Holding Change

Holding Change is part of the Emergent Strategy Series.

In our complex world, facilitation and mediation skills are as important for individuals as they are for organizations. How do we practice them in ways that align with nature, with pleasure, with our best imagining of our future? How do we attend to generating the ease necessary to help us move through the inevitable struggles of life? How do we practice the art of holding others without losing ourselves? Black feminists have answers to those questions that can serve anyone working to create changes in our world, changes great and small; individually, interpersonally, and within our organizations.

Holding Change is about attending to coordination, to conflict, to being humans in right relationship with each other, not as a constant ongoing state, but rather as a magnificent, mysterious, ever-evolving dynamic in which we must involve ourselves, shape ourselves and each other. The majority of the book is sourced from brown’s twenty-plus years of facilitation and mediation work with movement groups.

Includes contributions by Autumn Brown, Sage Crump, Malkia Devich-Cyril, Ejeris Dixon, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Prentis Hemphill, Micky ScottBey Jones, N’Tanya Lee, and Makani Themba

adrienne maree brown is the author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds; Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good; We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice; co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements; cohost of the podcasts How to Survive the End of the World and Octavia’s Parables; and founder of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute.