"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after." Credit: Ramkumar Radhakrishnan

"A beauty of art is simultaneity—multiple truths beingness allowed to exist. What would happen if the world could live with that—multiple truths existing?"

—Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Jones

The Management Aid Group (MAG) is one of NPQ's go-to sources of data near social justice movements. Magazine works with a number of the networks that are moving some of this nation's nigh hard bug. MAG has come up to believe there are v elements that are critical to advancing a thriving justice ecosystem. This is the third in a special five-part series, in which Mag and NPQ invite you to contribute to the development of what these elements mean in practice. Let's first something!

Have you lot ever had an run into with the world—ane that reaches correct into your brain, your heart, and your gut and radically alters the way you think, feel, and act? This is the terrain of multiple ways of knowing.

In that location is a strong bias in the U.S. ascendant culture, ane that shows upwardly in the nonprofit sector as well, to value only 1 way of knowing, the one grounded in data, analysis, logic, and theory—a rationalist's approach to truth. Only there are many different means to empathize and appoint with the world. These other ways of knowing are equally meaningful, and are critical to our efforts to empathize complexity and create the possibility for transformational social modify.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described justice as moving "toward the public manifestation of dear." To publically manifest love, nosotros must incorporate all our ways of knowing. Dr. King modeled this by bringing his own experience and faith, what he learned from the faith of others, his scholarship, and deep cultural traditions of music and song together with theory and activity to advance a vision of love and justice.

A Framework for Understanding

To help the states grapple with the multitude of practices and embrace the many "ways of knowing"—and to bring greater clarity to the touch of integrating them into our social justice work—nosotros began using extended epistemology, a theory adult by Peter Reason and John Heron. This theory categorizes four interdependent ways of knowing: experiential knowing, presentational knowing, propositional knowing, and applied knowing.

This theory has been useful in thinking most the wisdom that is critical to harness to consequence meaningful social change. But at that place are other elements of knowing, such every bit what we acquire from indigenous/bequeathed wisdom and the natural world that we, along with our partners, clients, and people we interviewed for this article, have found important to lift up in more than pronounced ways. As a result, we take developed on the framework to meliorate understand and human action in meaningful and interdependent ways in the world.

The framework, like extended epistemology, is rooted in iv interdependent ways of knowing:

  • Foundational Knowing: There at to the lowest degree three major foundations for how we make sense of the earth: experience, indigenous/ancestral wisdom, and spiritual/natural wisdom.
  • Artistic Knowing: To empathize our experiences and to help others empathise them, nosotros create representations through story, visual fine art, movement, music, etc.
  • Generalized Knowing: We look at patterns and experiment to create concepts. This is where academic theories and propositions live, as well as theories of change, logic models, and promising practices.
  • Applied Knowing: We act intentionally in the earth in ways that are informed by our previous actions, besides as our generalized knowing. Nosotros take our generalizations and turn them into practise.

Too oft, nosotros stay in generalized and applied knowing, rarely dipping into foundational knowing or artistic knowing in meaningful means. Past not intentionally drawing on these, our theories and action plans are often disconnected from our values and behavior, and the bedrock experiences of our lives. Moreover, privileging one way of knowing over others (e.thousand., generalized knowing, with its focus on measurable data) marginalizes and ignores other truths that people bring from other means of knowing. This marginalization oft lies at the core of conflicts, systemic barriers to modify, and inequity.

Foundational Knowing

Foundation knowing consists of at least iii fundamental ways of making sense of the world: experiential, ethnic/ancestral, and spiritual/natural.

Experiential Knowing

For Pamela Standing, managing director of the Minnesota Indian Business Alliance, experiential knowing is a wisdom enacted in our way of beingness with others—a way that looks securely inside some other person and takes the time to come across what emerges, rather than reading another person based on what is immediately presented.

"We are interested in the core of what people are virtually, rather than their resume," notes Standing. "Native people call experiential knowing 'craft wisdom.' It'south an ability that you carry. When I'm in a group with elderly people, I know that they may not have a formal education, just they have a PhD in life. You can't learn that in a book and tin can't learn it by going to college."

Only Continuing finds this way of knowing radically undervalued in contexts with less Native presence. Recently, a partner was looking to convene a group of people and hoped for more Native attendees. "I told her that it would be difficult to attract Native American people to an outcome if you lot have to accept a college degree to be role of information technology. Nosotros don't brand choices based on that."

Whenever possible, Standing tries to share different ways of knowing and being to encourage dissimilar approaches. She and people from the six Anishinaabe bands in Minnesota brought scientists together to assist them empathise the impact genetic modification of wild rice was having on a native food staple, one inextricably linked to their mode of life. "We took them out rice harvesting [also chosen knocking the rice or 'manoominikewin,' a do that Ojibwe people have been engaging in for centuries] so they could feel things differently. They were really moved."

From this experience, the scientists began to understand the impact of genetic modification on nutrition, nutrition, and traditional food gathering rituals, as well as their exercise of what Standing described as "going into tribal communities, just trampling all over the state and starting to take samples." Sharing their native worldview and Anishinaabe lifeways, notes Continuing, "deepened their respect." And in plow, it created a collaborative opportunity for addressing an ecology, food systems, and indigenous rights result to greater effect.

Ethnic, Ancestral Knowing

For Native peoples, such as the Ojibwe and Choctaw of the authors' heritages, indigenous or ancestral wisdom is a linguistic communication withal spoken; its guidance is still heard. But ancestral wisdom exists across all cultures and peoples. Prior to the rise of the scientific revolution, ancestral wisdom was a critical aspect of experiencing and understanding the world. Such common European American proverbs taught to u.s. by our elders, such as "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"—referenced in Hugh Rhodes' The Boke of Nurture or Schoole of Proficient Maners, circa 1530 and most often interpreted as a means of encouraging us to recognize the value of what nosotros have—have guided u.s. for centuries. But our current overreliance on knowings born exclusively of Western scientific methodologies has lessened the value of ancestral noesis and the affect it has in creating meaningful, community-based social modify.

While in Hawaii working with a grouping of over 50 people from 10 dissimilar indigenous communities in North America and Hawaii, the importance of this mode of knowing came to life before our optics. We were gathered together to create ways to amend the educational experiences among youth in these communities from preschool through loftier school. The evening before our first total day, we came together for a cookout at the embankment, playing games, cooking and pond together—building relationships, extending our 'ohana (in Hawaiian, "'ohana" can hateful family in a wide sense that includes blood relatives and adopted or intentional family).

The post-obit morning, nosotros did not jump immediately into current educational theories, test scores, or other sets of pupil or teacher data to learn about the educational challenges nosotros each faced in our communities. Instead, we were first taken every bit a group to a identify reserved for paying respect to ancestors. The Native Hawaiian host group led a prayer ceremony in front end of native wood sculptures in which they welcomed their ancestors and asked them for permission to bring the rest of the group onto sacred country. Most of the group had tears in our eyes as we listened to the prayer and songs, spoken in a linguistic communication few of us knew. Nosotros became vulnerable in forepart of each other, which enabled an instant knowing of the deep responsibility we carried to both the past and the hereafter and to the children for whom we were imagining a better experience of public education. This knowing was named by well-nigh everyone during the day'due south debrief and it provided an undeniable current in the menses of our work for the rest of that week and beyond. Nosotros did not accept to make up one's mind on centering this knowing as a priority to guide our work together; information technology was simply presenced by this ceremonial practice of honoring and engaging ancestors.

Another example of drawing on indigenous/bequeathed wisdom in social justice work comes from a client and partner in the field, Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy, which supports the creative, educational, and professional person development of youth and families of African descent in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and the surrounding communities. Ifetayo honors the ancestors and elders through formal structures (eastward.g., the Quango of Elders) and through practices and concepts drawn from African traditions. I of these is Mbongi, which translates equally "a place of learning" and is a community space where all people have the ability to raise and hash out questions, concerns, conflicts, and reflections. Mbongi is rooted in an ancestral knowing of how to resolve conflict and innovate. As described by Sandra Bowie, executive managing director of the Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy,

Mbongi is a applied example of how youth are able to exert their perspectives alongside adults by "calling" the community together to address trouble-solving and the community is obligated to answer. … Each person's vox is valued and taken into consideration in an open, honest, and accurate way."

Through Mbongi, Ifetayo is able to develop a comprehensive, systemic understanding of issues and can come up to agreement about desired actions. It has helped Ifetayo to build a strong community, develop leaders who can engage in courageous conversations, and enhance all aspects of its work from programming to operations.

Spiritual/Natural Knowing

Our admission to agreement is most often rooted in simile and metaphor, in the imaginative capacity of linguistic communication. Nosotros understand the movement of claret in our veins and arteries through descriptions of rivers and their tributaries. Nosotros describe complex social systems through their natural corollaries: copse and their interconnected root systems, wetlands and the delicate interdependence of their plant and animal species. We understand our own connection to the earth and its sentient tapestry through the increasingly evident impact of our subversive behaviors on every living thing around us: the land, heaven, waters, and glacial mountain peaks. And, through the impact on our environment, nosotros are beginning to understand the bear on on ourselves.

Spiritual beliefs and practices throughout the world are also rooted in an agreement that there is something larger than us. For those who resonate more with an agnostic or atheist belief system, justice itself becomes sacred. Pamela Standing says, "We always begin with a prayer. If we are working with communities, what we are doing is sacred."

To gear up herself for such sacred work, Standing invites spiritual help each day, asking "to have what I demand to live in a good way…to remember what is it that I am putting my hands to today." And, also, to do so with reverence and care. Without this, she says, we are missing the help that is available to united states. "In that location is something bigger than u.s.a. that we need to heed to" and whose support nosotros can describe on and from.

Artistic Knowing

"Verse is not a luxury. Information technology is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which nosotros predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible activeness." – Audre Lorde, from the essay "Poetry is Not a Luxury," showtime delivered in an address at Mount Holyoke College in 1978.

We create representations of our experiences through story, visual art, movement, music, etc. in order to understand them every bit well as to help others understand them. These different ways of knowing atomic number 82 not only to fuller cognition of self and others; they also lead to alternating perceptions, apprehensions of the truth, and ideas and deportment for addressing our shared challenges.

Artistic Knowing Leads to Different Results

Thousand Currents (formerly International Evolution Commutation, or IDEX) partners with funders and donors to provide flexible minor grants to effective, locally-based organizations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America led by women, youth, and indigenous leaders. In the summer of 2015, Thousand Currents began an artists-in-residence plan with Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, who offered theatrical jazz as a tool for improvisation, creativity, and innovation. They brought together the staff, guiding them through artistic processes.

Through her piece of work in organizations, Sharon Bridgforth sees people creating "experiences of beloved past being together…relinquishing some aspect of identity in gild to find it." They are, in fact, edifice community and in the process also accessing the "liberty to accept their own experience," she says, "allowing there to be many truths."

Bridgforth notes that "recognizing our humanity…is a necessary condition of leadership and working with whole people in this style creates the necessary humility in folks. We innovate people more than deeply to each other and then that they can work together differently. What's different [is that] when we are whole people doing this piece of work, we are fully present with everything we've got. We cannot exist nowadays and be hiding at the same fourth dimension. Hiding and presence are not simultaneous truths." And it is simply when we come up to social alter with our whole presence that we can heal and transform our globe.

Bringing creative and cultural-based strategies for team and organizational development led to unexpected only welcome outcomes. The staff believes that the forms and practices they engaged in together, which included artistic writing, music, and move, enabled them to learn a lot about vulnerability, courage, accompaniment, and joy. Staff shared,

Raising resource is not like shooting fish in a barrel. Building alliances and deepening relationships takes fourth dimension. At the same fourth dimension, they are all sources of joy. If we emphasize on the joy, nosotros volition move forrad and more than creatively with our work, shedding the martyrdom sometimes inherent in our nonprofits. Nosotros committed and recommitted to great joy in all nosotros do, as a tribute to our partners, our ancestors, and to our collective strength.

Thus, they run into an increase in their vulnerability and a deeper sensation of their ain humanity, which is critical to how they approach their work.

Rajiv Khanna, Manager of Philanthropic Partnerships at One thousand Currents, and the executive director of Thousand Currents, Rajasvini Bhansali, herself a longtime poet and former member of poet activist June Hashemite kingdom of jordan's Poesy for the People, agree that there has been a difference in how they do their piece of work. In add-on to the greater self-cognition and noesis of one other, the process has grown Thousand Currents' leadership and team capacity too. The system has begun embracing cultural (indigenous/ancestral) and artistic ways of knowing aslope—or fifty-fifty instead of— those rooted in U.S. ascendant culture. This shift has caused K Currents to dramatically modify its strategy, shift its theory of change, and re-envision how it goes nearly its work of advancing alter in the world.

Reclaiming and Sharing Our Multiple Ways of Knowing

Like Bhansali, both authors accept a long-continuing artistic practice and in fact met in a jazz poetry grade many years ago. Despite our longstanding artistic practice, we found ourselves creating separations betwixt our artistic pursuits and our leadership development piece of work in U.Southward.-based nonprofits. Somewhere along the style, nosotros had come to accept the dominant Western idea that art lived in 1 business firm and theories of change, logic models, and principles of leadership lived in another.

The limitations of this separation became pronounced as one of the authors began reclaiming her artistic knowing by bringing creative writing and media arts to youth as a leadership development methodology. This led to an exploration of what it means to bring what Brian Hall termed "ritual communication" into leadership evolution piece of work. Hall roughly defined ritual communication as skill with and employ of ritual, archetypal symbols and the arts equally a communication medium for making meaning and for raising critical consciousness of complex issues or the awareness of the transcendent. From his decades of work with individuals and organizations, he viewed this every bit an essential office of education, learning and the learning organization.

We have increasingly seen the presencing of ritual to facilitate significant-making and healing in a number of social justice spaces. While this is a long-standing exercise for indigenous communities and communities of color, information technology was mainly something shared only within ane'due south ain customs. Over the concluding few years, broad coalitions of social justice actors accept come together in lodge to address complex social justice issues, and in so doing have opened up space for sharing our multiple realities and experiential truths then that we might move forward together. To illustrate this shift, Nobility and Power At present (a Los Angeles-based criminal justice reform organization and network) has a Manager of Wellness & Wellness who leads their "edifice resilience" work. Another Los Angeles organization, the Youth Justice Coalition, engages in a combination of rituals—such as altar-building and mural creation—that honors young people of color lost to violence. These rituals are rooted in African and Indigenous American traditions and draw on the support of our ancestors in lodge to increase community cooperation and engender mutual abundance.

Generalized Knowing

More deeply presencing foundational and creative ways of knowing does not lessen the value of generalized and practical knowing. Generalized knowing is fatigued from patterns and repeat experiments. It includes concepts, theories, logic models, and promising practices.

For K Currents, drawing on generalized knowing ways lifting up the wisdom, insights, and experiences of their partners in the field and learning from them. As Bhansali observes, it'south the "social movements and grassroots organizations that really do the terrific work that's reflected in [our] theory of change." In creating a theory of change, Thousand Currents wanted to surface what they practise from the perspective of their grantee partners, fine-melody what they say they exercise and how they represent it, and then choose what they were committing to continue doing and measure out it. Both theory of change and evaluation are examples of generalized knowing and provide critical insights into strengthening efforts to effect transformative social change.

To surface what they were doing, M Currents did a series of interviews and surveys with grantee partners, as many research projects practice. What was different about this projection, though, was how it evolved to be in real relationship with the foundational and applied (and even artistic) knowing of their grantee partners, bringing multiple ways of knowing to carry in their ongoing theory of change process.

The theory of modify methodology was introduced to 1000 Currents by long-time funder and consultant Shiree Teng during the learning and evaluation journey. According to Teng, Thousand Currents' theory of change was developed equally a tool for learning—identifying patterns, conducting experiments, and making adjustments. It helps the organization have a coherent conversation well-nigh what and how it thinks about the earth in which information technology operates, the context information technology finds itself in, and the assumptions it holds. As Teng says, we don't ofttimes have the opportunity on a weekly or even a monthly ground to say to each other, "Hey, I'yard doing these things because I'chiliad bold these things." We don't often interruption and consider why we do what we choose to practice, or why we do some things over others.

When Thousand Currents got to what they thought was the cease of drafting their theory of alter and were gear up to share it with the globe, staff had some reservations. Bhansali reported with a express mirth that they were complaining that the theory was too linear and didn't reflect the adaptive and flexible manner that the organization actually works with partners. So, they paused and went back to the stories they heard, and through these stories were able to create an artistic accompaniment to the theory that reflected the team's more holistic approach.

When the founder of K Currents, Paul Strasburg, beginning saw the comprehensive theory of change, he remarked, "This is an experience-based model—a model that has grown out of your own continuing trial-and-error experiments over decades… It's not a hypothesis to be tested but really a culmination of experience…. [with] a college probability of success than other models that have dominated the field."

Applied Knowing

"Beingness in a learning community is different than being in a community of do. A community of do is about the learning from the doing. Not the learning almost doing."—Norma Wong

This idea of our organizations and networks existence communities of practice that unfold from and in mutual relationship with our foundational, artistic and generalized knowing is one that resonates with Thousand Currents as well. Bhansali reports,

[Our theory of modify] is effecting everything from how nosotros do workplans and reporting with our grantee partners, to our internal program and grantmaking processes, to our new capacity edifice and alliance building work that we take signed up to exist answerable for with measurable outcomes, to our own internal budgeting processes. This is where the alignment comes in from our feel through to our action.

Determination

"Knowing volition be more valid—richer, deeper, more true to life and more useful if…our knowing is grounded in our experience, expressed through our art, understood through theories which make sense to us, and expressed in worthwhile action in our lives."

— Peter Reason, "A Laypersons' guide to co-operative enquiry," University of Bath, 1998

With our clients and partners in the field, nosotros continue to engage in practices that bring forth our multiple ways of knowing. Through this, we are creating space for all of us to bring our full selves to the tables so that together we tin can continue to—in the words of Dr. Male monarch—bend the long arc of history toward justice. As our understanding and practices deepen, the possibility for justice seems within closer reach.

The authors would like to thank featured correspondent Rajiv Khanna. Khanna is the Manager of Philanthropic Partnerships at Thousand Currents (formerly IDEX), where he leads a team engaged in resource mobilization and building a philanthropic community that has forged solidarity-based learning partnerships with Global Southern grassroots groups. A recovering academic, Rajiv is professionally trained equally a historian of international relations, has taught in public universities, and serves on the Board of Management Assistance Group.

We hope yous're enjoying this series, "Five Elements of a Thriving Justice Ecosystem," which began with "Pursuing Deep Equity" and led to "Cultivating Leaderful Ecosystems." Look for the next function, "Influencing Circuitous Systems Change," next calendar week.