book review: holding change by adrienne maree brown
17 Sep 2021
Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation by Adrienne Maree Brown
What are the main ideas?
- adrienne’s definitions: facilitation: making it as easy as possible for group sof people to do the hard work of dream, planning, visioning, and organizing together. mediation: supporting people when conflicts or misunderstandings arise that make it hard for them to hear and understand each other in direct conversation. both of these can be held as sacred practices.
- Black feminists have a long history literally of world-changing facilitation. that history is often overlooked. let us learn about all the ways Black feminist wisdom can inform and improve our movement facilitation and movement practice.
- each element of emergent strategy has lessons for us as they relate to facilitation and mediation.
If I implemented one idea from this book right now, which one would it be?
remember that trust in a room is like a tapestry. every relationship is a thread. each relationship that is strengthened (by things that build trust between two people) makes the whole fabric stronger. when in doubt, strengthen trust between people in pairs.
How would I describe the book to a friend?
this book feels impossible to summarize fairly. this compilation black feminist wisdom as it applies to facilitation and mediation is #chefskiss. it has helped me begin to discern between the rational science of facilitation/mediation (somewhat rooted in enlightenment linearity) and the creative art(s) of facilitation/mediation (in this book, rooted in black feminist wisdom/tradition/practices). the black feminist wisdom essays are a prism through which i have learned many different frameworks for what facilitation and mediation are. the following chapters, pairs that focus on an element of emergent strategy, are a summary of lessons that clearly developed with decades of wisdom. every little morsel makes sense and it’s wild to experience my facilitation and mediation skills leveling up paragraph by paragraph. i would recommend this book to anyone, but especially to folks who have been facilitating/mediating with whiter frameworks and feeling excited to deepen the radical/earth-based/magical edge of their facilitation/mediation practice.
reminder: book review structure
words / writing / post-processing
345w / ? / ?