Spirit in Action
Collective Visioning & Bridging the Class Divide
Linda Stout is the activist/author of Collective Visioning: How Groups Can Work Together for a Just and Sustainable Future and founder of Spirit In Action, a non-profit organization that catalyzes broad-based movement building to support deep and lasting social change.
- Broadcast on:
- 05 Jun 2011
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear that as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And my lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Joining us for today's Spirit in Action is Linda Stout, author of a new book called Collective Visioning, how groups can work together for a just and sustainable future. Linda has a long pedigree of community organizing, but brings some perspective that many peace and justice groups are missing, coming from poverty and without a college education as she does. Linda's techniques and insights provide powerful tools for all organizers, with the additional bonus of helping us bridge all kinds of gaps and castoms that might have kept us from developing our full power. Author and activist Linda Stout joins us from Massachusetts. Linda, I'm so pleased to have you here for Spirit in Action. - Thank you so much, I'm so happy to join you. - And it's all the more exciting because your organization is called Spirit in Action. So this is truly a meeting of the minds or at least of the hearts and spirits. How did you go about getting the name Spirit in Action? Why did you pick it out? - Well, it's the whole reason the organization started is after doing a national listening project, that's part of a national project of peace development fund, where we talk to activists all over the country. In addition to people saying we have to have a vision of what we're working for, not just talk about what we're against. People talked about the fact that we come into this work with detailed values, heart values, human values, spiritual religious values, all different ways that we come into the work for social justice and that it was critical that that be part of our movements, even though we're so diverse. And so when I was trying to think of a name that really indicated that we're working from a place of love and heart, Spirit in Action was what we came up with. - And why don't you tell folks exactly the kind of work that you do, you've had what, 12 years now or so, you've been going. - Spirit in Action is a movement building organization and we work both community levels, regional, state and national levels to help folks come together across differences, race, class, age, other ethnicities and sometimes across issues and always across strategies to become more than the sum of our parts basically. So how do we build a movement that's all inclusive where everyone has power and voice and trust with each other? In some cases where there has not been trust or even there's been her in the past, these are all who are working for social justice and a better world. We have worked on using lots of methodologies on how to do that and we basically have four core principles. One is that we work from a place of vision, just one long-term vision, although that's helpful, but it's collective vision where everyone's voice is heard and then we create a plan of how to move toward that vision. The second piece is what we call healing divisions where ways we've been taught to be separated, whether it's through our different class backgrounds, educational backgrounds, our ethnicities, our race, gender, et cetera. How do we really build trust and create a space where we all can be fully our powerful selves? The piece around spirit or heart is about how do we bring and create a space where we all can bring forth all that individually inspires us and share in our joy of that and our heart connections to the work so that we don't burn out and that we don't feel so separated. So even if in the room there's an atheist and a Christian and a Buddhist and Jewish and Quaker and Wiccan and agnostic that we all can figure out a way to have that love and spirit and heart part of our work be present among a very diverse group. And then last is how do we really change the way we do change that's inclusive of all this because the way we have done change has not been working and we have to create a movement that's much more broad based and diverse and loving and positive. - You know, I've read your book, "Collective Visioning" and really enjoyed it. There's a good read there and there's so many good points that you make in there. You just in speaking now mentioned things like social justice and what jumped mine right away was Glenn Beck speaking how if you go into a church where they talk about social justice you should hurry up, get the hell out of there and you talked about methodologies which might lead someone to think that you're kind of highbrow because, you know, methodologies is not a street word I guess but I don't think that's you. I don't think either of those are you. - No, that's not me. It's so interesting because growing up in the buckle, I'm actually 13th generation Quaker but growing up in the buckle of the Bible bell my mother's side of the family are very conservative Christians. I got exposed to a lot of that but as I interpret Jesus' teachings he was very much about social justice and peace. So I think Glenn Beck is totally off the wall there and I have an aunt and uncle who watched him faithfully and when he began to say that and attack the idea of social justice I wrote them and I said how can you support and listen to a person who says if you're attacking Jim Wallace who is a Christian and really supports Jesus' teachings and they said oh well we won't listen to him anymore as a result but you know it's a hard one because I think a lot of people have been miseducated. I don't think people are uneducated. I think they're miseducated by folks like Glenn Beck and Fox News and other kinds of media and we have to learn to create a voice that speaks to all people and I think that's part of what I'm trying to do with this book. You know I've been an organizer for a long time so sometimes I sneak in that language but I think that's really problematic because when I first started being an organizer I didn't understand any of those words and I wanted to be a part of a movement but it didn't work for me so I had to go back to my own community and organize poor people from my community and speak from my own way of speaking so it's really important for me that as a social justice movement we're not just creating materials for college educated people but that we're speaking to everyone. - Way early on you mentioned something about listening project and I'm familiar with Herb and his listening projects is this listening project in that mode that you're talking about? - Very much in that mode I know are very well and worked with him in North Carolina back in the 80s is why I called it that. In fact I honor his work in my book and the acknowledgments. So what I decided to do while I piece development fund and the board and staff supported this was to do a national listening project with activist organizers all over the country at every level and every kind of issue that was about social justice to say what will it take to build a movement that can really transform the world and that's what spirit and action was born out of it was from that listening to those folks all over the country it wasn't an idea that I just, I mean it was my idea that I wanted to work on an inclusive movement that everybody could be a part of 'cause certainly our organization that was very successful in rural North Carolina we knew we couldn't win unless we were part of something bigger but it was out of that listening project that we figured out what our work was for the future. - I think that maybe a lot of our listeners have little idea of what a listening project is. Could you explain the mechanics and what the idea is behind a listening project? - Well it's really, so we were asking people how do you transform the world and we did have a set of questions, strategic questions that we asked about what is needed, what do you see missing, what do you like, what can we build on, what do you think's working, those kinds of things and we did it both individually and in groups but we've also do that in our organizing work coming from Quakerism, I say listening has always been my spiritual practice 'cause Quakerism is about teaching you to listen to the inner heart or the inner spirit, whatever you wanna call it, some people call it God, some people call it other names. We would go into a community and knock on doors and say we wanna hear your concerns, we wanna hear how you're thinking about these concerns and what do you think needs to happen? Then out of that we could ask them if they had these concerns to come to a meeting to talk about it and figure out what we need to do. That was how in Royal North Carolina and one congressional district we organized and mobilized and trained 44,000 people. Is this related to the Piedmont Peace Project? - Yes, that was the organization. I was the founder of Piedmont Peace Project. I had been working in South Carolina as a secretary after I left the textile mills, moved back to North Carolina to really organize in my own community and we formed Piedmont Peace Project and we called it that, although peace wasn't our only focus, we really connected all of our issues that affected us as poor people. For us, peace in our hearts and our community and in the world, we did connect military budget with the issues that we cared about like housing, health care, childcare, education and all the ways we were affected as poor people. - I wanna mention, Linda, that I grew up in a family that I think would be called, you know, upper lower class or lower middle class at best. And so there's some similarities between your background and my background. I do think that there are a lot of people who are active in these peace and organizing type settings who are middle class or upper middle class. I am college educated, but I'm the only one out of the 12 kids in our family who is college educated. So I'm kind of, have a foot in both camps. Do you run into strong prejudice in these activist groups when, you know, you come in because you don't have the college degree to hit them over the head with? - I used to a lot, I think, not as much right now and sadly that's only because they can look at me differently 'cause they just do not have a college education if I've published a book. If you read my first book, "Bridging the Class Divide," it's full of stories. I don't think of myself as a writer, I think of myself as a storyteller, which many of us can do that come from those backgrounds 'cause that's how we pass down our history. But I met lots of prejudice and it was because of that that I wrote that book to both talk what happens when you grow up in poverty in this country or as a person of color in this country and you're faced with constant racism and classism that never goes away. I mean, we get that message on TV and the billboards, everywhere we turn, every day. And so how do we find our power outside of that by working together? It took me a long time, but I began to realize that a lot of these groups, very well-meaning, white middle class and upper class folks, would say things like, well, we want poor people as part of our organization or we want people of color and we've invited them but they don't come or if they come they never stay, which is a really good sign of what the issues are. So I also wrote the book for them. It was for both groups of people to say, here are the invisible walls that you don't even understand or see that you need to be able to understand and see so that we can all work together. A lot of our work is about killing divisions that have been traditionally there and not in the ways that a lot of people think about it around anti-racism, anti-classism workshops, which I used to do and talk about in the book, first book, written in the class divide, but what especially younger people are saying is, it's hard to tell a very poor man of color that he has power and privilege or a white woman that is struggling to feed her children that she has power and privilege because she's white. So we really begin to look at, well, how do we build the relationships and trust? So then we can begin to talk about where those kind of issues show up from a place of love and trust and knowing each other and knowing we're all gonna make mistakes. I think our message was you have to do it in a different way that really creates powerful community. The other thing about these kinds of groups, we're talking about social justice groups, is we're often so desperately in a hurry because we're trying to fix everything that's wrong and there's so many things wrong that we don't take the time to slow down, connect, connect to spirit, connect to each other, build relationships, go trust, because we're rushing to the next campaign or rushing to the next disaster. It's in the slowing down and doing that work together that allows us to move really fast and build really strategically and not fall apart the first time things come up or not fight over the agenda for two hours because we've all are connected to ourselves and each other. - I think it's probably become increasingly difficult to do that because we don't work on building community. I think a lot of our technological direction and just the fact that we friend people on Facebook but we don't meet them face to face means that we don't build community in a way that people had to a hundred years ago. Is this a really big threshold to get people over? I'm just imagining people digging in their heels and saying we don't need to do all of this stuff. What we need to do is plan a good agenda and we can vote on these points and we can go ahead and I can just imagine people saying, why do we have to talk about what I'm feeling or what we want? - People say that all the time at every one of our training, although I would have to say that in some of our older networks that they actually change the culture and new people coming in are just part of that culture and we no longer have to hold that strongly. But the other thing that those folks say coming in through are maybe for the first or second of time, they'll say, we don't have time to work on this, 9/11 just happened. We don't have time to work on this Katrina just happened and why are we sitting around talking about our feelings or telling stories. But at the end of that same weekend, gathering or five day gathering or whatever it is, one day gatherings that we do, there are the same people who say, I can't believe how much we accomplished in such a short time. I call it going slow to go fast, that when we take the time to create that space and I talk about how to do that in my book and how to build those relationships and build that trust and the agreements of how we are going to work together that comes from everyone's voice, then the work can move really quickly and the planning can move really quickly and people are much more invested in staying involved. You know, how many conferences or workshops if you go into leaving with all these promises of excitement of this is what I'm going to do when I get back home and then it never happens. What we've found is because we do that work for that people who promise the volunteers stay involved and keep the network, even though they're very busy leaders of their own organizations, they stay involved in the network because it benefits them so much and it feeds not only them personally, but it helps their work. All of our networks and collaborations is all about how do we become more than the sum of our parts, but unless we're strengthening each part at the same time, why should you invest your time to come to another meeting? So it's that balance of, yes, I'm going to grow from this, I'm going to learn from this, we're going to share skills, we're going to share all of these things because we've built the trust to be able to do that. - If you just tuned in, this is Spirit In Action. I'm Mark Helpsmeet, your host for this Northern Spirit Radio production. Our website is NorthernSpiritRadio.org and today we're speaking to a real Spirit In Action. As a matter of fact, she is founder of an organization called Spirit In Action, same as this program. Only she did it first, and I'm very pleased to meet her after all these years. Her latest book is Collective Visioning, how groups can work together for a just and sustainable future. Her name is Linda Stauci's in North Carolina where she hails from and then she started doing her organization there in the back country. Many of us start from the big cities and from, let's say, a Northern perspective. And Linda, because you've come up from a different direction, is the overall organizing culture in this nation? Are you helping to transform it? I mean, I think there's strengths from both sides, you mentioned the storytelling. Is this going to be one of those insurgent movements from the back country into the cities to help us get our act together? Well, you know, I started in the rural areas, but I've done a lot of work within the cities, you know, in New Orleans, Seattle, Oakland, workshops at the national level. I think that even though we may have specific issues in rural areas, they often translate into urban areas. And yes, the cultures are different in different parts of the country, and you have to take that into consideration. But that's true even in the South, 'cause the culture of where I was raised is the daughter of a tenant farmer, and people were either mill workers, tenant farmers or truck drivers, are teachers sometimes. The culture might be different, but that's why it is so important to build community that is inclusive of all kinds of cultures. So the work at a national level, or building movement at a national level, or even at a community level, has to understand how to do that. I think you're also part of a national organization of communicators. Do you wanna talk about that organization a little bit? - Well, Spirit and Action started a national network of folks who were helping get the message out about social justice to the media, both sort of standard media outlets as well as alternative media. And I wanted to bring all these folks together to figure out how we could be more effective in communicating our messages nationally as the right had been brilliant at doing. When I first started to try to build that network, people didn't even wanna sit in the room together in some cases because of issues of race and class and past hurts and very legitimate reasons. And there was also fear of if I share my ideas, someone's gonna steal it and raise money off of it. And so when we brought the first group together, one of the things people said is we're not gonna share ideas and we're not gonna talk about building a network. After we did community building, telling our stories about what inspired us to do this work and then doing visioning, folks started saying, well, can we share our models in our different ways of training and ask for feedback? And there was consensus to do that. And at the end, one person said, I feel like we've accomplished more in the last 24 hours in the past 17 years that I've done this work. And I think we should talk about building a network. And there was total consensus for that. And in the next four hours that we had available to us, we created the most strategic, powerful plan of how that was gonna happen, how we were gonna build a national network. It's in its 11th year, we just had our 12th gathering and it is incredibly powerful and does a lot of behind the theme work. Like, I remember people saying, oh, even people in CNN are talking about race and class around Katrina and that was an accidental. It was because we had this whole network of organizers who do media who was helping get those kind of briefings out to reporters. And so progressivecommunicators.net, but progressive communicators network is a powerful national organization that is working together to help echo the messages and work with a lens around race and class as they move forward on all different issues. - You mentioned Katrina in there. And one of the stories that's very powerful, an example that you share in the book is about working with some kids down in the area of New Orleans after Katrina. Could you share some of that? Just so people get an idea of why this collective visioning process is so powerful. - Well, it started out with adults who were displaced and had been organizing and had had their organizations, you know, their offices and their homes destroyed many of them. We met in New York Division around what they wanted to do when they were allowed to go back to New Orleans and because New Orleans and Louisiana had some of the worst school systems in the country, poor school systems in the country, they decided that they would focus on the rebuilding of schools. But part of their vision was that that would include youth. So their decision was to look at junior high school age and do visioning with them. So I came down to vision with junior high school kids on how they wanted the schools to look like and what they wanted to change. Among things they wanted to change was bathrooms where they had doors on the stalls and toilet paper and their own textbooks that they didn't have to share and could take home and do homework. And everyone would have a desk and unbelievable things that I've heard the same story now that I've told that story in schools like that in L.A. and Chicago and New York and many rural areas. And these children through doing visioning every year, I'm going back in a couple of weeks to do visioning with them again, have gone on with the adults who support them to really change how the schools have been built in New Orleans and are being rebuilt. Like for example, there is, I guess, I don't know to call it a law or a rule or whatever, but there was a decision made because of these kids that now every new school that's built has to have a community garden and help the alternatives in the cafeteria like salad bars instead of candy bar machines that they did design and won a national prize on how to build green bathrooms. And then they designed a green school that came in at the top at a national level. They're working on replacing the metal detector machines that are from first grade through high school that was put in after Katrina by welcoming circles and having restorative justice circles as a form of dealing with problems instead of 50% of all public school kids being in detention at any one day in New Orleans as of last year. So they've done tremendous work and have gotten national and international recognition as a result. And these were nice word kids who most weren't even expected to graduate high school. And now the first ones we have gone on to college, but meeting her in high school stay and help the younger ones and have started junior rethinking, these are called kids rethinking New Orleans. If you want to look it up that are doing amazing work in becoming powerful leaders of the future as well as powerful change makers now. - You're talking there about junior high school, middle school students. I think that most people would assume you could not do such a project with kids. At best, you're a manipulation. When you said salad bars, I'm thinking our kids at that age, all they want to have is pizza. And yet, somehow they're coming up with the idea of salad bars. It's coming out of their culture. - Okay, so we did visioning around one year around, what does it mean to have healthy minds so we can learn well, healthy economies, so we'll have jobs and healthy schools? What would that look like? And of course, kids want pizza and some of the kids wanted salad bars and they wanted to be able to wash their hands. And garden and using local food, yes, some of that, we came in and when they talked about that, we said, well, let's bring people in who talks about the local economy and how to support that. But we start with them doing the visioning, with them saying what they want. I remember doing visioning with some kids in Kalula, Louisiana around what they wanted in a community college. One of them said, because this was a very poor community and all they had was like a truck stop restaurant. So one child said, well, I want us to have a McDonald's. So we write that up. And another child said, I want us to have a French restaurant. And I said, why do you like French restaurants? He said, I don't know, but I've heard the food is very good. And so I think with the kids and we gave them experiences of, what does it mean to eat healthy? And so, no, I wouldn't call it manipulation at all, but giving children choices and helping them think into the future, well, yeah, what do I need to have a healthy mind so I can do my best and become the most of what I can be? And when you give them that option, they're amazing about what they come up with. I mean, they decided they didn't want forks in their cafeteria anymore. And forks are those little tiny plastic spoons with little fork edges on them that you see at fast food restaurants. As part of a press conference, they built like a six foot spork. And they ended up on the Rachel Rae cooking show talking about that and they got forks out of schools. And so they begin to feel power and know that they can make change where they never believed it before and have become very outspoken leaders around the education of New Orleans schools, around how the schools are run and how they work and how they're built. - You know, Linda, this is all based around the idea that we're going towards a positive vision instead of a negative vision. I think we need some more stories from your experience to make clear to people the difference between those two because a lot of people think, yeah, I'm working towards a positive outcome. I want the war in Afghanistan to end. And, you know, there is some positivity in that. But I think what you've said in your book and which strikes me as true in the world is that when you're only fighting against something, you do get the burnout, you do shut down, you reach the dead end and then you stop working. - I think that's true, yes. Or you stay in it for a long time and you become bitter and you don't inspire new leadership and younger people to join. And, you know, and that's not true for everyone obviously, but most of the leaders that I've seen stay in this for a very long time that really still inspire people and bring them in do have a positive vision. It doesn't mean we ignore what's wrong or don't acknowledge the problem we do. That has to be a part of it. But also we have to hold out the hope and the vision of where we're moving toward or it's really hard to mobilize people and get the millions of people who maybe share the same values as us to be a part of us and to feel like they have power in making change. I often say I don't believe in apathy. I don't think people are apathetic. I think they just feel helpless and hopeless and don't know how to make change or in my own little listening project I did before this book, I asked folks who shared our values and were connected to social justice about how they made change and many said, well, I recycle, I volunteer, I do this, I do that, but they didn't know how to work collectively together and I think unless we're working collectively, we can't really create change at even a national or international level and that's what we have to think about. We've become a global community and we have to understand how to work at a really different level now. And that doesn't mean we don't do the work locally or regionally. I've read this book for people who want to make change in their communities or their churches or their workplace or their organizations. We hope to provide support for that. That's why if you go to my website, linda.org, we're gonna be telling a lot more stories than to get printed in a book of success and there's book circles already starting. We tell how to do that on our website. We use one website for my book, linda.org, but it connects them to the other organizations and I give resources in the back of the book as well. And one point that you just made that I don't want to lose Linda is that while we can do good and important things individually, the power to make major changes in this world can only come through working together with others and to put some emphasis to the point, here's a song by North Carolina organizer and singer-songwriter, Sai Khan. I'm sure, Linda, that you agree with Sai. When we walk along this road together, we are strong. (upbeat music) ♪ When our lives that follow fields of cotton ♪ ♪ Heard and crack like sun-baked clay ♪ ♪ We will gather at the deepest river ♪ ♪ Longing for a new day ♪ ♪ All the night divides us from each other ♪ ♪ Though the days are hard and drunk ♪ ♪ When we walk along this road together ♪ ♪ We are strong ♪ ♪ When the years of dust have choked our voices ♪ ♪ 'Til there's no power to say ♪ ♪ We will look to where the plow is turning ♪ ♪ Longing for a new day ♪ ♪ All the night divides us from each other ♪ ♪ Though the days are hard and long ♪ ♪ When we walk along this road together ♪ ♪ We are strong ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ We are strong ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ In the silence of a world gone crazy ♪ ♪ Truth and justice lose their way ♪ ♪ We are standing at the edge of midnight ♪ ♪ Longing for a new day ♪ ♪ Though the night divides us from each other ♪ ♪ Though the days are hard and long ♪ ♪ When we walk along this road together ♪ ♪ We are strong ♪ ♪ We are strong ♪ - We are strong by Saigon. Sa was with us for spirit and action a couple months ago talking about his book on creative community organizing, Sa's been organizing in North Carolina for decades now, but we've got a different author organizer with us here today and North Carolina was the home that gave Linda her start an important material for her new book. Again, the name of the book is Collective Visioning, How Groups Can Work Together for Adjust and Sustainable Future by Linda Stout was with us here today for spirit and action. Our organization is also Spirit and Action. You know, one of the things that's part of the processes that you work people through Linda is you have them draw the vision and I do understand the importance of having something concrete that people can touch, look at, that they can get it in their heads in a different way than just a massive words, but I have to say I'm very intimidated by drawing. How much does that hold people back or do people get okay with drawing a stick figure or whatever? Well, first of all, I explain ahead of time when they go to draw on the map and I'm like, okay, some of us are word people. I can only draw a stick figure. I'm not a drawer at all, but what I see happen is people go up to the walls and the other piece is people don't always vision in a concrete picture. Some people vision as feelings and I'm like, think if you can draw, you know, like sunshine or stick figures, dancing or singing, whatever feelings that you have, it almost always there's someone who'll say, "Well, here's what I envision, "but I don't know how to draw it and other people help." And so it becomes this collective process of connecting the figures, but very first thing I say is, you know, maybe some of us are good drawers, some of us can't draw at all, that would be me. And then we can actually do things like add language and I have this exercise in the book, but we can add language to what we've drawn or how we interpret it and prioritize the ones that all of us agree on and want to work on. And it's an amazing process. I mean, I tell the story of working with a group of people who were coming from two different cities who had never worked together before and actually were immigrants from warring countries. And the organizers at the time want me to have vision together with them. It was the first time they'd ever come together and they were really worried because these were folks who wouldn't talk to each other. And after we'd done the trust building and the storytelling and other kinds of things, I had sort of made an agreement with the staff that I would do one visioning, but one city could go and draw their concerns and their vision for their community and other group could do the same on the other end of the room. And so we did that. I have to say, we had like translators because there were about seven languages being spoke at that time when people drew and I had them come and look. One city come and look at the other cities and then vice versa and they explained their vision to each other and one of the elder women, this were Asian folks stood up and she said, okay, we can no longer work separately. Clearly we have that difficult vision. And just because we come from a place where our governments were at war with each other and forced us to be at war with each other, we now live in these communities where we're suffering the same indignities, especially around environmental pollution. And we need to work together to make this happen. And that was just, it was such a lesson about not only were there visions identical, I was able to say to them, you know, I have to tell you that your visions look like the ones I've seen in Seattle, in New York, in Kentucky, in North Carolina, in New Orleans with young people and old people and many generations. I call myself a 13th generation immigrant. It's shocking to me how similar the visions are when we start visioning what we want for our world and for our community. - I am intrigued, Linda. I've been an organizer. Certainly a part of organization's stuff for more than 30 years. And I've seen the phenomena where the group is kind of white middle class. And the fringe people, what, lower class or people of color or something, very few of them involved in this. You mentioned earlier that groups will say, you know what, we've invited them, but they don't show up or they don't stay. Do you have any insights into the concrete parts of why they don't stay? I imagine each group has to really learn this internally, but you must have observed some of the features that make that happen. - Oh, absolutely. I write extensively about this in my first book, "Bridging the Class Divide." That's primarily what that whole book's about. It's very easy to walk into those meetings and feel totally intimidated and not to be seen as someone who has value as a leader or the spokesperson because maybe we don't speak proper grammar. But then the other thing is that all the materials are written for college educated levels where I grew up the average reading level for adults with third grade. We begin to create our own materials, but we didn't write them. We had the folks in our community write them. And as we go around and talk about their concerns and their issues they wanted to make points about, if someone said, "I don't see very well," that was code for "I can't read," and we'd say, "Great, that means you can make sure the pictures tell the story." And we created a whole set of materials about all the different issues and the connection to military budget and the need to be registered and vote. And as a result of that, we found that what happened was some of the national canvassers for the peace movement started using our materials in wealthy communities to fundraise with because our materials were more effective than their own materials written at a college educated level. It's a problem in our movement that we assume everyone must have a college education and often I go to groups and I might be one or one of two or three that don't have a college education. It's really critical if we want to build a culture that's welcoming and inclusive of all people that we learn ways to do that. And I feel that there's some of us, I think you mentioned having a foot in both worlds and I certainly think I have a foot in both worlds now and I have people come up to me all the time and say, "Oh, I can't hide the fact that I grew up poor and I feel out of place now in both worlds." And I say, "Well, that means we have a special job to do because we can help with translation. We can help bridge between the two groups. The folks who are part of these movements need to look and see why aren't we being successful, why aren't low? If low income people and people of color aren't part of your organization, then you need to do some deep soul searching because you will never win. - Amen. I also had questions about how this is playing out in our society now. I think in some ways the Tea Party movement has been very much better tooled, let's say, to reach out across class boundaries and so they're not just stuck with the white middle class, they're reaching much more widely. What is it that they're doing differently and could we be friends, can we work together? - Well, it's interesting. I just heard a story about the people's alliance and the SEIU who was doing a demonstration against the banks and Seattle and why they were working against people's needs. They said these two white guys drove up and a pickup got out and joined them and picked up the signs and were chanting with them and afterwards the two guys came up to them and they said, "Hey, we're ahead of the Tea Party here. We need to be talking with each other." So there's two things. I think there's leaders. If you look at any research, the Tea Party is funded by billionaires and that's why I say a lot of low income people are miseducated, not uneducated and they're told that this is the people to blame. Immigrants are to blame or wealthy or mothers are to blame or they always are blaming it on someone and unless we're educating folks about where the truth is coming from and we have a big battle because of who owns the media and that more than 50% of the population who watch news, watch Fox News, that's why we have to join together across issues because there is studies that show a majority of people care about the same issues that we care about. We need to be developing ways to reach out to those folks and I think what the right has been really good at is building community and we're not good at doing that because we are so desperately trying to change things that will better the lives of all people. That's wonderful but it's not enough. We can see that it's not enough because we're not changing things so we have to get people involved in doing more than just staying the same group of people and thinking they have to do it for for people because that's not true. When poor people feel they're included or people of color feel they're included and welcomed and that their culture is honored as well and their way of talking and making decisions is honored as well as anybody else's. It's not that it should be just one way. It should be how do we do this collectively and then they can become much more powerful, much more interested in working for change. It's not true that poor people are too busy trying to survive to do these things. That makes me true with few people but if you're providing childcare, you're providing food and transportation, they'll be there and if they think they can make change in their lives, they're there more than most middle-class people are. - Got a lot of great lessons in the book. Again, it is. Collective visioning, how groups can work together for a just and sustainable future by Linda Stout. I wanna finish one more thing, Linda. And that is, you said your, I think, 13th generation Quaker right there in North Carolina. Can you talk a little bit about how your faith plays out? You already mentioned, you know, you grew up with this listening as part of your spiritual experience. Of course, I know because I'm Quaker also about peace testimony and simplicity and all of these kinds of things. Talk about your experience because evidently, I grew up Catholic and became Quaker. So I kind of entered at the middle-class level but your Quaker meeting isn't all college graduates. - No, where I grew up was actually a very poor area and Quakers settled in North Carolina many, many generations ago, probably in the mid 1700s. So my meeting, actually, most people were very working class and we had silent meeting. So I think for me, it was learning the history of resistance of Quakers that a few people could come together and make a difference that impacted me so strongly. I remember doing my first protest actually in the Quaker meeting, us kids decided that we were not going to go along with some of the old-fashioned ways that the Quaker meeting had decided and that we wanted our first day school teacher to be the same person. And we stood in the silent meeting 'cause we would always stay for part of it and then leave to go to first day school, which is similar to Sunday school and other churches. And we stood for like two or three Sundays in a row before the elders looked like okay, we have to listen to these younger folks and what they want. So I think having that history and the combination of growing up in poverty was a really different experience for me than most poor people have and then most, like when I come to the Northeast, I have to admit that most of the Quaker meetings are very middle class or college educated, I would say. You know, I think as Quakers, we need to look at that. What happened along the way? 'Cause we also have to be very inclusive and I grew, I was lucky and fortunate to grow up in a meeting that had all kinds of people in it. And the generational piece, I think of stories passed down of I know that my family pre-16 generations ago were dissenters in England and went to Holland and that's where they first met George Fox and became Quakers. I honor the fact that the privilege that I have of knowing my own history because Quakers do pass down their history and luckily weren't one of the groups who had their history destroyed or taken away from them or stolen from them as, for instance, African Americans, many have had slaves, they were brought over, they lost a lot of their history and as Jewish folks because of the Holocaust and many other immigrant groups. I'm very fortunate, but I do know that that was part of, it was through my state in listening to my own heart and listening to that that's bigger than me. I never referred to that as God, but to the spirit that's all inclusive and a part of all of us and part of everybody. And it was through that listening that gave me the courage to start to speak out, start to ask questions, start to stand up for what I believed in and that led me eventually to organizing but I know that anyone can do this work even if they're not being an organizer. It doesn't, you don't have to be an organizer to be a part of a movement that can change the world. Certainly all the kids involved in the work that I've done have proven that. - Well thank you for planting those wonderful seeds, the seeds that grow into peace and healingness and I think the love that you're planting through all these stories. And of course that's such a powerful force in the world. We've been speaking with Linda Stout, author of Collective Visioning, how groups can work together for a just and sustainable future. It's a great book full of all kinds of tools, exercises and stories. You need to read the book to fill up your toolbox because so many of us are operating with only partial toolboxes. Linda's done a great job of providing us with great tools for our trade. Thank you again so much, Linda, for joining us for Spirit in Action. - Thank you, I really appreciate it. - Thinking about Linda's ancestry and roots in rural North Carolina, we'll take you out for today's Spirit in Action with another song by activist songwriter, Sai Khan, calling us back to the importance of gifts of those who've come before us and our ties to the land. Gone, gonna rise again by Sai Khan. ♪ I remember the year that my grand daddy died ♪ ♪ Gone, gonna rise again ♪ ♪ And they took his grave on the mountain side ♪ ♪ Gone, gonna rise again ♪ ♪ I was too young to understand ♪ ♪ The way he felt about the land ♪ ♪ But I could read his history and his hands gone ♪ ♪ Gonna rise again ♪ ♪ It's poured in the crib and apples in the bin gone ♪ ♪ Gonna rise again ♪ ♪ Hamming the smokehouse and cotton in the gin gone ♪ ♪ Gonna rise again ♪ ♪ Cows in the morning, hogs in the lawn ♪ ♪ You know he never had a love ♪ ♪ But he worked like the devil for the little he got gone ♪ ♪ Gonna rise again ♪ ♪ His apple trees on the mountain side gone ♪ ♪ Gonna rise again ♪ ♪ He planted the seeds just before he died gone ♪ ♪ Gonna rise again ♪ ♪ I guess he knew that he'd never see ♪ ♪ The red fruit hanging from the tree ♪ ♪ But he planted the seeds for his children and me gone ♪ ♪ Gonna rise again ♪ ♪ High on the ridge above the farm gone ♪ ♪ Gonna rise again ♪ ♪ I think of my people that have gone on gone ♪ ♪ Gonna rise again ♪ ♪ Like a tree that grows in the mountain ground ♪ ♪ The storms of life have cut 'em down ♪ ♪ But the new wood springs from the roots underground ♪ ♪ Gonna rise again ♪ ♪ Gonna rise again ♪ - The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ I'm feeling ♪