extractive political economic system) and from suffering (the internal response to external conditions we face). Both structures and ourselves must be engaged for liberation.

Or as my friend, organizer Shaketa Redden puts it, “You don’t want to be all stank when we get to liberation.”

Transformative Organizing is rooted in four principles that help to remind me of all the levels that must be engaged to move fully toward liberation. Transformative organizing...
...begins with self-awareness in recognizing habitual behaviors that influence how we show up and create positive impact.
...requires the intentional practice of new ways of being.
...requires envisioning the kind of society we seek in the long-term that traverses the personal, organizational, movement or field, and societal.
...requires ideological, strategic, and mass-based organizing. "

Liberation is a practice. We have to live it everywhere we are and everywhere we go.

01/10/2023

"We believe that a culture of repair must be embedded into all institutions we create—including philanthropy—to ensure Black people can thrive."

For philanthropy to heal, it must see reparations as central to its work. This means not only transferring control of assets to communities, but also embedding repair into its practices.

01/09/2023

"We believe that a culture of repair must be embedded into all institutions we create—including philanthropy—to ensure Black people can thrive. At Liberation Ventures, we define repair as an iterative, cyclical process with four components: reckoning, acknowledgment, accountability, and redress. This framework was developed through a study of frameworks across disciplines—from transitional and restorative justice, to prison-industrial complex abolition, to psychology and religion. It is a living framework; as more individuals and organizations try it out, it will evolve in tangent with our lived experiences. It can apply to all sectors, but here we use it to ask: what might a comprehensive philanthropic approach to repair look like?"

For philanthropy to heal, it must see reparations as central to its work. This means not only transferring control of assets to communities, but also embedding repair into its practices.

10/31/2022

"During this time of the great sickness—a time of tyranny, violence and greed—people have been harmed deeply by the practices of oppression: disconnection from source (a higher power and understanding of the world as greater than ourselves such as through spiritual, natural, cultural, ancestral, and/or creative practice); dissociation from our physical bodies; distancing from our emotions; and distortion of our stories.1 Some days the effects are overwhelming; the sickness is life threatening. Some days—with rest and soup, with love and community care—there are moments of shared understanding, connection, and transformational shifts in understanding and behavior. Beyond rest and community care, what makes these moments possible, and the potential for such moments to multiply exponentially, is not one but many things, things that operate across the dimensions of personal, interpersonal, organizational/institutional, and societal/social systems.2 For those of us working as racial equity change makers—whether as internal or external coaches and consultants, including those who work in intersectional roles as healers, artists, and liberation practitioners—there is a familiar route that embraces organic twists and turns and yields movement in the right direction."

When we made it back home, back over those curved roadsthat wind through the city of peace, we stopped at thedoorway of dusk as it opened to our homelands.We gave thanks for the story, for all parts of the storybecause it was by the light of those challenges we knewourselves—We asked for forgiven

10/31/2022

"... leaders are not solely a product of internal drive; they are also a result of lived experiences, external investment, and recognition. In other words, leaders are made, not born. A person becomes an effective leader through the people that support them and the opportunities and experiences—both good and bad—of their life and career. This combination allows for new skills to be developed, old skills to be honed, and potential to shine through. In the figure below, we’ve laid out how identity, including racial or ethnic identity, as well as other dimensions, such as gender, sexuality, and class, can influence a leader’s approach to their work. "

These leaders’ assets go beyond experiences of oppression or marginalization to include the connection, meaning, and joy they can draw on from their respective cultures and communities.

09/26/2022

"In this year’s primaries, there are more than 100 Indigenous candidates running for state or federal office in the United States. These leaders are no strangers to governance and civic duty—American Indigenous values, like the Iroquois Great Law of Peace, served as the foundational model for American democracy. Still, these civic leaders face significant hurdles, particularly when they campaign in the many districts where Indigenous people aren’t the majority. They must overcome the limited mainstream awareness of Indigeneity and Indigenous issues, remnants of colonialism and lateral violence, and competing interests."

Indigenous values helped shape American democracy, and now they’re helping increase Native representation.