Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

We have also learned that we had to lay out our operating beliefs. Each person has a set of beliefs with which they move through the world. These are formed by their cultural, social, economic, and environmental (amongst others) experiences from birth, and they change as more experiences are added to the whole. A group joins their beliefs together creating a set of named or unnamed ways in which they operate. We have made our beliefs very transparent at Ruckus. What we landed on was that, for the next period of history, we need to place an emphasis on: Impacted leadership (the leadership of communities directly impacted by economic and environmental injustice); Privileged support (the intentional support for impacted leadership from communities/people that can identify their privilege and want to see a rebalancing of power); Feminine leadership (not just women leaders, but leaders who shift our understanding of how power can be held). These beliefs are partly grounded in the reality that leadership from these spheres is directly opposite to the leadership we’ve experienced for the last century and it’s time for balance, and also because the most exciting organizing happening today is coming from communities directly impacted by oppressions and injustices.