Power of Purpose: A Call to Action for Transformative Change
A Path to Real Change
Real, transformative change demands that we challenge the structures that perpetuate inequality and share power with those who have been silenced and/or marginalized. By reimagining power dynamics and creating new opportunities through Education, Social Justice and Civic Responsibility, we can pave the way towards healthy communities.
We recognize that inequity and exclusionary practices are mutually reinforcing and must be tackled holistically.
Level three Structural Change (explicit):
- Policies: Government, institutional, and organizational rules, regulations, procedures and priorities that guide areas of focus.
- Practices: Espoused activities aimed at social and environmental progress, including standards, guidelines, or informal habits within entities, such as participatory budgeting or community-led data collection.
- Resource Flows: How resources and assets are leveraged, allocated and distributed.
Level two Engaged Change (semi-explicit):
- Relationships & Connections: Quality of connections and communication among community members, especially those with differing histories and viewpoints.
- Power Dynamics: The distribution of decision-making power, authority, and influence among individuals and organizations.
Level one Transformative Change (implicit):
- Mental Models: Habits of thought—deeply held beliefs, assumptions, and taken-for-granted ways of operating which influence how we think, how we make decisions, interact-behaviors, and how we express ourselves.
To disrupt and uproot unhealthy mental models, we must focus on Education, Social Justice, and Civic Responsibility, taking time to deeply understand issues confronting our world and working to solve those challenges. This requires the inclusion of communities, advocates at all levels, and subject matter experts with lived and learned experience, and sharing decision-making power. It also requires critical thinking, robust information sharing and collective action.
Community-based advocacy, combined with a broader systems perspective, require full immersion through peer-to-peer learning. This creates a learning movement structured around horizontal & vertical knowledge sharing within informal learning groups.
Focus on transformative systems change:
- Results-Based Success: Focus on processes and outcomes partnering with community members to improve impacts.
- Equity-Focused: Hold ourselves accountable by modeling practices that provide opportunities, improve outcomes, and increase voice and representation.
- Power\Dynamics: Understand and leverage power dynamics to positively influence and effect change.
- Collaborative Actions: Actively manage relationships across components to advance common goals.
- Inclusive Culture: Nurture an environment of interaction to build trust, inclusion, learning, celebration, and healing.
- Adaptive Leadership: Effectively manage change, complexity, tensions, and conflict at all levels.
Address the "Wicked Problems" with a Transformative Change approach. Humanities problems are wicked, meaning they are complex issues with interconnected causes, no clear solutions, and often conflicting with stakeholder values. To address these challenges, we can apply the power of purpose for transformative change based on components/elements of the problem:
- Narrow focus points: Clearly articulate connected problems, identify interrelatedness and interconnected parts, and analyze root causes.
- Collaborate: Engage diverse stakeholders, foster shared understanding, and establish shared goals through collective actions.
- Accountability: Design multi-faceted interventions, leverage one another's strengths, and adapt based on experimentation, feedback and learning.
- Learn and Adapt: Monitor and evaluate impacts, analyze results, identify emergent shifts, capture learnings and promote knowledge sharing.
- Share Power: Analyze power structures, share power with marginalized groups, tap into their voices, their leadership and advocate for substantive practices, process, policy, and behavior change.
Applying this framework involves providing mentorship, support services, training, share-outs, in culturally responsive pedagogy, implementing equitable formulas, and advocating for policies that address root causes.
Key Considerations:
- Transformative change requires long-term commitment, sustained effort, continuous learning, and investment.
- Wicked problems are complex and unpredictable, demanding flexibility, innovativeness, emergent and adaptive responses.
- Centering equity and justice is crucial for addressing root causes and ensuring that we develop solutions that benefit communities.
**This work is adapted from:
Shabazz Rah-Khem, Ph.D. 2018 Dissertation, Case Western Reserve University
THE WATER OF SYSTEMS CHANGE, BY JOHN KANIA, MARK KRAMER, PETER SENGE June 2018
