“We are living through a syndemic—a time of multiple crises causing seismic economic, political, environmental, technological, and social shifts, which are long from being settled. Black, Indigenous, people of color, and Global South communities are at the frontlines and faultlines of these changes that are reshaping the world. Institutions, hierarchies, and forms of leadership rooted in Western colonial ideology are failing, being renegotiated, and getting deconstructed—even in the face of intense backlash.
In this liminal time, BIPOC leaders are being asked to simultaneously dismantle the past, survive in the present, and create an alternative future. Our leadership, needed now more than ever, is being tested like never before.” Neha Mahajan and Felicia Griffin, “The Call of Leadership Now: BIPOC Leaders in a Syndemic Era”
In their beautiful piece, “The Call of Leadership Now: BIPOC Leaders in a Syndemic Era,” authors and long-time organizers Neha Mahajan and Felicia Griffin name the current context that so many of us who are working to build a thriving world find ourselves in. As someone who has occupied many leadership development roles myself—organizer, network weaver, funder—understanding this context raises fundamental questions about how we should move during this time:
- What would it look like for our movements and our funding structures to honor the deep work that catalyzes swells of action?
- What more becomes possible when we recognize our individual roles while actively operating as an ecosystem?
- How might abundant resourcing support a creative, collective longview around movement work?
And most importantly…
- What’s the learning we need to do at this moment, and from whom?
Humans are my typical go-to for the last question—frontline workers, activists and organizers, elders and movement historians, philosophers, and economists. We began our Change Elemental Governance Team retreat at Earthseed (a BIPOC land collective in Durham, NC), with Zulayka Santiago introducing us to the trees that live on the land. After about ten minutes, Zulayka spotted the first thumb-sized hole in the ground, and she, our fellow Governance Team member Stephanie Gutierrez, and I all found ourselves squatting in a circle for a closer look.
“Cicadas,” Zulayka said matter of factly.
“Ahhhhh,” Stephanie and I breathed in unison.
Still squatting, we each named that we’d been hearing this was a big year for cicadas. Why? We weren’t sure. Something about the numbers? Or about how long it’s been? And these holes—did the cicadas go in? Or did they come out?
We all stared at each other and then started doing that thing that children and scientists do: We wondered aloud together and made up a theory based on what we saw and what little we knew. Once we were clear that we collectively actually knew very little, we stood up, dusted ourselves off, and volunteered to do some research and report back. Zulayka then continued joyfully introducing us to the trees.
I learned from my Googling that night that cicadas—particularly this year—have a great deal of wisdom to offer around the questions many of us in movement spaces are in. One of the beautiful hallmarks of being connected with Change Elemental is the consistent invitation to engage in multiple ways of knowing, including nature-based inquiry, which is a long-held practice of Indigenous peoples and which Zulayka suggested we use to inspire our retreat’s design. So, the following day, I invited the rest of our Governance Team to join Zulayka, Stephanie, and me, figuratively, around this hole in the ground and draw this wisdom out (see some of our sticky note musings throughout this post!).
Time Underground
It turns out that cicadas spend the majority of their lives underground, which was almost impossible for me to fathom. A life cycle of 17 years and only three months of it is above ground?! However, in one of the super-informative videos I watched, entomologist Dr. Jessica Ware insisted that this is true. Cicadas mate on trees and then drop their eggs into the soil at the tree’s base. The larvae that hatch burrow underground, the sap and roots of the soil beneath the tree become its food, and the other larvae, their community. They eat, burrow, and grow for the seven, 13, or 17 years it takes for their brood to reach maturity. Only then do they collectively emerge from underground.
These uneven yet rhythmic phases brought to mind both the Movement Cycle I learned from Movement Net Lab many years ago and reflections on why so many of us talk about various movements we have witnessed or been a part of as failures.
In cicada terms, our movements’ uprising, peak, and contraction phases are the loud, frenetic three months above ground. Often sparked by a trigger event like a police-involved shooting or the threat of war, it is the point at which we are collectively pushed to emerge from our homes, find our comrades in the streets and online, declare our values at the fullest volume, and call for a different future. But because the marches or occupations eventually dissolve and that future has yet to materialize, we view these periods of uprising like the millions of cicada shells clinging to trees and crunching underfoot—as things that were once alive and are now dead. For this reason, both cicadas and the movement cycle remind us how deeply we must value time underground.
Movement educator Mariame Kaba famously said, “Hope is a discipline.” In a recent article excerpted from her book, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, she expands on this notion, saying, “To practice active hope, we do not need to believe that everything will work out in the end. We need only decide who we are choosing to be and how we are choosing to function in relation to the outcome we desire, and abide by what those decisions demand of us.” The periods preceding and following an uprising are precious for composting the uprising’s cicada shells through reflection, sensemaking, and healing. They are critical spaces for transforming our despair, seeding joy, deepening analysis and relationships, and building toward our next opportunity to shift toward a world of love, dignity, and justice.
In the same article, Kaba calls up the need for actual “practice spaces” and other infrastructure to hold this hope discipline. These include political homes, gatherings, skilled and experienced healers and facilitators, social movement historians, and cultural workers. So, it felt like we were in a call and response with Kaba during our Governance Team retreat—Elissa Sloan Perry guided us through a demo of what people are experiencing in Change Elemental’s new Prefiguring Futures Lab. The Lab is a living experiment and gathers practitioners around the question, “How might we—who know some of these ways of prefiguring a world of love, dignity, and justice—come together and build relationships and practice so we’re adding up to more than the sum of our parts?” My heart swelled with gratitude as I considered how deeply our movements need this lab and so many other spaces, coaches, and organizations supporting our time underground—these places to be fed alongside our people and to grow the bones that will carry us back into the light.
So…
- How might the stories we tell about our movements and movement-building shift if we deeply honor our time underground?
- As movement actors, how might we organize our time and activities differently if we embraced time underground as a natural part of the cycle?
- What would it take for these underground spaces to be resourced as critical parts of our movement infrastructure?
A Convergence of Broods
In my cicada deep dive, I came across a piece about the ecological impact of cicada emergences, which shared that, “a sudden influx of a particular food source can rewire complex food chains and disrupt forest ecosystems.” As Zulayka, Stephanie, and I squatted over that hole in the ground at Earthseed, we all recalled hearing that this year was being referred to as a “cicada invasion.”
“Something about sheer numbers?” I offered fuzzily as we continued to form our group theory.
And we were right. There are over 15 distinct broods of cicadas in North America, and they mature at different rates. Typically, these broods emerge one at a time, depending on their life cycles. But 2024 is one of those rare years when brood math maths and multiple brood cycles line up—something that hasn’t happened in 221 years. According to studies, introducing billions of these insects into the food web will switch the feeding habits of birds in the short term, which will have cascading effects on the insects, plants, and animals in the rest of the ecosystem, fundamentally changing the web for years to come.
Those of us paying attention to various social movements for love, dignity, and justice recognize the natural wisdom of a periodic convergence of broods. This year, for example, Get Free launched a campaign to build a youth-led movement that will inextricably link reparations for past harms with their future as people living in the U.S. Get Free was built in the momentum style of organizing, where organizations take responsibility for a particular audience and agenda only after deep analysis of their broader movement ecosystem. The mass popular movement Get Free has launched will fundamentally change the reparations ecosystem for years, shifting how an entire generation understands, acts, and votes around reparations. But this will only happen because they took the time to develop as their brood AND because as they emerge, they are converging with broods that have been laying the groundwork for reparations for decades, like the National African American Reparations Commission, National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, and NDN Collective’s Landback initiative.
This year we are seeing a similar beautiful confluence of U.S. movements to stop the Palestinian genocide with the emergence of student occupations across the country converging with many longer-standing US-based Palestinian liberation groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), founded in the 90s, and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), founded in 2001, alongside Jewish Voice for Peaceand IfNotNow, who have been at the forefront of Jewish-led anti-Zionist movements for 30 and 10 years, respectively. In the short term, demonstrators’ sheer breadth and volume are building momentum after more than half a century of Israeli occupation. In the long term, we get to imagine an ongoing justice movement shaped by actors with a deeper, more embodied analysis of how, despite borders and governmental doctrine, our liberation is tied to one another.
So…
- What more becomes possible when our distinct yet interdependent broods converge?
- What will their ripple effects be?
- How might they fundamentally change our society and our movement ecosystem?
“Safety” in Numbers
Even during a year without converging multiple broods, the sheer number of cicadas during a single emergence is strategically essential. Martha Weiss, an insect ecologist at Georgetown University, said, “Because cicadas are hyperabundant, they are entirely undefended. They are not poisonous, they’re not spiny, they’re entirely palatable, they are slow flyers—they really are just sitting ducks. Their defense is coming out in the billions. Predators really just can’t possibly eat all of them.”
I became an executive director in the early 2010s when charismatic leaders and scalable models were all the rage. The nonprofit sector—primarily driven by funders—wanted a panacea for everything from addressing the education gap in low-income neighborhoods to micro-loans, and there were many smart, driven “social entrepreneurs” who were encouraged to claim that what had worked in one place could be replicated everywhere. I ran a network of tens of thousands of young nonprofit professionals organized into over 40 local chapters nationwide, providing relationship-building and skill-development opportunities for otherwise-isolated workers. There was a basic common structure across the chapters, but other than that, local leaders built their governing structure and programming around whatever resonated most with the young people working in the local sector. As an ED, I would proudly tout the leaderful, decentralized, organic culture as the special sauce of our organization, but funders found this frustrating. Rather than cultivating leadership, they wanted us to promise a model that would produce one specific type of leader over and over again.
After 25+ years as a movement actor, I can confidently say that, like cicadas, building a world rooted in love, dignity, and justice requires a superabundance of leaders and tactics. As I experienced during my time as an executive director, who is funded and how they are funded makes all the difference in cultivating that superabundance. These days, in addition to my Governance Team role with Change Elemental, I am part of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation staff, which uses a trust-based philanthropyapproach to fund in ways that support imagination and experimentation, particularly amongst BIPOC leaders. This includes reliable, multi-year general operating support so leaders can take a longer, more expansive view of their work, hone their strategies, and move creatively according to their best assessments with the freedom to fail and re-calibrate. It also includes support beyond-the-check—learning communities and executive director roundtables—which remind leaders that they are part of a brood, a larger, leader-full ecosystem, and that they can learn from or link to approaches their comrades are taking.
Still, as a foundation and field, we know there is more that we and other funders should do to cultivate the superabundance BIPOC leaders need to creatively and courageously move toward this vision amidst intersecting crises. Like other foundations, we are exploring how to meet the current moment with a higher spending rate while maintaining our long-term commitment to support the local leadership development field. We are also actively examining the sources of our foundation’s wealth and our current investment portfolio so we can take a reparative approach to our funding and align our investments with our values whenever possible. As often as possible, we share our journey with others in the field to honor those who walked the road before us and invite others to create the funding superabundance necessary for moving us toward a liberatory world.
So…
- How might foundations fund movements in ways that give leaders a sense of safety in numbers—an abundance of leaders, chances to fail forward, and resources to advance our vision?
- How might multi-year unrestricted funding support creative, collective long-term movement work?
Next Time…
It’s hard for me to imagine what the world might look like the next time these two broods converge 221 years from now. But I can project 13 or 17 years into the future when Zulayka, Stephanie, and I might gather again to squat (or perhaps pull up some chairs at that point) around a hole in the ground, anticipating the subsequent emergence. Earthseed Land Collective remains in this near-future world, but it is no longer rare. It is part of a vast network of land collectives that stretch across the continent, spanning our slowly disappearing borders. These lands are stewarded now by those same BIPOC leaders who moved us through the syndemic and who, like we did that weekend, are doing their best to practice loving self-governance and consider the land and non-human kin as part of the council. Our movements are still experiencing their peaks and valleys, their highs, and their space underground, but now, each of these moments is resourced and honored as a sacred step toward building a world where all of us can thrive. And this time, when the cicadas emerge, we are ready to thank them for their wisdom.
Trish Adobea Tchume is a first generation Ghanaian-American, a social and racial justice advocate, facilitator and trainer. She is proud to be the Director of Liberatory Leadership Practice and the Sterling Network Organizer for the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation. As the Director of Liberatory Leadership Practice, Trish works closely with the other organizations of the Liberatory Leadership Partnership to explore, define, and support approaches to leadership development and organizational capacity building that prefigure a world where all of us can thrive. In her role as Sterling Network Organizer, Trish directly supports the Sterling Network NYC to build the necessary culture and analysis to imagine and collectively work toward a more racially just and vibrant New York City.
featured image by Hanna Bozhko
originally published at Change Elemental
Network Weaver is dedicated to offering free content to all – in support of equity, justice and transformation for all.
We appreciate your support!