Moving at the speed of love: part 2

Just over a year ago I wrote a piece celebrating the relationships that were blossoming in the early days of living together and community organising at Wirksworth Housing Co-operative. Since then a lot has changed, and my understanding of love within this collective endeavour has deepened. 

During that time we’ve welcomed 6 new people (including 2 children) and said goodbye to 2. We’ve weathered heartbreak together as we lost one of our founding members following my separation. We’ve also had plenty of joyful experiences with the wider community such as running D&D nights and multiple events as part of the queer care collective - with 4 more gatherings happening this winter to provide sober warm spaces for our local community. We’ve hosted about 20 overnight visitors - some who have needed love and care in troubled times, some who were interested in co-operative living, and most recently a few members from the Radical routes network volunteering their time to help us to navigate complex financial questions. We’ve taken the DWP to tribunal over local housing allowance issues and won (again with the support of Radical Routes and our friends at Wild Peak Housing Co-operative). And we are finally about to submit for planning permission to introduce 3 new bedrooms, improve the facilities within the community space, and to insulate this beautiful grade II building for which we constantly count our blessings for even when it’s bloody freezing.

Alongside of all of this we are constantly learning more about ourselves and one another. We’ve made mistakes, we’ve been surprised, but the commitment to the change we are trying to create both for ourselves and generations to come is still burning bright within all of us. I wanted to share some of the things I’ve experienced so far, in the hope that it might inspire  anyone living communally in any capacity to consider how to shape and reshape the way you live together with others.

Personal growth

Relationships are like mirrors. When we allow others in, they will shine a light on parts of us that we didn’t know existed. I thought I was pretty good at this process by now as a result of being a parent and having practiced polyamory for 6 years, but sharing your daily space with so many other adults and children really pushes you to extend your understanding of yourself in ways you weren’t expecting. I’ve had to practice holding my boundaries more than ever, and I’ve also had to practice letting go of expectations or flexing my boundaries too. Perhaps it’s also the pressure that the group was put under following my separation, but it’s also made me question what’s truly important to me and to refind what I believe in over and over again. And learning to do this in real-time alongside multiple other people has been both painful and magical. You learn to be witnessed at your most vulnerable, to practice repair, to really notice when it’s important to speak up and when to remain quiet.

Food

One of my most unexpected challenges when moving into the co-operative was navigating food. As someone who cooks for my kids every night, and is also committed to changing the ways we eat, I assumed this way of living was going to excite me to get to feed more people and reduce our collective waste.

Initially a few of us were all taking it in turns to cook communal dinners most nights, and shopping for our staple foods together. We tried to be extra thoughtful about the competing dietary requirements and allergens within the group. But when so much change started happening we struggled to hold onto this commitment. I noticed in particular for myself that I was having real anxiety around food. Working with my autism coach Micha I realised it was the first time in almost 20 years that I hadn’t been solely responsible for food shopping and cooking, and as an autistic person I was really struggling with not knowing when and what I’d be eating.

I also enjoy cooking as a transitionary activity before I eat, and entering into an overstimulating dining room without that build up was really challenging for my brain. I was sad to have to tell the group I wanted to eat and cook separate meals but it was something I needed to do to have consistent regulation. Since then we’ve slowly been resurfacing with our collective meals - but on a more flexible basis. Most weeks there will be one or two people during the week who will just send out a simple message to say what they intend to cook and anyone can help themselves. For me this approach feels like it shows love and care in a way that centres agency - when someone offers I can be confident they definitely have the capacity to cook for others, and that if I accept or decline the offer it will not be experienced as problematic/inconvenient.

And it almost made me cry the other day when my housemate Char had registered my current hyperfixation on cadbury’s chocolate mousse and popped round with it to brighten my day. The way we notice each other's needs and adapt how navigate something like food fills me with so much confidence for how we navigate other complex issues together.

Space

In such a big building I didn’t imagine we might struggle at times to find the space we all respectively needed. One reason for this is because we have 4 kids as part of our co-op, and small children expand into the space they have. It’s beautiful to witness them all expressing themselves in ways many of us didn’t as kids, and to consider how running around in a giant hall playing games might fill their memories. But it’s also a sensory challenge for a predominantly neurodivergent co-operative.

In addition the building is not designed as a ‘home’. So while we have big beautiful communal spaces (and unnecessarily large hostel bathrooms) it doesn’t necessarily evoke the feelings that others might get from hiding out in their cosy living room or relaxing in their bath.

This year I started renting the cottage next door which me and my kids moved into - while it’s not officially part of the co-operative I believe having a shared garden and an extra kitchen has been pivotal for our capacities to keep investing time and energy into each other and the project. And as we invest in renovation work, the next few years are going to involve a fair amount of negotiation and rearranging to get the combination of needs right. We’re lucky to have such a large space to play with - so long as we can raise the funds we need. Some co-operatives don’t have that same flexibility, but we’ve heard recently about a co-operative that gives their new members a ‘moving in’ budget to make their rooms feel homely. I love the sentiment of each new person being given power to reshape their space to suit their needs.

Money

I wrote last year about our financial model and celebrated the freedom it gives us as a co-operative. But following my separation, we have a substantial investment within the co-operative that was loaned by the founding member who left. It raises some financial questions that none of us imagined having to navigate so early in our journey. The fully mutual housing co-operative model is great in lots of ways because loans are separate from any tenancy - this creates security for those who remain as part of the co-operative because the building can’t just be sold out from underneath those living there like many private landlords can. And the fact that everyone is also an equal director regardless of whether they loan money to the venture means that it levels some of the power dynamics that can ensue when someone is resourcing a project.

But if someone’s commitment to the co-operative was based on them being able to live there, and then they need to find somewhere else it is reasonable for them to request to withdraw that money early. We are currently raising loanstock in the hope that we can return some of their funds to them, invest in the renovations we need to and continue to support more people without access to wealth to live as part of the co-operative. Experiencing this as a member of the co-op has made me reassess the money I have within the project and my own commitment to wealth redistribution - it’s made me think about mine and my kids future in a more collective sense to the point where I even investigated ensuring the funds remain in the co-op if I was to die. But the experience has also made me more committed to raising funds from a wide range of sources to ensure the project doesn’t hinge on the goodwill of a few core people.

Rituals and rhythms

In my work I often talk about how having clear rhythms, cycles or consistent shared practices helps teams to build trust and confidence, particularly through times of change. One of the most invaluable practices we have implemented as a co-op is consent-based decision making, with the support of our lovely collaborator Abi Handley. The structure provides us with a pattern of communication and a route through complex decisions which values everyone's voice and feelings, and makes spaces for dissent and difference. I also think it’s particularly helpful for neurodivergent people to have a structured framework for how they bring ideas and challenges into a conversation. 

We continue to prioritise time together as a group every week to discuss decisions and share issues, and we’ve recently started doing one sunday a month together where we delve deeper into a particular topic. So far we’ve revisited our visions for the co-operative and had financial literacy training on those days - and the next one is likely to be working through our DIY tasks together ahead of the winter. 

Solidarity

Living in this way wouldn’t have been possible without the support of both our local community and the national co-operative movement. Most of our investors are local people and it’s been really powerful to feel both accountable to people we see on a weekly basis and to feel supported by them.  In addition, having a place we could immediately turn to in the form of Radical Routes when we’ve been in crisis has made a huge difference in ensuring we didn’t descend into hopelessness. Most of the time we’ve been able to get easy answers or pretty immediate support from others in the network but even when we’ve had challenges that someone in the network isn’t familiar with, the speed at which people rally around to ensure another co-operative makes it through challenging times has been a really powerful experience. 

It’s made me more committed than ever to the co-operative movement because it’s the first time in any organising space that I’ve really felt that collective sense of care and also focussing on facing up to the challenges that are literally on our own doorstep. It’s soothed my tendency to get a flight response to conflict I’m implicated in and to show up for my comrades in a more grounded way. 

I said to one of my housemates the other day that this period of time had really shown me what a chosen family actually means. I think many of us have a tendency within the lgbt community to want to experience only love and joy together because of what we’ve faced in other spaces, which is legitimate in lots of ways but that also means when conflict arises or we find each other irritating or too much we can end up retreating. When I was struggling to connect with my housemates during the upheavals this year I reminded myself that they were my siblings - and that means our struggles are shared and we are in this together forever in some form. I had to find a way through that feeling and to allow our relationship to morph into something more complex but also more meaningful in the long run. 

Please get in touch with us via wirksworthhc@gmail.com if you are considering investing loanstock, or if you simply want to learn more about housing co-operatives. 


Being an autistic facilitator

The other week I spent all day facilitating a last minute workshop in London and then noticed the weight of the work as I tackled bouts of anxiety about stepping into spaces with anyone online the next day. Being diagnosed as autistic has meant I’m no longer capable of ignoring the signals from my brain and body when I’m struggling. This is great in the long term but short-term it can often leave my questioning how to proceed. So I’ve also been trying to notice where I draw my energy from and value what goes into preparing myself for continuing my work as a facilitator. I thought I’d share some of my experiences of being an autistic facilitator in the hope that it might demonstrate both the magic and the hard work that this combination entails, and support other autistic facilitators and those who work with us to put in place things that make it more possible for us to do this work.

Hierarchy blindness

One of the double-edged swords of autism within this work is our tendency towards hierarchy blindness. Part of why I excelled as a facilitator in my early work was because the ‘status’ or ‘job title’ of someone didn’t effect how I treated them. I naturally made space for everyone to talk and engage, and would have an equal expectation of mutual respect and vulnerability from those who were considered ‘superior’. Over the years though I have had to learn to manage my tendency to call out and confront unequal power dynamics due to the way it might experienced by individuals within a group and the knock on effects that it can have after I’ve gone. This has led me to go deeper into my reflective practice and implement structures and microstructures that can support inclusion and shared accountability. However, knowing I’m both inherently dismissive of hierarchies while having simultaneously developed a deep knowledge of power dynamics, has often become draining because I can end up analysing my perceptions of others (and their perceptions of me) at a mile a minute. It can take a lot out of me to prepare well, be present and process afterwards - often requiring multiple other people to hold space for me to process and integrate what I’ve learnt.

That said I’m appreciative of the fact that my brain naturally needs to process dynamics to this extent. I think anyone holding and trying to disrupt power dynamics needs quite a lot of supervision to continuously get this right and do better, and it’s partly why I’ve started offering 1-2-1 support sessions for people who hold space for others. But when the skill of holding space is undervalued there’s very few clients who will cover the time that facilitators actually need to fully process and integrate what the complexities of what they are holding when it comes to power.

Conscious vs subconcious processing

One theory I have about why autistic people are less likely to take hierarchy as a given (and also more likely to be gender-questioning etc) is because of the differences in how we process information. I believe that a lot of the information and societal norms that are taken as a given by neurotypical people is being processed within their subconcious, whereas autistic people are often having to process these rules and expectations with our conscious minds every time we are met with them.

This can be great within a facilitation context because it means we are more likely to notice and question subtle patterns that a group might assume to be ‘common sense’, and unearth things that might’ve gone unattended to. But it also means that I can sometimes miss things or get confused by things that I really wish my brain would process as ‘common sense’. For example, I often can’t read new people’s facial expressions because my brain takes time to learn each individuals unique patterns. Previously this would make me overwhelmed and anxious when facilitating new groups, but now I have learnt to let people know this and to make more explicit moments for people to vocalise, write or draw how they feeling during a session.

Transitions

Looking back I now realise that one of the reasons I became a facilitator was to provide myself structure with transitioning into a different space, and to have some control over the flow of a conversation. While many people move through the world finding it easy to go from walking down the street to being in a busy room of chatter, this sort of transition is highly overwhelming for many neurodivergent people. What’s more is that it’s quite common for autistic people to need scripts in order to engage in certain conversations. If I’m entering an unheld space I will often rehearse a million different conversations and flows so that I can feel safe enough to speak. The pace of conversation is also often a challenge for me, because by the time my thoughts have solidified and I’ve worked out how to translate them into words, the discussion has often moved on.

Due to my own experiences as a participant, I try to implement structures into how I facilitate in order to accommodate differences in processing speeds. A simple check-in at the start can help people fully transition into the space - but I’ll often go further and invite people to do a drawing exercise or somatic activity to allow space for their bodies to catch up with their brains or vice versa. Consistently making space for solo reflection throughout a session is also important for both the participants and me as a facilitator - the quietness in a room allows me to prepare myself fully for when people start exchanging their ideas and thoughts. And I’m learning that regardless of the ‘intensity’ of a workshop I simply cannot jump straight into another conversation or piece of work right afterwards unless I want to risk a meltdown. Knowing this occurs for me when transitioning out of a space has been helpful to ensure I encourage participants to take the time that they need after a session also.

Interoception

It is common for autistic people to struggle with what is called ‘interoception’- the ability to detect and interpret signals from inside the body. On a basic level this means I can often not realise I need to go to the toilet or that I’m thirsty. Knowing this about myself means that I make explicit time and invitations for others to pay attention to their needs as well. But on a more complex level it can mean I don’t fully understand the feelings I am having in response to an experience until after it has occurred.

Before I understood this about myself I’d feel a great sense of shame a few days after a session if I hadn’t told people how much I’d enjoyed my time with them, or if I’d not responded with enough care to a harmful interaction. But I think it’s partly why I invested so much into developing my understanding of repair processes and also in building my confidence to return to the things that may have been unsaid. Now I know that the moment isn’t all that matters, and that it takes time for my brain (and other people’s brains) to understand what my body has experienced means I can return to those I’ve facilitated with authentic and thoughtful feedback.

Co-facilitation

I’ve been really thriving from having co-facilitators to work with via the Holding Space Collective. When you facilitate alone you are multi-tasking constantly - you’re providing the structure and explaining the exercises, you are listening to people’s contributions and paying attention to the dynamics within the room, you’re also keeping an eye on the environment, time and energy levels, and making decisions about how to adapt to challenges that arise. Having someone else to share out the responsibility has made it possible for me to be more attentive to different layers of a workshop, and has felt more enjoyable because there is someone to work through challenges with. However, as an autistic person it is also a challenge for me to collaborate with others in such an intimate and continuous way so it took me a while to feel comfortable co-facilitating.

I’ve realised that there’s quite a few things that my team at the Holding Space Collective do which has massively helped my autistic brain. We agreed principles together before we facilitated anything - which helped me to understand our shared intentions. We also have a combination of flexibility and structure around how we design sessions, run them, and get paid for them. Shared workshop prep documents and learning journals help me to understand the flow and how things fit together, and give me something to ground myself in when brainstorming broader ideas with a co-facilitator. We also agreed that when we co-facilitate there is a set budget for the workshop but the co-facilitators could then negotiate using consent-based decision making around what level of responsibility they were taking and therefore what pay they expected to receive. We also have reflective sessions with a wider group of us after each workshop which allows us to raise things we want to do more of and things we want to change. This structure has enabled me to notice and name when I’m struggling to work out my role or need more support from the team.

It was actually the existence of the Holding Space collective that kept me going through my bout of anxiety after being burnt out from the intense in-person session. Previously I might have either dissappeared for a few weeks and questioned my ability to do this job, or tried to push through it to do my work and ended up making mistakes in other spaces. But with the support from the collective I was able to process my experience and access supportive structures and rhythms that kept me grounded.

If you’re interested in building your own community of people to support you or want to work out what you need in facilitation then you can sign up to the waitlist for our next 9-month Holding Space for Change programme here.

The rhythm of change

This year I launched Holding Space for Change, a 9-month programme supporting change makers to develop their facilitation practices and reflect on what it means to hold space in the work and communities they are part of, alongside a beautiful bunch of collaborators. We are only 3 months into the programme together and a lot has changed for us all personally too - some of us have separated from long-term nesting partners while someone else in the group has gotten married; one of us has lost a parent and another has lost an aunt; we’ve changed jobs, moved houses, and shifted and changed as people in a multitude of ways. 

Since the start of the year I myself have welcomed 5 new people into the housing co-operative I’m part of, moved into a new building, started an apprenticeship in carpentry, rekindled some somewhat estranged familial relationships, experienced two break-ups simultaneously and made a commitment to practicing monogamy after 6 years of polyamory. As I prepare myself to deliver our next workshop on ‘Reframing conflict’, alongside Abi, I am noticing what a hot mess of internal conflict I am myself. And it’s raised the question for me once again about what it takes to hold ourselves as space holders, and how we sustainably shift systems and change patterns when we are living those things every day. I want to understand more deeply what it takes to stay grounded within change - how do we find the right pace and rhythm for ourselves and for others, without descending into chaos or falling back into past patterns? These are just some of the things I’ve been noticing, but no doubt there’s more that we need to invest in as space holders in order to hold ourselves and others steady.

Self awareness and trauma responses

Even though this is probably the most intense period of my life, I’m noticing that I am able to keep moving through it with far more compassion and patience than I’ve ever embodied before. For me that’s been a result of a couple of things. I’m super attuned to my flight response these days and can give myself space to rationalise before acting. I can notice it and vocalise it to others. It’s taken me many years as a facilitator to notice when this occurs within spaces I’m holding, and it’s been thanks to many brilliant co-facilitators that I’ve been able to practice moving through these responses. But in day to day life it’s even harder for me to notice it because it happens multiple times a day, others around me are less attuned to these types of responses, and as an autistic person it can take me a while to connect with what’s happening in my body. 

It’s also hard to work on your own patterns and regulation when others you might be working with might not have access to the same language or knowledge about their own experiences. It’s one of the reasons I like to introduce people to a simple fight/flight/freeze warm up they can do with groups they facilitate - it’s an accessible way for people to quickly learn from one another about how these responses might show up with in them and witness the patterns together when they play out in the room. 

Interweaving cycles and patterns

Working with the Holding Space Collective has been truly liberating. The main thing I’ve noticed about how we work together is we are all willing to notice and speak to the ways our harmful narratives or cycles might be interwoven or in conflict when collaborating. We have a regular ‘equity check-in’ where we talk honestly about our relationship with the value exchanges going on. Fear, guilt, grief all show up in this space as we witness together how our early experiences of money might shape the way we respectively value ourselves now. 

Unless we can see the systemic nature of the harmful cycles we might be stuck within, and work on that relationally, it’s almost impossible to create meaningful lasting change. Yes I’m a firm believer that the only person you can really change is yourself, but I also know that we all need to experience different responses from those around us in order to keep moving towards a different kind of existence. 

On a different type of cycle, this week the Holding Space delivery team had a regrounding session where we talked about where we are on the change cycle. It was helpful to hear the different places we were all in within our personal and work lives, and to notice the pace at which we were moving or feeling resistance.

Faith

It’s safe to say that I’ve found myself in the ‘danger zone’ of the change cycle repeatedly over the last few months, but with the self knowledge I’ve developed and faith in the process I’ve been able to sit with that discomfort without racing to act or completely falling apart. Having observed Ramadan multiple times now it’s gifted me with a deeply embodied sense of what it means to have faith that discomfort will pass. I’m not suggesting that all facilitators should have a spiritual practice, but I think a more general form of ‘faith’ is important. Having faith in your process, in the people you are bringing together, or in the intentions and values you live by. And finding space and rituals that help you reconnect with that consistently when times are turbulent. The Holding Space community has a monthly peer group where we talk about our challenges together. I’ve been offering regular prep & debrief spaces to people who facilitate alone so they can enter their space with confidence, and let go of any uncertainty afterwards. But if communal space and routine like this aren’t accessible to you it could be as simple as having some quotes you ground yourself in - I re-read excerpts from the likes of Secrets of divine Love and Pleasure activism constantly. 

Community and accountability 

What I love about the Holding Space community is that there’s a bunch of people who are able to hold one another to account in their journeys. Within an organisational system, or a client / supplier relationship, the power dynamics are often too murky to truly experience that level of meaningful and caring accountability from others about how you are showing up and holding space. What’s more is that when a skill is so invisible and undervalued such as facilitation it can be hard to keep investing in your work and advocating for certain approaches. Being alongside others who believe in the value of this work has given me strength to keep going. 

Joy, pleasure, possibility

While we have got a session about ‘imagination practice’ at the end of the Holding Space for Change programme, myself and Benedicta (who’s facilitating the session) expressed the other day our dubiousness about the imagination field. Having a good dose of skepticism is important because it keeps us grounded in reality and reminds us to make the work accessible and tangible to people. But these last few months have reminded me that getting to imagine (and experience) different possibilities is key to holding space for change. Drawing together with Abi about what our hopes for the Holding Space CIC is helped me put into words the tangible change we are trying to create. Experiencing enthusiastic ‘Yes’s’ from my peers galvanises my energy. Getting to laugh alongside people even when times are hard is what allows me to continue to move with ease rather than friction. When we are ‘Holding Space’ it can often feel quite serious or heavy, particularly if you are doing so in social justice spaces or in a leadership context. We need to know how to balance that with a lightness that keeps us all moving. 

Rest

A transformational moment for me was when I read Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hershey about 7 years ago, and truly understood the ways that racial capitalism has shaped what ‘productivity’ looks like. Rest is still something that takes a lot of conscious work to prioritise for myself and others, and importantly how to get the balance right around who gets to rest, when. Initially it mostly informed how I treated the people I held space for; encouraging groups to take more breaks, inviting people to self-manage around their needs, reducing the amount of exercises I’m cramming in for everyone. But more recently I’m noticing the harmful effects of pushing myself beyond my brain and body's capacity, especially when I’m processing so much change. Adopting more consistent forms of rest, such as going to the community farm and having tea ceremonies on Mondays, making massage a central aspect of family life, and napping after long intense workshops have all enabled me to keep myself more grounded in my work. But it has been the community around me that has made this possible and I’m hoping that through the Holding Space collective and the programmes we run we can keep giving one another permission to rest as we need, and build resilience by stepping up when others need to rest.

If you’d like to develop your practices and be connected with others you might want to sign up to the Holding Space short series starting on 22nd September, or add your name to the waitlist for the next Holding Space for Change programme if you’d like to invest in a deeper learning experience.


Why I write

There’s things I wrote when I was 13 that still exist on the internet. Me and my oldest friend, Arooj, cried with laughter this year when we found my LiveJournal. I’m glad she was there to revel in the mortification of it all because I might never have written publicly again if I’d allowed myself to be consumed by embarrassment. She reminded me of how much she had loved reading song lyrics I wrote as a distraction from boredom at school, and how much they'd spoken to her even if we were two naive teenagers. 

On reflection now I think during my first decade of writing on the internet I was never really expecting anyone to read it, it was just that I lacked understanding about privacy. I was mostly just writing to process my own thoughts on something that felt simpler and cleaner than writing by hand. But when I hit publish on my blog post about Rape I realised the power in being witnessed, and in inadvertently witnessing others through my words. As a result of this revelation for a while I got stuck using writing as a way to unravel trauma and ended up laying bare that process for all to see. And while much of it was informative, when I was running Collaborative Future I also became addicted to rage writing. Writing became a way for me to process all the things that made no sense, a way to express the absurdity of the system with clarity and confidence. It was both liberating and exhausting. Until all of a sudden it dawned on me that writing had become a distraction from getting shit done, and then I lost my capacity for it. I needed to see real-world change, and that required me to be head down and deep in it. I think giving myself space from desperately publishing my inner thoughts is what enabled me to actually achieve setting up a housing co-operative. 

I had come to realise that change wouldn’t happen through words on a page, and I had learnt that sometimes it's best to process your shit privately rather than vomiting it out into the ether. I knew that we were all consuming too much, and that the internet was a big energy suck drawing us away from a revolution. But there was something about writing that still called me. I became more careful about the time I allowed content to percolate: I took 5 months reflecting on my abortion before I published anything about it - and I still return to that piece of writing now to remind myself of why I move through the world in the ways I do. In that piece I had articulated possibility, without shame and without rage. It became a beacon of joy for me to know I was able to hold all that nuance as a human, and to choose an existence that really resonated with me. 

This feeling perhaps became a guiding force for how I began to write on Ray the Spirit. I started writing from a place where I really felt for the first time what Toni Cade Bambara had meant by making the revolution irresistible. I had finally found a way to align all of my activism and work through my writing, and the joy that people have expressed to me from reading my writing over the last few years has made me realise it’s more than just words on a page. So many autistics have found solace in the ways I’ve described autistic meltdowns, and it’s made their lives easier when it comes to trying to explain their needs to partners, friends, employers. So many people in the co-operative movement have talked about using my writing as a way to rally people around the change that could be possible within the housing system. People have shared how they slowed down and reshaped their relationships - professional, platonic, and romantic - in response to some of the content I’ve written about relationship anarchy and the role of love. 

My writing has become a resource. It catalyses energy within me and within others, it grounds people, it reassures people, it helps them move through the world with more ease. When existing in a constant state of transition and flux it roots me to my past and helps me unfurl the future. And it is why I was delighted to come across the term ‘Narrative Infrastructure’ for the first time through this Blis Collective research. As someone who wants to see words translate to action, understanding more deeply how we can create narratives that seek to do precisely that is huge. What’s more is this research made me reflect on how I show up in solidarity with my writing - how am I ensuring I’m not only giving voice to the issues that relate to my lived experience but that I also work with others to shift who is centred in the narrative infrastructure that surrounds us all? I would love to move beyond simply sharing my own stories and beliefs, and to support others to access the power of narratives and story-telling. For me the act of writing itself is a flow state that comes with ease - that’s not the case for everyone and there are so many more people that deserve to have their stories told and their futures woven into the narrative infrastructure that plays a role in the shaping of our world. 

I would love to be of service to people that have something powerful to say, and to do that through processes that do so much more than just putting words on a page. Some of the ways I want to do this include:

  • Supporting groups to write collectively in a way that provides nuance around particular shared human experiences, and creates connection between people pursuing change within their field. 

  • Mirroring people back to themselves so that they can move towards their visions with more confidence. Rather than simply being a sounding board can I take conversations and turn them into written language that people can either root themselves in or rail against. 

  • Ghostwriting or editing for Black, brown, and disabled people, offered freely as part of my commitment to reparative practice — putting my skills in service of amplifying stories that deserve greater space in our shared narratives. 

Of course we could all just use AI to write freely for us. But it is through telling our own stories that we reclaim our humanity. It is through the process of another human committing with care to the telling of your story that healing can be found. It is through that interplay between storyteller and scribe, scribe and reader that we will discover and be able to articulate more of the truth underneath what we are feeling and experiencing. 

If you’d like to explore ways we could write together, get in touch via ray@and-breathe.org, and if you like my writing you can support me by buying something from my giftlist. 

From partnership to collective

I’m a relationship anarchist, who firmly believes that the value and expectations of a relationship should be defined by the people involved in it, not by societal norms and structures. So when one of my partners asked me to join him on his consultancy journey when setting up &Breathe in 2022 it felt much more important to me than any marriage proposal or commitment to living together might. What we learnt through that process was that this kind of shared entity actually gave us the structures for embedding the mutuality we sought within our relationship, without the need for a monogamous marriage. Regardless of how much either of us was able to work, we committed to paying ourselves the same income, and in turn this completely transformed my capacity and got me out of cycles that were making me poor both in terms of time and money. At first it was Nick that brought in a lot of the business, but in time the tides turned and I had built enough social capital and confidence to do the same. 

Last year we also officially started living as part of a housing co-operative, and were explicit as part of that that we wanted to operate as individuals rather than a couple. As two non-hierarchical polyamorous people we navigate our romantic relationships as individuals, and we wanted co-operative living to dismantle some of the tendencies towards hierarchy and nuclear family dynamics that we had been noticing. Within the co-op each individual has their own tenancy agreement and pays the same rent as any other person regardless of whether they share a room with their partner - and we’ve also consistently addressed couple dynamics in how we are consciously navigating conversations etc. For a while Nick and I also had relationship accountability check-in every few months where I asked our friends to give us feedback around how we are showing up for them together and separately. 

This year Nick took on a full-time job in London, and while I wondered what this might mean for both our living situation and our work partnership, I didn’t have any fears that as we grew as individuals we would consistently reshape our relationship around that.  And that reshaping is now unfurling for me in a beautifully values-aligned way.  

During the process of designing the Holding Space for Change programme, I realised I wanted to be able to commit to my co-facilitators in the same way Nick had committed to me. And I also wanted to be able to maintain my freedom as an individual in the same way I protect this in my romantic relationships. Which brought me to propose a new legal structure for all of the Holding Space offerings - Holding Space Together CIC. Through this entity I’m hoping to work with my peers to practice consent within decision-making and explore how we can pool our resources in ways that feel equitable. We’ll also practice accountability to the communities we support through this work. Alongside this collective endeavour those involved will continue to operate as individuals -  taking on projects and collaborations that align with who we each are and what we each need. 

At the moment it is myself and Abi who will act as directors in order to prepare the foundations for others to come aboard when they are ready. Which is another thing I appreciate about relationship anarchy and collective endeavours - you learn to move at the speed of trust and respond to different people’s actual needs rather than people adopting strict structures for relationships.

I feel so lucky that I get to experiment with alternative models for relating - in my work, in my home-life and in my friendships and romantic connections. It is a millions miles away from the possessive nature of toxic monogamy and the ‘ownership over’ dynamics that are present in so many families and organisations. Every single relationship I invest in these days is a product of mutuality and creativity, rather than necessity or societal expectations. Each partnership in my life acts as a foundation for my wider community - each person I choose to relate deeply with understands what community means to me and as a result all of us are strengthened by those multitude of relationships - and I wish more people got to experience the power of this kind of connection in their lives. 

If you’d like to go deeper with how you hold collective spaces and what it means to support groups to journey together apply to be part of the Holding Space for Change programme.

Planting seeds quietly: collaborative idea generation

In our last Community-Led Research Collaboration workshop we reached the point in the process where the group was ready to start generating some shared ideas. In the past I’ve found this is often the type of conversation that gets derailed by power dynamics, especially when the promise of resources are on the line. Although I knew working with this group would be different based on how much space they held for each other in the first session, I still wanted to be sure that ideas could emerge at a pace and in a way which incorporated everyone’s voices and beliefs. 

So there were a few things I proactively did as a facilitator to cultivate the fertile ground for the seeds of ideas to be planted.

Solo preparatory chats

While I generally offer detailed agenda’s to the groups I work with so that people can prepare themselves to be in particular types of headspace, it’s also valuable to shape the plan with the participants themselves so that the translation process between what is being asked during the session is easier. 

Quite often I find that people who are used to engaging in collaborative processes, or perhaps even running them themselves, will steam ahead with their responses to an exercise or prompt while someone else in the group is still trying to catch up with what we’re even supposed to be doing or thinking about. 

So in the build up to the group space I offered people a chance to have a 1-2-1 with me to talk through some of the things that were percolating for them and think together about how they might bring that into the collective space. This also helped me to provide examples when introducing exercises to the group - for instance when explaining the ‘How might we’ structure I spoke to some example conversations I’d had with quieter members of the group in preparation for the session. This grounded the exercises in things that were top of mind for more than just the loudest or most confident voices in the room. 

Connection building warm ups 

The society we live in breeds a scarcity mindset. So even if everyone arrives at a collaborative process with the best intentions, our stress responses and self-defensiveness can still creep into that space and affect the level of openness we bring to the conversation. 

When I participated in the Queer musical story-telling research one of the facilitators did a yarn based exercise where each participant shared their story while holding a ball of yarn, and whenever they said something that resonated other participants would grab a thread. Building on this technique I invited this group to revisit the values we’d laid out at the start of the process and spend one minute sharing what that word meant to them. By the end most people had spoken into the group and everyone was connected multiple times by this ball of yarn, providing a physical reminder of the connections and experiences that we share. 

For me this warm up also promotes deep listening, self-awareness and physical processing. Giving participants an embodied experience of things you want them to be able to easily access for the rest of the day is a really important way to kick off this type of work. 

Solo imagination practice

Before talking about limitations or constraints, or developing specific ideas in response to those, I wanted the group to expand their thinking and imagine possibilities. So I invited everyone to draw their ‘utopia’ for the community research ecosystem. Using metaphors to describe how resource flows, power is shared, and knowledge is developed and utilised, each person drew a picture that represented what they dreamed of. 

I’ve written before about how sometimes drawings help us to articulate what’s most important and can translate much more easily than words. But the physical act of drawing is often something that evokes the child in us, allowing us to be more playful, and activates our brains in a way that is more embodied.  

Non-verbal ‘how might we’ process

As we drew close to defining some ideas I held the group back a little bit longer. I’m sure there were people in the space who were already overflowing with ideas that they wanted to share so no doubt this next step would’ve been painful for some. But for others it was deeply liberating and inclusive. 

The ‘how might we’ process is a design-thinking approach to ensure that you don’t narrow too fast into specific mechanisms, but instead ask broader questions so that the intentions behind the ideas you develop are clear. In this instance rather than discussing the ‘how might we’s’ out loud though I invited the group to  take an approach similar to a game of ‘consequences’. Each person writes a ‘how might we’ at the top of an A4 sheet, and then it gets passed to the next person who writes a response. The how might we is passed multiple times around multiple people until everyone in the room has contributed a thought to each ‘how might we’ and read what others have contributed.

During the process I suddenly became really nervous and unsure whether it was leading anywhere. Partly because I no longer had verbal cues and content to sense how it was going as the facilitator, and partly because it felt a little limiting for the complex questions the group were posing to one another. However, I reminded myself of all the times that a room full of people have managed to make a lot of noise and say a lot of words without saying much at all - and that perhaps this silence might lead to more thoughtful ideas that better reflect everyone in the room. 

Trusting in people as well as the process 

But because I’d broken my own patterns of knowing, when we came to transitioning into the group conversation about what next, I completely lost my thread as a facilitator. I had a mild autistic meltdown and had to leave the room for a minute to work out what I was doing and why. When I returned the group proactively demonstrated care and held the space with me as we worked out how to approach the final stage of the day. Each of the groups facilitated their own conversations about ideas for 30-minutes which allowed me to rest and be ready to listen when they returned. 

The ideas were all brilliant and captured so much of what different people in the group care about. And as I wrote up the notes from the day and had more time to reflect on what everyone had contributed it was so amazing to be able to visually see each person reflected in the words they had written. 

I’d invited a group to trust me in the process, and in return I was reminded to put my trust in the people I’m facilitating. I don’t need to know and manage everyone’s experience perfectly, I just need to show up authentically and know that people will show up whole-heartedly in return. 

Relationships before ideas: Preparing the ground we will grow from

At the end of last year I had the joy and privilege of facilitating the first in person session for the Community-Led Research Collaboration. Entering into a space with 12 people who don’t know each other is always nerve-wracking, but this time it was particularly so because I believe so deeply in the group's work and also knew just how massive it was that everyone had committed to being in person together in this way. Some people had taken 7 hour train trips, some people had assistance dogs and children accompanying them, many of the group had to pause on urgent and pressing demands from work, and everyone was battling different anxieties around meeting a new group of people they were expected to collaborate with for the next few months. 

During the session we shared more about what we value, why we do the work we do, we spent time in pairs hearing what we each found hard about our work, and we developed some wicked questions together in groups. 

The intention of this first session was simply to build relationships and trust among the group and as I listened to all the commitments people made to each other at the end of the session I knew we’d more than achieved that together. It was clear that people had shown up for each other and were excited to show up for each other even more over the coming months.

But there were also still feelings of uncertainty, and questions about ‘what is it that we are actually doing together’. For me there were two reasons for this lingering feeling - one was as a result of the fact everyone had spent the day sharing deeply painful and challenging stuff with each other which left a lot of threads open, and another is due to the fact that when we are receiving money for something we are all so conditioned to feel that gives someone the right to tell us what we are supposed to deliver. 

I myself had left the session with my heart and pores open because all of the participants had really stepped into sharing meaningful and profound reflections about their work in a very vulnerable and authentic way. It made me panic that either people might have left the session feeling entangled or helpless now that all of the pain of trying to do community research within a broken system had been acknowledged, or that the outside world might feel excruciatingly sharp as they ventured back into more extractive, hypocritical or devaluing experiences without their peers alongside them. 

But I reminded myself that the point of the session was to build resonance and relationships and that many people remarked during and after the session that it was liberating just to know that they weren’t alone with the struggles they have within their work. When we embark on journeys like this from a place of realism about the challenges, constraints and injustices that exist, rather than from a place of toxic positivity and endless possibilities, it enables us to make more strategic and informed decisions about how we want to operate as a group with that context in mind. Being more honest also helps us consider how we can ensure our work actually translates into something which can take root in the world we operate within. 

With this idea of ‘taking root’ in mind it speaks to the other question people were left with - which is what is the ‘thing’ or ‘idea’ we are delivering together. While we hope that this process leads to the group designing a new idea or approach together, we cannot start in that place for a multitude of reasons:

  • An idea from a funder is less relevant/useful than ideas from those closest to the work 

  • Telling people what to do doesn’t build intrinsic motivation

  • A great idea won’t grow without the right environment 

There are ideas aplenty in the world, but so many of them don’t come to fruition because they are not rooted in soil that can sustain them. Therefore this process isn’t really about creating the seed, seeds exist within all of us already. This process is about creating the soil - through centring relationships, sharing understanding, creating connective and abundant experiences, building resilience together - that will eventually enable a seed to germinate, grow and bear fruit. 

But it’s a lot to ask a group that doesn't know each other to simply show up and hold the space for that. We don’t exist in a society that teaches us to cultivate - we exist in a society that dictates and controls. Therefore a group coming together to simply hold space for one another; suspending judgement and time so that they can be fully present; is a beautiful and hopeful act. Creating this space ensures that we are ready for this journey together, and we are ready to make space for people, ideas or seeds that have not found a home in other more restrictive and hostile environments. 

All that said, I can tell that the group does already have a million and one things they could do together. I have facilitated many academic groups before - but usually I’m less concerned about the content of their rambles and more concerned about ensuring they aren’t talking over the top of each other. In that type of environment everyone seems to be saying a lot while not really saying much at all so you can let most of it wash over you. With this group however, every single thing that everyone said was so deeply meaningful and insightful - and I could tell that everyone wanted to be able to internalise and reflect on the weight of everyone’s words. 

I was also desperately wishing I could capture every single thing that everyone said, but I reminded myself of my facilitation mantra that stops me from taking on too much emotional labour or cognitive processing “What will stick will stick”. And what I hope will stick the most is the resonance that the group feel between the words they speak; the feeling in their body that being present with one another’s stories provokes; and the capacity to move together in an embodied way as we embark on a process of change and transformation. 

The 'magic' of community building

A diagram titled “The foundations for a vibrant and equitable community”. It has three core principles at the centre - Culture, commitment and value - and questions such as “What energy do people show up with?” and “How and why are relationships sustained”

I wrote most of this post about a year ago, as part of working with a few different networks and organisations to support them with community work, and growing frustrated at people who think community can be accessed or created simply by putting people together in a room or online platform. Since then my experience of community has deepened. This past year my polycule and co-parenting community has grown, I’ve moved into our housing co-operative, I’ve run a queer care collective, I’ve facilitated multiple community research groups, and my professional community has grown exponentially too thanks to the holding space series.

But I still meet people who want to magic a community for themselves or their organisation without understanding what it truly requires. As ‘community’ becomes an increasingly overused term in both the virtual and physical world I fear that community-building and community engagement work is being done poorly by people raised in a capitalist society built on individualism.

When I was 19 I was living in a flat share in London and predominantly hung out with friends from my work. It was only when I got seriously ill and had to call on the distant cousin of my dad for support that I realised how isolated I was. It took me a long time, though, to realise that what I was missing was community, because it wasn’t ingrained into the fibre of my being.

I’d grown up with a makeshift community my mum had built around us - 4 working mums taking it in turns to look after all of the kids. But we were working class families striving for a middle class existence. As a result the need to rely on each other was experienced as a failing or a survival tactic rather than the essence of our collective life. Beyond that group and my immediate uncles and aunties, I hadn’t experienced the same depth of community support that I feel I have access to now.

I’m sad to say that I had my first real embodied experience of community didn’t happen until I moved to Nottingham when I was 27. There, I not only experienced a community based on proximity - kids running between the terraced houses we all lived in, local cafe owners knowing everyone’s regular orders, all watching out for the people we knew were more vulnerable - but I also connected to the ‘queer community’ for the first time. I’d understood myself as pansexual since I was a teen but I had no idea how much deeper queerness ran within me or how important it was to be surrounded by people that aligned with my soul.

Nottingham was also where I first pursued building my own community through Collaborative Future. And while I didn’t necessarily have an accessible blueprint for community in my body, what I did have was a commitment to something other than the constant feeling of isolation and apathy, knowing that I needed it as much as anyone else.

This brings me to the first vital thing for true community-building: commitment. A major problem within the charity sector and many of the academic research teams I’ve worked with is that the people doing the work are doing so through a do-gooding martyrdom lens, rather than a solidarity lens (much like I’ve described in my community research post). Which means that when the work becomes too much, it’s easy to let it go because you aren’t committed to that community like your life depends on it. 

Community-building needs everyone to feel that their fight is my fight, that their poor health is my poor health, that their debt is my debt - and conversely that their success is my success, their joy is my joy. Only through that commitment can the true value of community can surface. For example, the amount of knowledge, ideas and resources produced and shared on Autistic Reddit is so much greater than any of the charities working in this space because autistic people are deeply committed to other autistic people thriving.

Commitment to community is sustained through the value that is generated. Many potential forms of value exist within communities, and in recent years the interest in community-building has risen among both commercial teams and third sector organisations because of the value it can generate. Commercial ventures might seek to capitalise on the data generated through online communities or on the influence that people have on one another within a community, while activist groups see community as a source of collective power for their particular movement. For me, though, communities fuelled by either of these forms of value often feel like they are missing the blood that pumps through their veins: a deep, mutual value that can only be experienced and embodied, not measured, quantified, or rationalised.

A community fueled by love, care, and mutuality possesses both practical resilience and an electrifying vibrancy, the true value of which only those who experience it can understand. When a friend recently shared how their Muslim community mobilized after a cousin died—cooking meals, holding space, and rallying around the family’s needs—I felt it deep in my soul. This image's energy lit me up because I have been lucky to experience a similar flow with many of my communities, bringing back this magical sensation. This is the life-affirming nature of a community that feeds and holds you to your core, even—or especially—when you are at your most vulnerable.

Of course, communities can become imbalanced, and this experience can come at a great cost when forms of power and dominance are at play. This is why the third ingredient to attend to when community-building is culture. Quite often the most resilient and profound communities are those which embrace a polyculture, while still aligning around core shared values. It is this combination of collectivity and individuality, symmetry and diversity that keeps a community in balance and centred. Accountability is possible because members of the community are connected through choice, not out of obligation or duty.

I have been able to nurture the culture required for community-building because I am surrounded by people who hold one another to account. In the housing co-op movement, we have a multitude of informal relationships to compare and contrast our most intimate decisions. In the holding space community, I am lucky to have found people who share the belief and desire to make good facilitation more accessible, committing to help adapt how we do things together. Within my friendships and the queer care collective, we bring structures into intimate spaces to help everyone redesign how we show up and proactively unravel the norms and expectations inscribed on us from birth. This brings me full circle to commitment. We can only create the required culture if we are committed to seeing things through: pushing ourselves to go deeper, challenging our assumptions, being vulnerable so others can show up, and repairing any ruptures that occur.

So if you are seeking to build a community it’s important to ask yourself: have I actually experienced what it means to be a part of a thriving community? And if not, how can I? If I can’t experience it elsewhere what commitment am I showing up to this community-building endeavour? Are the intentions behind building this community to generate mutual and life-affirming value for everyone involved, or is there anything more one-sided at play? What culture(s) are we going to embrace and centre within the community we build? How will that culture ensure the cycles of commitment and value generation continue among its members?

Love & solidarity at Radical Routes

The giant cookie my kid made with the Kids group at Radical Routes Gathering

This weekend I attended my 8th Radical routes gathering. In the last 3 years the network and community has made so much possible - not least being the main source of knowledge and support in the creation of Wirksworth Housing Co-operative where I now live with my two kids.

I used to struggle with existing in ‘activist’ spaces, in spite of being deeply committed to social change in everything I did for from a young age. While very different to the academic field, they were both environments where, in spite of having lots of knowledge and lived experience, I felt patronised and talked over as a working class autistic person. But within radical routes I found my political home, and although I’m deeply committed to the co-operative movement I also think it’s partly to do with the way the network organises around all of the invisible infrastructure, relationships and labour that underpin movement building. So I wrote a poem to explain why our quarterly gatherings are important.

Love & solidarity 

We welcome ourselves in 
To a world we long to meet
At a gathering that feels like luxury
When the climb to change feels this long and that steep.

But when we practice being present
It's not about escaping from the fight
It's about readying our foundations
To hold more people through the night.

This is love. This is resistance. This is solidarity. 
We learn to feel it in our bones right here 
So that we can feel it in the streets 

Disrupting all the patterns
That we have known from old.
It takes more than just campaigning
If we want to dismantle narratives we were sold.

Every single slow and thoughtful conversation
Is a rehearsal for the time 
When we've got to tell that judge, that cop, that bailiff
That if it's my neighbours problem, it's also mine. 

This is love. This is resistance. This is solidarity. 
Slow down to feel it in your bones right here 
So that you can feel it in the streets.

And when we stop in all the chaos 
To play games with all the kids
It's not frivolous, it's making sure 
they've got the nervous system for all of this. 

Because when we are tired or we are gone
They will pick up the fight again
They’ll learn from our mistakes
And continue building communal shelters from the rain 

This is love. This is resistance. This is solidarity. 
Slow down to feel it in your bones right here 
So that you can feel it in the streets.

And when we're still here scrubbing pans 
that held food for one-hundred bellies
And you're still there cleaning carpets
from the mud of two-hundred wellies

Thats when we remember 
That saving our humanity
Is more than a protest placard
It's our shared reality.

This is love. This is resistance. This is solidarity. 
Now we've felt in our bones right here 
Let's take it to the streets.

What do I get paid? 

Back in December I facilitated a conversation with a bunch of small businesses and freelancers from the Agencies for Good network to talk about the tension we experience making money while working on social justice issues. I’ve written before about why people should pay DEI practitioners, but with a few more years under my belt as a freelancer working to address social justice issues, power dynamics and extractive economic systems, I thought I’d share something about how I think about pay within my work. 

To be fully transparent and up front, my standard day rate is £650. In my experience, with the amount of business admin and relationship-building required that isn't chargeable to anyone in particular, a typical full-time freelance facilitator could manage about 3 days of chargeable time a week if they had a constant stream of work (which is almost impossible for any freelancer that isn’t a fixed-term contractor, and even then contractors have big periods of time where they’ve not got their next gig). In my context where I’m doing at least 1 day of work a week on our housing co-op, regular work at the community farm and on other community organising, and picking up kids from school at 3pm most days I end up with only 1-2 days of chargeable time per week even if I work in the evenings and weekends to make up for it (again assuming that I have a steady flow of clients which most freelancers do not). On average on this day rate after all my business costs, I end up paying myself around £2,500 a month before income tax (equivalent to a £30,000 salary).

Some people (likely those that have never freelanced) will see this salary and be surprised it’s so much lower than expected when they consider £650 to be a high day rate. Some people (likely those who know how hard it is to sustain self-employment) will look at this and wonder how I manage to have such a high income. I only started feeling confident to charge this amount when I started working with my partner who was on this rate, I was scraping by on much less before he encouraged me to value myself.

So below are just some of the reflections on how I got to this place and what makes earning this level of income feel okay for me - both in practical and moral sense. 

What are my needs?

A basic need that I used to ignore previously was the fact I can get sick and be entirely unable to work. I am also autistic and am frequently disabled by meltdowns. If I was employed I’d have access to paid sick leave and holiday leave, as a self-employed person I have to earn enough to cover those myself.

My salary also has to support raising 2 kids full-time. Plus it subsidises the time I make to care for my wider community - whether that’s supporting the people I live with emotionally or physically, cooking regular dinners for the local lgbt+ group, supporting our co-op and other housing co-ops with DIY, finances, legal issues or emotional work, hosting gatherings in our community space for refugees and asylum seekers - the list is endless.

I believe in creating a world where all forms of labour are valued, and therefore I try my best to account for that in how I think about my own income, even if clients are more reductive about it. However this unpaid labour is not just something that has to be subsidised by my paid work, it is intrinsically linked to the value I deliver as a freelancer but we will come back to that later. 

I live comfortably on this salary because I have been able to divest from the status quo. I pay £660 towards rent and bills for me and my kids at our housing co-op. We collectivise food purchasing as much as possible but this forms another substantial monthly cost, as does the running of a car which is required for living rurally. 

What I consider ‘chargeable’?

When I first started out as a freelance facilitator I only had my designer friends’ contracting rates to go by. My first paid client was the British Medical Journal and I only charged them £300 for a full day workshop with 40+ people!! At the time I thought £200 was a decent day rate and thought a day and half was enough to cover my time. Past me would never have dreamt of one day charging 6 times that amount for the same thing.

These days I try to ensure I include plenty of prep time and travel time in the cost for an in person workshops, and for some clients I consider the ongoing emotional toll of the work, although 9 times out of 10 working in the social justice space means I go far beyond my contracted hours because very few people value the depth of thinking and relating that is truly required to create meaningful change.

In addition many individuals I work with want to keep ongoing relationships with me long after any paid engagements, which I absolutely love in a lot of ways, but as someone that already has a large extended community and chosen family it’s incredibly hard to juggle the multiple voice notes and emails I receive from past and potential clients and workshop participants each week. For me I actually struggle with the concept of day rates for most of the work I do because you can never predict what transformations might occur and what cans of worms might be opened, and even when most clients don’t have endless budget to keep resourcing that I still feel a deep responsibility to show up in some capacity for people who are ready to create real shifts in practice and power. 

One thing that people don't fully grasp is that the value I bring to my paid work is often substantially higher as a result of what I embody in the rest of my life. As a community organiser for instance I am deeply connected to a lot of people with different life experiences, which makes it easier for me to design inclusive spaces in different contexts and to draw upon my networks for useful insight. As someone doing collectivised budgeting in more intimate settings, holding space for funders to do that with beneficiaries doesn't feel as daunting as it might if I wasn’t constantly practicing this in my own life. When my brain processes and composts alongside my fellow volunteers at the community farm, I am also learning new modes for reflecting on myself and the system that I can share with my clients.

When do I charge less?

Many people choose to do a charity or not-for-profit discount on their rate but having been employed at a questionable charity in the past that logic has never made sense to me. There are a lot of not-for-profit organisations where CEOs are still paying themselves 6-figure salaries. There are charities that perpetuate the exact thing they are supposedly trying to dismantle. There are dysfunctional non-profits where the emotional labour of the work I’m doing is going to be higher than in a corporate setting. But there are many scenarios where I offer my time for much less than my standard day rate including:

  • Lower rates for individuals that want to access my work but can’t either due to a lack of disposable income or due to the constraints or barriers they face in their organisation. For instance on my holding space series it’s a ‘pay-what-you-can’ offer, and about 50% of each cohort join for free as a result.

  • Lower rates or pro-bono time for individuals facing real challenges in doing social change work within a toxic environment, for instance through transformational relationships coaching . I believe in those individuals' capacity to create change with the right support and I don’t want them to give up simply due to a lack of internal buy-in. 

  • On longer-term projects that really matters to me, and where the group or organisation have really clear standards around pay. For example I was recently invited to work with a prison abolition group with really consistent pay principles. I both want to further my facilitation work within restorative and transformative justice, and I can see that they have clear commitments to one another when it comes to what they spend so I’ve offered to reduce my day rate to the same as theirs which is about £200. 

When do I struggle?

After 7 years of being self-employed this is the first year I’ve paid myself the same every month and not burnt myself out with the anxiety of where the next gig is coming from. But I’ve only got to this place due to two things that most other self-employed people don’t have access to: 1. I’ve worked with one of my partners for the last few years and we’ve shared income equally even if one of us is delivering or winning more work 2. I received an unrestricted grant from Thirty Percy as part of their changemaker programme.

Both of these things have made it possible for me to steady out the ebbs and flows that are usually present in freelancing, and in turn this enabled me to make more thoughtful decisions about where I invest my time and energy, rather than jumping at opportunities simply because they can afford to pay me now. It has also made me more open to non-chargeable relationship building - which previously used to fill me with resentment towards those who didn’t seem to value me, or on the flip side made me feel a bit gross in the relationships where I really did care about the people and their work and wanted those relationships to be mutual rather than transactional. 

It’s helped me to really lean into deep and never-ending work of building community and organising people towards change. So much of this is often unseen and undervalued and now I can throw myself wholeheartedly into creating the glue that holds everything together, rather than cutting corners because I don’t know if I’ll be able to afford to pay my bills next month. 

Another thing that’s been hard to navigate as a freelancer is consistently finding the funds to pay other people and investing in our own development. I have strong principles around what I deserve to earn and I want to ensure that I’m valuing everyone else with the same mindset. But for most of us investing in other people requires us to take that out of our earning capacity. The grant I received has enabled me to more easily pay co-facilitators, get design support, and access training opportunities that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford. In addition I’ve been able to invest in starting up a Queer Care Collective which has paid multiple facilitators, a photographer, a printing co-op and provided the queer community with a £500 co-budgeting pot for shared resources. 

I’ve been able to share resources in a way that aligns with my values partly because of this funding, but it was also present in the way I approached this work even before I had any disposable income. Collaborative Future for example was founded on the belief that moving resources rapidly into the hands of undervalued individuals could be transformational and we operated on the principle that no-one should be doing unpaid labour. Even as someone with no savings and no access to family wealth, I was still able to use my privilege to take out a £20k personal loan to fund this work (I wrote this before about the barriers this created for us to then access grant funding).  For me taking financial risks in order to create meaningful and urgent change is worth it. When I commit to mobilising the relatively small amount of resource I have - whether that’s money, housing, energy or connections - I am reminded that we all have the power to change things even if we are reliant on the capitalist systems we are trying to dismantle. 

Sense-making with shapes

The first time someone used drawing to explain something to me was in my early days of product management. I was 21, without a university education, working at an Edtech company. I thought I’d never be able to navigate the work because I had none of the academic or technical jargon. But one of the developers sat me down and drew a diagram of how the product worked and I instantly felt at ease. Never in my entire education or work could I remember anyone else drawing what they were trying to explain - it was eye opening.

As I transitioned into facilitation work a few years later I naturally started to use drawing techniques as a way for people to articulate complex ideas in strategy and vision sessions. It was clear to me that a lot of the senior leaders I worked with raced to use big words that they did not fully comprehend, and nodded along to each other without understanding what was going on under the hood, which ultimately led to confusion further down the line. But if I’m honest I also just enjoyed the discomfort it created for people that were used to being able to communicate verbally. This was prior to my work within the Equity and Inclusion space and prior to my autism diagnosis but I knew that there was something inherently biased about the way the professionalised world operated that meant people that could articulate themselves with a certain tone and language dominated the conversations and decision-making. 

But it wasn’t until quite a few years later that I got to experience a facilitator using drawing techniques with me and it clicked as to why that approach was so profound. Working at Collaborative Future alongside my co-founders Prisca and Sonia, we’d been struggling to make sense of tensions that were present for us on a youth programme we’d been running.  Imani Clough asked us all to draw our experiences of the programme using shapes only, and then to talk each other through what we’d drawn. As soon as she set the task my brain lit up, stars and lines and squiggles filled my page. I hadn’t been able to order my thoughts to my team in words because every time they came out of my mouth they didn’t quite speak to what I felt in my body, and they caused responses that I wasn’t expecting. In return as my teammates talked me through their drawings I got to see the patterns that their brains honed in on. The differences in what we felt most viscerally and the layers that we each noticed in the work were clearer. Even the way we each structured our thoughts were different - and it made me realise that through trying to communicate in a shared language we’d each been missing each others nuances. 

On the surface we all already knew all this. We’d each grown up in different cultures. We each had very different people and values in our lives. We each had very different brains and rhythms and needs. But this was the first time I truly felt its presence so clearly in our work. And through witnessing those differences in this way we could finally pinpoint the specific things that were causing conflict for us. All of that in a 20-minute exercise. 

From that point onwards I became obsessed with drawing and shapes as a way of communicating for any layer of the work. When I’m mediating a conflict I’ll get each person to first draw their experience of that conflict before jumping into unpacking it verbally. People have remarked that this approach also allows them to de-personalise things. Comparing shapes on a page together is more connecting and grounding than speaking directly to another person or worse pointing fingers at them. When I want a team to explore the role they or their team play within the work they do I get them to draw their ideal day or draw how their work flows into the wider ecosystem and then to compare and contrast with other people’s drawings. Quite often verbal processing centres similarities, we seek to assimilate towards the dominant voice. But when we can visually see the differences in what we’ve noticed we can identify the exciting nuances between us and make more conscious choices around what to move towards. When I’m asking people to imagine possibilities for how their work could transform society I get them to use visual metaphors to expand their thinking and to express what doesn’t yet exist. Language can be quite constricting. It is also so shaped by patriarchal and colonial powers. As described by Minna Salami in Sensuous Knowledge “The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation”.

When I introduce people to drawing exercises as part of the holding space series a lot of retinence I hear from people about using this type of thing in the spaces they are part of is the discomfort it might create for people. Often what I say in response is that 9 times out of 10 the people that are uncomfortable with communicating in this way tend to be able to navigate the systems with some ease because they can speak the right words in the right way. It is okay to make them feel uncomfortable for a little while so that others can have a moment to communicate in a way that makes more sense to them. And even if people struggle to communicate their ideas visually, the act of slowing down with a pen and sitting with your thoughts for a moment generally means that what follows out of their mouth is more considered than it might’ve been otherwise. 

Of course it is also worth remembering that some people might not have the dexterity or limbs required for drawing, or there might people that have perhaps been shamed in the past around their creative skills. For these people I’d suggest adaptations. Maybe you could bring glue and colourful shapes and pictures to collage with. Maybe you could ask people to work in pairs and play to their strengths. Or maybe just some people draw but it sparks new thinking for those who look at that drawing and see a new layer or pattern.

If you’d like to learn more about drawing and collaging as a facilitation technique, sign up to the next Holding Space programme kicking off on 9th September.

This is an excerpt from a new book I’m writing about facilitation, if you enjoyed reading this and would like to be part of the process of reviewing the content please email me on ray@and-breathe.org

The most liberating "liberating structure"

I’ve been running an accessible programme to provide more people with experience of different facilitation methods and techniques, including many liberating structures. This week a participant remarked in response to Troika consulting “I noticed that it was really hard not being able to rely on people’s facial expressions and was really conscious that I might not know if I’ve offended the listener” and I joked “Welcome to the brain of an autistic person”.

As an autistic person who struggles to read people, I find troika consulting is incredibly neuroinclusive because it does away with the unwritten rules of what is socially acceptable and creates clear boundaries between the roles people are playing. There are 3 core aspects to it: 

  • One person (person A) shares a challenge or problem they have for 1-2 minutes

  • Person A then turns of their mic and camera (or turns their back if in person) and the other two people discuss the challenge or problem together for 5-7 minutes

  • Person A then returns to the pair to share what was useful about what they heard

But that small set of instructions are hugely powerful. Here’s what it enables in my experience:

Self-awareness

When we can no longer rely on cues from others around how they are responding to our suggestions or ideas, I believe it actually encourages us to be more aware and thoughtful of what we are saying. In my experience people say much more flippant things when they know the other person can say something back to them. 

In addition the listener can really tune into what they are feeling in response to what they are hearing from the others, rather than using their capacity on responding, affirming, or correcting other people’s thinking which is what most people would be doing when in a dialogue. One participant said the other day that they felt really reactionary to something someone had suggested, but even though it was not the answer they were looking for, noticing that response in their body is still wisdom that’s useful for them as they think about the next steps with their challenge. 

Space to venture beyond parameters

What’s more is when the recipient of the advice or ideas can’t respond it forces them to really listen to the places the other two go with the challenge. And it gives space to the people exploring the challenge to ask questions and propose things they might not have otherwise. All too often an affirming ‘yes exactly’ will make someone want to lean into a particular idea more,  or a ‘no you’ve misunderstood’ will make someone retreat from the place their ideas where heading. Without that feedback it allows people’s brains to wander and to venture into perspectives that a more active participation from the recipient might have otherwise shut down.

Disruption of potential power dynamics

In addition, the desire to say what someone wants to hear or expects to hear is stronger when there’s a power dynamic present. I still remember when I was involved in a recruitment as a junior product manager and when I learned that my boss had scored a candidate very differently to me I assumed I must’ve been missing something and adjusted my scores to be in more alignment to him. But later on in my career I realised I’d simply assimilated into homogenous thought due to the power dynamics at play and wanting to not be perceived as ‘wrong’ or ‘ignorant’ for holding certain beliefs and perspectives. We lack diversity of thought in so many situations because of this same fear. This is perpetuated by the fact many leaders speak as if their idea or perspective is the ultimate truth, so getting those leaders to enter into a troika consulting dynamic where they are asking others for input on a challenge and sitting back to really listen disrupts this pattern of behaviour. 

If you want an opportunity to try out Troika consulting in a welcoming environment sign up to my next holding space series or join this workshop on Power and positionality.

If you stand for justice, you cannot be above it

After a decade of working in the diversity, equity and inclusion field and being part of many social justice movements I am more aware than ever of the co-opting of these movements by people who are not deeply living and breathing decolonial practices. Back in 2020, after George Floyd's murder, I was concerned this was me and I tried to step away from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) work, because I didn’t want to be another white person making money off of the struggle. But my friend Janice, a black woman who has been doing this work for far longer than me, said to me “There’s no way we are letting you step away now - we’ve gotta use you and your identity to speak to the people that won’t listen to people like me”. She worked with me to explore why I’d rather be surrounded by people of colour and my deep discomfort in white spaces. She made me see that I had a responsibility to hold space for white people with compassion, even when I wanted to run away from our shameful colonial history and the white supremacy culture still present. She taught me that oppression is the water we swim in, the complexities of our conditioning and the slow and consistent chipping away that requires. She helped me unpack all the ways the system was suffocating and harming me and let me be vulnerable in my pain, while still holding me to account over the things that give me ease or entitlement. 

As I’ve deepened my roots and my practice, I’ve learnt how to move through this work authentically, even when both myself and the wider field is feeling deeply conflicted. I want to share a few questions that consistently keep me grounded in this work and why I struggle to trust anyone that says they stand for equity and justice but isn’t asking themselves these questions. As Cole Arthur Riley describes in This Here Flesh, “Liberation is not a finality or an end point; it is an unending awakening”.

How does the oppressor show up in me?

When a person or an organisation tells me they are good at DEI it’s an immediate red flag for me. Even though I’ve spent the last 10 years doing some form of DEI work every single day as well as the lived experience I have as a queer autistic person from a working class background, I still have a mountain of things to dismantle and redesign within myself.  The oppressor lives inside all of us, and as described in this article, “Coloniality is a shape we are born into and entrained to continue perpetuating through all the  educational, administrative, cultural and structural systems that we navigate”

If you truly believe in change, particularly if you espouse social justice rhetoric within your work, you should be engaging in a constant cycle of self-consciousness. Paying attention to the ways you police people, the decisions you make about financial income and what you spend money on, the way you respond to pressure, what intentions sit behind your relationship building, what space you take up or give to others. 

Do the people around me call me out?

Self-criticism isn’t enough. We need to be engaging with the people around us to understand what we need to change in order to embody our values. If you and your friends or colleagues aren’t regularly calling out and questioning each other, you are likely perpetuating the problem. The teams that are the best at DEI are those where everyone can challenge each other to do and be better, regardless of where the organisation is on the ‘progressive’ scale. We are likely to make even more mistakes and unearth deeper wounds the more we push into unchartered territory, which means that those working within the social justice space should expect to be called out even more. 

If you have a particular positionality within a space you are both less likely to receive criticism and more likely to need it. As a white person within DEI I expect to be held to a higher standard, it’s valid that I should have to prove myself. But sadly all too often people who consider themselves ‘good people’ avoid being called out through defensiveness, martyrdom, or centring of their own pain. 

Is this charity or solidarity?

Which brings me to the question of ‘doing good’ versus deeply understanding that this work is necessary for our collective liberation. No matter how much people share the ‘First they came’ poem or quote Lilla Watson about how ‘your liberation is bound up with mine’, so many people operating in social justice spaces still act as if they deserve some kind of medal for doing what is fundamental for us all to resist the continued threat of fascism. 

In spite of being deeply connected with how our struggles are interwoven, I still find myself thinking I need to engage in certain spaces or do certain acts from a place of sympathy or guilt. When I feel these within me I interrogate how I might move to feeling the implications of this social issue in connection to my own humanity, whether the act I wish to pursue will actually help the situation, and whether my desires come from a place of deep care or just through wanting to be perceived a certain way?

Am I distancing myself for the sake of my reputation?

On the flip side of aligning ourselves to causes out of wanting to improve people’s perceptions of us, many of us also make the mistake of distancing ourselves from the things, acts or people we feel are unfavourable. We rush to jump on movement bandwagons before we have formulated our own authentic beliefs about it, and we rush to disassociate from people with harmful or ignorant views. It is valid for a trans person to distance themselves quickly from a transphobe to avoid being exposed to harm, but all too often a trans ally will distance themselves from a transphobe before they’ve done any work to connect with, understand and educate that person. What’s more is a lot of phobic behaviour stems from disconnection and lack of exposure - so our choices to protect our reputation within the social justice space actually leads to making space for people’s harmful views and behaviours to continue perpetuating. 

I have not yet had the joy of reading Adrienne Maree Brown’s book “Loving Corrections” but when I heard her speak to it on this podcast it reminded me that it is imperative I continue to make space to be with people that make me feel uncomfortable and to provide experiences to people that are rooted in compassion rather than confrontation. 

Is this new pain, or is someone just giving it back to me? 

When I think about the various discomforts we feel when we do this work, I am reminded of all the times that people have responded to it with intense reactions that seem unreasonable. What I realised when I used to deliver DEI training is that quite often it is the first time (or one of the few times) that people with certain privileges have had to experience discomfort or pain around that aspect of their identity. And in those moments it offers an embodied opportunity for them to reconnect with the pain that they have been avoiding for so long. When a white person experiences intense shame, pain, anger or grief in response to being asked to engage with racist aggressions I tend to conceptualise it as either a moment where their body has invited them to access just some of the pain that the victim has been carrying, or that in order to enact ignorant and harmful behaviours towards other humans they have been previously existing in numbed state. Perhaps also the experience of acknowledging other people's pain has re-awoken them from the disembodied place they’ve been having to exist within due to other forms of oppression they experience within the system they are perpetuating. 

So when I feel pain course through my body when I’m faced with something someone thinks I’ve done wrong or been complicit with, before reacting I ask myself what is the universe giving back to me right now? Is there something I’ve been avoiding and how can I see this pain as a gift to allow me to move closer to who I am? How am I being called to rebalance the scales and how can I carry and process what’s moving through my body? And is it just reminding me to come back down to earth to be in this work, rather than floating around above it? We desperately need to be in it and present, rather than performing, because as Andrea J Ritchie describes in Practicing New Worlds “The strongest solutions happen through the process, not in a moment at the end of the process” and we need to be ready to shape those new worlds together.

A grave with no name

Today I sat on a grave so old that no trace of their name can be seen. I play here often with my children and think about how much I’d love it if when I’m dead and buried it is a place that people want to sit and love and be. Today however, sat out on my own on my lunchbreak, I worried that people might perceive me choosing to sit there as a mark of disrespect. I thought of the body that laid beneath, of the person that once was and what their spirit might be feeling to have me present. I also thought about the nature that surrounded us, how if I chose to sit on the grass perhaps I might squish an ant or spider, and wondered why we have more attachment to some beliefs and not others in our society. I thought about the conversations me and the dead might have - had they chosen their bench like tomb on purpose or was that a choice that had been made on their behalf? How did they feel about nature, about kids, about love? How did they feel about the societal norms around death and dying? I’d shown them respect and consideration with my mind and my soul while considering both of our relationships with living creatures that surrounded us both above and below the ground. I concluded I’d done more than most people do to consider the dead and the living, so I continued to sit on the tomb because it felt connecting and I felt confident in my choices. 

As I sat there I also considered what I’d do if someone came past and reacted to me sitting there. I thought about the nuanced conversation we might have about what respect for the dead looks like. I went on thinking about other forms of respect and appreciation, about all the things that sit between the dead and living. About what we choose to eat and consume as a society, and how little thought so many of us put into that. I opened up my book about disability justice and the phrase to ‘exist is to resist’ ran through me as I thought about every single moment my simple existence as a queer autistic person, let alone an explicit choice to go against the grain, offends someone. I thought about how I’d almost not come out in the sunshine for an hour because growing up in a working class household within an ableist society I still felt like I had to be productive to be worthy - even though I speak of anticapitalist values all the time and remind everyone that rest is resistance, that the daily grind is a construct, that we could all live abundant lives if wealth and land was better distributed. 

The grave I sat on. Later that day a young girl was climbing on it, making daisy chains and playing with the spiders she found underneath it. Let’s hope she’s not shamed for exploring so beautifully and joyfully.

Suddenly my thoughts were interrupted by an  angry man storming past and shouting repeatedly: ‘‘You entitled cunt, how dare you disrespect the dead. Get off that grave. Show some respect to the dead”. I went to jump in to say something, but I knew he wasn’t going to engage in the same nuanced debate me and the dead body beneath me had been having together. I sputtered out “actually I have a lot of respect for the dead..” And was about to point out that I’d even trained as a death doula to be able to support people in the process of dying, and studied many different rituals and rites. But he ignored me and continued with his aggressive barrage “You entitled leftie woke” (Lucky I didn't say anything about my death doula  training)...”You want to make everything LGBT.” (Sudden panic that this was a targeted hate crime, that he knew me from somewhere else. Or maybe he really was worried I was making the grave gay by sitting on it) “You’ve never had to work for what you’ve got.” (So confused. Literally everything I’ve got is a result of working - even my kids were a result of a relationship that started at work.. Not sure how that comment would have gone down though!)   “You fucking cunt. You entitled leftie cunt” etc etc for a good few minutes.

About 10 people stood by and watched as I silently took the abuse and left, because I continue to have compassion for a man so broken by the world that he needs to make all of these assumptions about who I am and what I represent in order to make himself feel like he has some sort of purpose. The bystanders made the whole experience even more traumatic - it legitimised his policing of me and humiliated me further. No-one that witnessed it followed up with me, and they could’ve done because most people in the town know where I live (which makes these sorts of incidents even more scary). But luckily I have a beautiful supportive queer community who were ready to process the experience with me.

His mention of identity also reminded me of the conversation I’d been having that morning with a researcher that was interested in my experiences of raising kids in a queer polyamorous and gender-affirming household. I told the researcher that we didn’t face too much discrimination (although as I described the way some of my kids' friends won’t come for playdates I realised perhaps I was just accustomed to it). But I explained that was partly because we worked so hard to make sure that there could never be any doubt that our kids are loved and safe and happy. I explained to him how tiring it was to feel like you can never fuck up - the anxiety it brings when you are constantly assessing how safe it is to be yourself in case someone uses that as a way to harm you and your family. 

Today I don’t think I even fucked up, but that’s not how others that want an excuse to harm and harass queer and trans people will see it. Ultimately, I had shown exponentially more care, consideration and kindness to both an unnamed body buried 6 feet under ground, and to an aggressive stranger hauling shit at me than that stranger had shown a living being standing right in front of him. But none of this is about love, care or respect for the dead or the living, for people like this man, it’s about dominating and oppressing people to feel more powerful.

If you’d like to explore your own relationship with the dead and dying I’ll be hosting a few online and in-person death cafes this summer. Find out more. 

Relationship anarchy and transformational governance

Originally this blog post was going to be about how teams navigate risk together. Then it was going to be about complex decisions and the role of trust and relationships. And then I realised that a lot of my own relationship to risk, complexity and trust stems from my personal life as a queer relationship anarchist, and a lot of people might not have those experiences to draw upon. It got me wondering about the role of intimacy if we truly want to transform governance practices, and how the conditioning within our hierarchical romantic lives impacts our capacity to be fluid and responsive in our communities or within our working lives. So, inspired by Louise Armstrongs post about a polyamorous relationship to work and leadership I wondered if there is something here that runs deeper than a metaphor when it comes to the ways we love and how that influences the way we work.

A relationship anarchist as “someone that rejects traditional relationship structures like monogamy and hierarchy, instead prioritizing individual autonomy and treating all relationships (romantic, platonic, etc.) with equal importance and flexibility, without rigid rules or labels” feels like it could be describing many of the beliefs and principles that underpin the work of those involved in shifting organisations towards more collective forms of leading, organising and decision-making in response to our increasingly complex societies and systems. But in my experience the deep personal work required to make this shift within organisations is often repeatedly overlooked in favour of tools and processes. 

There are five things that being a relationship anarchist has forced me to practice day in day out within my most intimate relationships, and it is these experiences that I believe make me more ready to create deeper changes within the work I do. 

Understanding the complex interplay of desires, needs and norms

Having no labels, and the freedom to design and redesign relationships in a way that works for you, might seem liberating but it actually reveals how easy it is to fall back into patterns of thinking that are shaped by societal conditioning. In addition, everyone else you are relating to in this space is also engaging with this complex interplay to varying degrees, with varying levels of self-knowledge and varying levels of understanding about the forms of oppression that are still present in the system regardless of whether you have the freedom to choose a different relationship style. The same could be said for when a group embarks on more fluid forms of organising or non-hierarchical decision-making. Every single person in that group needs the knowledge, confidence, and space/time to be able to engage with the complex interplay of the historical system and the new system you are trying to build together.

I can’t tell you how many times a week I have to sit with my insecurities in response to a partner expressing their love in ways that don’t fit my narrative. Or how many times I feel frustrated at all the ways the systems outside of my relationships, from housing to healthcare, force me to deprioritise the people I love and centre in my life. Or the time that I have to commit in order to nurture the intimate connections that I value with very few blue prints for how to do that. How do those of us working in transformational governance make the same space and grace for when insecurity shows up (likely again and again in spite of what you thought you’d committed to as a group)? How do we acknowledge that a decision-making process might feel one way to those of us who have designed it but will be entirely disregarded by other dominant forces outside of it? How do we commit time to create a new system while existing in a time poor late capitalist society?

In addition, when we lose hierarchy we lose the clear route through which we prioritise and advocate for needs. Invisible hierarchies might form as a result of those who have more confidence to advocate for themselves, or due to past dismissive experiences other people might assume their needs are whims or desires rather than core to their being. And within a networked system it’s also very hard to design processes which truly take account of the knock on effect of whose needs are or aren’t being met. It requires individuals to be able to meet each other where they are at and advocate on one another’s behalf. 

Learning and reforming your boundaries

Alongside understanding to more deeply connect to your needs and desires beyond the societal norms and narratives, the spiky moments in an anarchist approach to relating repeatedly offer me an opportunity to really feel into what my boundaries are. This is particularly important for me as an autistic person who generally finds a lot of things in life overwhelming but can discard that feeling because everyone else seems to be okay with it. 

For example, knowing that I have complete freedom to define my relationships in a way that feels good to me means I’ve become attuned to the different kinds of boundaries that are important to me personally. The message we are taught in society is that sex and desire is at its best when it’s heated and spontaneous, and yet even when I have entire freedom to have sex with anyone without consulting others I learnt that that scenario still doesn’t feel good to me. As an autistic person lots of upfront communication is required for me to feel turned on. So even though I have no external restrictions relating to who I can sleep with, I have learnt new restrictions based on the feelings in my body, and developing my own edges backed up by my own reasons feels good. 

In a traditional governance setting we don’t generally get taught how to feel into our own boundaries. Governing is a role that is historically steeped in the shepherding of other people’s work, making decisions that affect other people’s lives, and creating structures that we think will make things make sense/ be more streamlined/ solve more problems on behalf of a wider audience than those in the room. And in the worst case scenarios there are those in power who believe they are navigating all of that objectively and taking their own feelings out of it. 

But what we need is everyone to have the capacity to bring their own feelings into it in a constructive way. And for more space to be made for people to express their red lines, and to be able to re-articulate those as we learn where our edges our. Alongside that we also need to make conscious choices to let those go when we realise that edge or rule is no longer required in this particular scenario. 


Informal, consistent and caring feedback loops

All too often, even in supposedly non-hierarchical organisations, there are fears about honest and direct communication between people, combined with fears of manipulation. In addition in lower stakes environments or within bigger networks it can be easier for people to allow things to go unnoticed and unaddressed. While relationship anarchy hasn’t given me a fool proof system for encouraging consistent and caring feedback loops between everyone, it has created more impetus for it, because the risks of not doing that feel more immediate.

I often get my needs met more frequently in my polyamorous relationship style than I did in a monogamous set up, not because I have more people that care about me but because there are more people providing me with feedback about what they are witnessing within me, as well as my partners and friends giving feedback to each other about what I appreciate or need even if I can’t put words to it myself. 

There is a level of trust between everyone I am connected to intimately which means they can also have a direct connection to one another should it be needed. I also have the freedom and trust to form a direct connection with people that are intimate with my partners too. This open flow of communication and belief that we all have one another’s best interests at heart means that we learn rapidly about how to be in relationship with one another, and how to protect one another from toxic forces that might be at play.

It takes time to make yourself open to connecting to people you don’t have to speak to, and to do that in a way that clearly centres the things you collectively care about, knowing that the system is stronger if each individual relationship is stronger. 

Assuming abundance

We live in a system built on a scarcity mindset. Which means that at any moment someone could be harboring fears about losing something. Being a relationship anarchist has shown me that when you assume that love is abundant, it allows you to flex in response to your partners and friends needs in ways I might’ve been more rigid about before. It has also allowed me to be braver in my asks of others, because I know that if it goes awry I will find the love and care I need in others. The same goes for time and energy. I’ve had some people argue that love might be abundant, but that time is a finite resource… but as I’ve invested more time in others, they invest more time in me, I discover more about myself, I learn to flex time in ways that work better, and the cycle continues until time feels just as expansive as love. 

Working in the equity and inclusion space I get a lot of push back around change due to a lack of time, or around investing money due to a lack of funds. It doesn’t matter what size an organisation is and how many months or years worth of reserves they have there will always be the ‘we are too small’ or ‘we don’t have much funding’ retort to challenges to go bigger with their commitments. And yet if these respective organisations spoke to each other they’d see that actually an organisation double their size with quadruple their funding is still saying the exact same excuse.

The reality is there is abundance in everything if we know how to tune into the energy that drives us, and to allow it to flow through the systems we are trying to create. But many of us are stuck in a space of fear and doubt because the capitalist system thrives on making us feel trapped and incapable of making big change happen, and the cycle continues. And until we get an opportunity to experience abundance for ourselves we cannot replicate that feeling in the spaces we are part of. 

Being present

In Practicing New Worlds, Andrea J Ritchie says “The strongest solutions happen through the process, not in the moment at the end of the process”. Which is why I often talk about doing the work as you do the work. But we can only really notice the opportunities within this meta-state if we are being truly present with the process.

There are many monogamous and non-monogamous people alike that struggle with the concept of relationship anarchy because they don’t like having to constantly re-negotiate the terms of their relationships, or don’t like having to feel their feelings in moments of uncertainty. But for me, doing that with my partners is precisely what brings us more deeply together, and brings me closer to the type of connection and vulnerability I desire to share with others. We learn through these moments together, and being present in those moments is what strengthens our relationships.

The best decision-making I’ve ever been part of has never been due to the ultimate decision, or because of a specific method for getting there, but instead because everyone has actively engaged in the process, witnessed each other, understood the tensions and boldly committed to something together even when there are reservations present. And quite often those groups do that because they trust each other’s intentions and they trust that whatever arises they will have each other’s backs. Relationship anarchy is messy, but in some ways it’s really simple and clear. We love and trust each other to make the right choices for ourselves and the people we love, and when doubts or barriers arise we trust each other to work through that together. 

Breaking up with social media

As someone born in the 90s my formative years were shaped by the rise of social media. My Facebook still contains photos from when I was 14, and I recently dug out the early years of online blogging on live journal, where my 13-year old self seemed to pour out unfiltered poetry, love letters and weirdly specific tales about perverted teachers. 

In more recent years it became a tool to grow the network that supported Collaborative Future, with many of the young people on our programmes discovering our work through instagram. And my continued capacity and desire to share openly and authentically about my work and my personal life through what I post has not only inspired people from afar but it has also connected me with so many of the people I consider as friends and collaborators now. 

What’s more is social media offered me a route into discovering who I am. Both in terms of providing me with access to queer, trans and autistic experiences that resonated with my own, and also in connecting me with viewpoints and perspectives on global issues that are not covered in mainstream media. 

Social media has been a life line for me at times. It has helped me stay connected to friends lives when I’ve moved to different cities, it has shaped my practices and views, it has helped me find recipes, events and loop earplugs, and very occasionally helped me to pay my bills.

But at the same time it is also firmly an addiction. There is a churn on every platform I’m on - getting sucked into friends instagram stories about the event they just attended, wondering what to post on linkedin to make the ethos of my work clear to potential clients, annoying myself with reading the comments people have made on my neighbours post in the facebook group, feeling the pressure to be writing consistently on my brand new (and now retired) substack. In addition I’ve conditioned myself to consume and share opinions at a pace which I don’t think is sustainable if I want to develop a deeper understanding of the world around me. 

So I’m taking a year long break (at least) from every single social media platform (and dating app too btw so do make sure to offer me some old school match making!). And I’m going cold turkey from 1st Feb so I won’t be responding to messages on Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook or Substack after that. I’m so scared of taking this step that it makes me more certain than ever that it’s needed. I’ve got a reading list almost as long as my friend list on Facebook and I’m excited to see how dropping social media entirely will allow me to consume knowledge and ideas in a slower way that allows me to integrate it into my practice and work. I feel deeply connected to movements that I feel I can play an active part in, and while I'm worried about losing touch with online social justice movements I'm more confident than ever in my approach to organising for social change. I’m also so lucky to have a vibrant and thriving community around me in my personal life and work life - and I’m excited to see how those relationships deepen as I invite people to commit to being with me in real-time more often.

There are lots of people that I would love to continue to share my work with and vice versa so if you feel the same I’ve set up a ‘connect with me’ page where you can find my contact details, see where you might be able to cross paths with me at in person or online events this year, and sign up to a monthly newsletter from me (which I’m hoping will contain lots of juicy writing, fun workshops and photographs that I take with my new DSLR camera).

Doing community research when the system doesn’t want to hear the answer

For the first time in a long time it’s been a relief to get to use my equity and inclusion knowledge and facilitation skills for something that feels joyful. I’ve been supporting the British Science Association and UKRI to convene a diverse range of essays on what good community-led research looks like. My role has been to support the 13 contributors to produce a powerful output which will further possibilities for them and their work in this space. Not only has it been healing to facilitate a brilliant and committed group of people who really understand the tensions and opportunities in this work, the team I’m working with at British Science Association have demonstrated an openness to learn and adapt continuously as we go in order to hold a process which truly centres our contributors.

But as any good facilitator does, along the way I’ve been noticing my reactions to what is being shared in the spaces I’ve held. And a question I’ve had to keep on asking myself: why are you so damn triggered? And I realise now, because I was traumatised by my first experience of community-led research back in 2021. As part of the youth programmes we ran at Collaborative Future, we were invited to be youth partners on a £5million consortium of academics, design agencies and community organisations all investigating the underlying causes of poor adolescent mental health. We were excited to hear that the team was wanting to engage our young people, on a paid basis, to help inform the research hypotheses. And given the diverse cohort of young people we were working with at the time and the fact that every single one of us had experiences of navigating mental health issues and systems it felt like the perfect fit.

But three months into the relationship we found ourselves being managed off the project. Why? According to the lead academic, the consortium wasn’t seeking to hear the realities and ideas of “those kind of young people”. Our cohort included black and brown people, trans and non-binary people, people from immigrant families, autistic people, people living in social housing, people navigating multiple mental health issues, people who had experience sexual assault, people who were badly treated by the health system. These same young people were also articulate, intelligent and able to understand and meet the researchers where they were at.

From day one our team had always known the power of young people. We invested in our youth programmes as a route to disrupting the oppressive system because we knew young people saw the status quo with fresh eyes, and brought a unique and nuanced perspective on how to create change. The fact that this creative, passionate and thoughtful bunch were being actively ignored by the institutions involved in this project demonstrated a deep-seated fear of the truth, and how those academics could consider their research as a vehicle for change when they were dismissing the very people that mattered was eye-opening.

But in many ways I also played a role in perpetuating the wilful ignorance. I should have been faster to spot and respond to the red flags. In the first group meeting with 30 white middle-class academics the academic lead was allowed to make claims that “the real problem is black on black violence”. We should’ve walked straight out of that project as soon as the group had no answer for what they meant by “communities” and whether it was being used as a euphemism for racially minoritised people. As a trans autistic person who had little academic legitimacy at the time it felt impossible to speak up in such an environment, but over the past few years I’ve honed my capacity to step into the protection my whiteness provides me in these spaces and to call out the profound harm that this rhetoric reproduces

But even if I didn’t act in all the ways I wished I had, my body knew the score. I sobbed all night following this first meeting. Not only was I angry at the audacity and ignorance of the people working in this space, I was also grieving for myself. I never got to go to university for reasons I now believe are connected to being autistic, working class and a rape survivor, while this room of men in their 50s and 60s were paid 6-figure salaries to study a topic I likely knew more about when I was less than half their age.

We took a long-time healing from that experience. It was my team who had to hold our young people through the re-traumatising nature of the work, even though we ourselves were also struggling with it. What I am proud of is that as a result of our learnings we ran our own peer research into youth unemployment and loneliness - not for the eyes of any academic or government department or health service - but for our community of young people. Led by Prisca, together we held inclusive spaces where people gained knowledge from each other, we paid the young people from our programmes to be facilitators or speakers at the event, and everyone left with something of value from the space. It felt like a truly mutual approach to research.

Which brings me to the question: what do we do when the system doesn’t want to hear the answer? We make it so that knowledge serves us. There are many self-organising communities that have been curating and collating extensive knowledge for one another long before ‘community research’ became something that would be funded. Whether it’s consciousness raising groups that have been part of black liberation and women’s liberation movements since the 60’s, or practical knowledge production such as this Neurodiversity Support Centre - a collection of resources created by and for neurodivergent people.

While community research has become better funded, there are still very few funders that are willing to take communities’ lead in how research should be done and who it should serve. When me, Nick and Alvin ran an evaluation of The Ideas Fund I was energised by the fact that while many groups wanted to be able to use their research to advocate for change in the system, they also generated knowledge that was solely for the benefit of the community that led the research. Many of the researchers I spoke to wanted to create something the community could use, not just a research paper that sat on the shelf. While their research into grief among autistic people and people with learning disabilities was being contested by the university ethics committee (for calling autistic people what they requested to be called as part of the research), Informing Choices NI had already taken their findings and turned it into resources for service providers and hired people with lived experience to deliver training based on the research too.

And while many of the contributors to this essay series deserve to have their research taken seriously by academics, service providers, funders and policy makers alike, community-led research is already doing so much more. It is supporting marginalised people to put a shared language to their experiences, so that the system can no longer gaslight them. It is connecting people with a wide variety of skills, who truly care about the issues they are involved in researching to design their own interventions and support. And when equitable practices are adopted it is delivering change through the process itself - providing resources to communities that are currently under-resourced, offering skills and networks to individuals who have been overlooked, and centring issues that we have ignored for too long.

So while the system might not yet be ready for community-led research, those of us who know its power and potential must continue to develop the practices and learnings, and hold each other to account to ensure research is truly for the benefit of society. As bell hooks argues “education is the practice of freedom” and so even if community-led research is not yet getting the traction or recognition it deserves, we must continue to invest in knowledge that is generated by and for the communities it affects.