Finding that Equity Lens

 Foggy this morning so I guess I won't get out there and weed right away. I do plan to spend the day outside and let my thoughts and feelings sort themselves out in silence. 

Met my neighbor's new dog last night and realize I am the only house on this side of the block without a dog. I think there are now 9 in only 5 households. No wonder all the squirrels live in my yard. I think I'm the only one feeding birds now too, so I get a lot of great birds, but also all the cats. At least one of them is belled. As much as I would like to make friends with the cats, I have to chase them off. There are some baby squirrels right now. Seems late and they're scurrying to gather leaves and make nests everywhere. They're cute...but they can't all live with me.

Yesterday at the Park Blocks we had many many Cedar Waxwings. Although they are beautiful to see, they love eating laurel berries and the booths across from me, under a cedar tree, were just covered with purple fragments. One canopy was probably destroyed by them and will never be white again...but what can you do? I wish I would have thought to offer a cloth to throw over it, which might have helped a little. You don't expect to have to bring a cover for your cover. I was out of the fall line just barely, but it was still a hard day, even with bright birds to admire/resent.

There were also lots of people and some were dressed up. It made for some fun. I always am sorry I didn't go to more trouble. I was the apocalyptic vision of my future as a crafter. It says "HOW may I help you?" on the back because obviously if you are at Walmart, you need help. And we're gonna force it on you.

We all need help. I've been obsessing over my Board Educational Minute on Equity and of course I have an hour's worth of things to say at least. I'm consulting the hive mind on FB about it and actually it's helpful. It's about planting a seed so the next time I mention the word in the context of a policy, people will know what I am talking about, or will do some research of their own on how the organization is dealing with our equity issues.

I'm hopeful that we can get to it to a degree. We've been putting out fires for a year and a half so we haven't had the luxury of much reflection time, but several of the things that happened touched on DEI issues. We have them...sexism, racism, ableism, otherism, cultural appropriation, intolerance, microaggressions, pretty much all the things on the pyramid of racism and tenets of white supremacy graphics, but we don't address any of them directly as a rule so I am just assuming some or most of us are not aware of them. We've been lucky as far as I know to not have a lot of overt ism situations, but for sure they come up.

It's well established that hippie origins like those of the Market bring along white supremacy culture in structure and policies. Because at least one of our founders was not a hippie, and in fact escaped Nazi Germany, we built in a bit of awareness of equality, but a lot has changed in 53 years and we have not done any deep looks into what our assumptions lead us to. I know we tend to listen to the people at the table, who are essentially a self-selected group of people who have time to volunteer, and while there is an age range, that may or may not help. Younger people who grew up with more awareness of multiple cultures and didn't necessarily have hippie roots might know a lot more than I think they do, but I haven't seen a lot of my hard-core feminism operating in recent times. I know I am not middle-of-the-road in that aspect. I have to struggle to allow men some slack and while there are a couple of men I admire in my circles, it's never a given. I want to get myself somewhere in a genderless thought space where I never think in binary terms, as that might help my perspective. I mean, "not all women" either. 

The hive mind is reminding me that it could be possible to bypass all the ways I want to task my org with the faults I have observed and imagine what progress might look like. Not a self-congratulatory minute saying what we're doing right, but some way to convey what an equitable process would look like, so we can make a bit of an immediate shift. Because I know we don't have any funds for a professional training, as much as it would be useful, and we don't have time for any difficult conversations unless I form a focus group or something, which would likely attract more people who want to do the work, rather than those who need to do it. But if they ask me to do that, I probably will, as typically committees are the way we have the type of protracted discussions we need on all the many subjects. 

I'm going to have to make every word count. I figure I will ask for something easy to remember, which is to use an "equity lens" when we make policy. We can try that right away and in the process, figure out what that feels like. Obviously if I start with anything dramatic like saying I am a racist raised in a white supremacy culture they will likely fall easily into degrees of denial or acknowledgement, and that could actually allow a few others to feel that we are the same page in our process, but we need to work on a lot more issues than racism. So I think I will make an attempt to talk about how we all use privilege, without thinking about it. 

As individual member businesses, we are set up to think mostly about how our needs must be met, as we can easily opt out if that isn't happening. The guy next to me packed up an hour early yesterday and I worked hard on what to say about it. I wasn't able to talk to him directly, but I know I was cold when he tried to say goodbye. Fortunately the person he was sharing with stayed, so after he left I thanked her for staying and said a little about how it is our group agreement to stay open, for each other. She already agreed with me. I stopped myself from the full lecture. Increasingly I feel that it is not my job to police the other members, and it is detrimental if I do it. I'm already set up to be the cranky old lady who upholds tradition and uses an abundance of ownership to impose my will on everyone else. I'm not going to be that lady if I can help it. I mean, I FEEL ownership, but that is my privilege speaking there, as I benefit from my participation in many ways and need to do the work of limiting that and working for equity, myself!

So, a work in progress for sure, and I hope to put my editing skills to work to create a dynamic and memorable few minutes that will be useful to everyone in the zoom room. I have a couple of days. I will let my much-appreciated right brain ruminate on this while I get outside and do some weeding, because yay, the sun came out! But do let me know if you have something to add to my quest of the day. I signed up for this minute over a year ago and sure don't want to waste it. This old world has got to change.