​​Leslie's Story
​​TRC Co-Project Roundtable Part Two   
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​​TRCC/F  founder Leslie Meehan, PhD, wrote this shortly after the TRCC gathering in the SF Bay Area from Nov 8-10, 2014. The "We" she refers to is her sense of the heart and intention of the community based on her collective listening, not an expressed group consensus, unless specifically indicated.
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​Moved to Tears as TRCC Moves Forward 
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​​I woke up in the middle of the night sobbing tears of release and joy after coming home from our TRCC social justice training and gathering. After three years of community-building, it feels to me like we have finally crossed the threshold onto the journey of walking our talk together, both as a rainbow coalition of people of all colors and as an agent of collective impact. 
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​​The first big step was attending a workshop on “Dismantling Racism in Our Communities: Building Collaboration for Resilience.” It was taught by the Catalyst Project, who specialize in building awareness for white community organizers working with people of color. They call it a “political” training about social systems rather than “personal” work on our attitudes and behaviors, but in my experience you get two for the price of one. I learned shocking discrimination stories and statistics that broke my heart. I’ll never forget group exercises using real-life situations where organizations in power successfully held onto that power in the face of serious resistance, often through illegal exploitation of differences among their opposition. The experience was a real eye-opener about how much easier it is to keep power when you already have it because the economic, legal, and justice systems are designed to protect those in power. 
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​​The Thriving Resilient Communities Collaboratory sponsored this training because we want to become a community that is more welcoming to everyone, and we have some learning and work to do. We’re using the excellent Catalyst training materials to develop an action plan with support from our friends of color. It’s so good to have some of the missing voices coming to the table together. Welcome! 
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​​The next big step was to take the risk of putting major money on the TRCC table and figuring out how to share it. The TRCC was invited by the Threshold Foundation to develop multi-organization collaborative projects and to decide together which project should win a $50,000 grant. Brave or foolish? Blessing or curse? This is living on the edge!
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​​Yes, we deliberately leaned into the edge of putting real money in the middle. We put a hefty stake in the ground, a single catnip in the middle of a herd of cats. It’s risky. Many of us know horror stories of ugly power dynamics and relationships broken over money. There’s discomfort in the room. How do proposal-writers advocate for their project without sacrificing their allies’ projects? Why can’t somebody else decide? What does “the wisdom is in the room” really look like? Is it truly collaborative if not everyone is there when decisions are made? Are those who have less time to join in (often people of color) being discriminated against? 
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​​We have some models to work from but are finding our own democratic way. People understandably aren’t clear about what we’re doing because, to our knowledge, funder-grantee partnership hasn’t been done before at this “translocal” multi-organization multi-community scale. Yet, we’re asking the hard questions and figuring it out together with people we’ve come to know and trust. 
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​​What we’re going for here is to pilot a process where funders, community organizers, social experts, and information experts can bring their collective wisdom to the table and do our best to share the resources we have. It goes straight to the heart of our real-world situation where we have to learn and practice how to share finite resources in a way that serves the whole. If we can’t do it in TRCC with the level of transpersonal maturity and whole-systems perspective that our tribe carries, then we sure as heck can’t do it in our real-world communities. 
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​​Money speaks, and our tribe over the past three years has said loud and clear that our money voice is too small. Our translocal grassroots networks have critical solutions that need significantly larger resources to build local resilience systems. TRCC has been putting small money in the middle (~$5000) and Threshold has funded $20,000 grants for the past few years. It’s been an important start but hasn’t generated the collective impact that we need to move social change forward in time. And guess what: this money in the middle did the trick. We’ve now got the scope of proposals on the table that feel hefty enough to tip the scale.
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​​So where are we? We have collectively decided on four co-project “sprouts” from our twelve worthy seeds: without bloodshed and hopefully with minimally bruised feelings. We had a deep conversation about decision-making process that was priceless in building solidarity. We are kicking off a Roundtable dialogue to develop common criteria and collaborative funding strategies. And, we are creating a Co-Project Council to make decisions on behalf of the whole. 
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​​Please wish us luck and love, and come join us on the Roundtable journey.
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​Comments

​​Use the space below to post comments. Let's try this "blog style," with the most recent ones on top. Suggested formatting is to put your name and the date on the first line in bold, then post your comments below. Replies can be indented, following a similar format. 
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​​Next post here. Please include your name and the date, per the model below.
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​Ken White, 12/17
​​Leslie: Thank you for the honesty and clarity in this story. Honesty, in naming many of the challenges we are grappling with, and those you personally and generously have chosen to take on. Clarity in identifying the hurdles we have to overcome, and the mixed motivations, legacies, and present realities that we'll have to grapple with whole-heartedly in order to make this experiment come alive and serve the movement. By the way, I happen to think the movement will do OK with or without us, but if we do address some of the things you and others have raised, we may well be able to support the movement in doing just a little more, and a little more quickly, widely, and effectively. 
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