Becoming-Changemaker: Rosamonde Birch describes a leadership that draws on all the powers of community
One of our most active co-creators (join here) in A/UK is the artist, entrepreneur and educator Rosamonde Birch. Here she’s writing from an event which compelled her to explore a concept she calls “Becoming-Changemaker”.
This leaps off from the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari and their interest in “becoming”, or creative realities (see Notes at the end). But Roz uses “becoming”-thinking to describe a new kind of “leadership of the future”, fully open to co-creating missions with communities and localities.
Contact Rosamonde here.
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Rosamonde Birch: Becoming-Changemaker
On 24th November 2020, The Resurgence Trust and EcoResolution teamed up to host ‘Leadership: How can we be effective changemakers?’
The Zoom webinar (recording available here) included inspirational stories from indigenous activism, urban hip-hop gardening, and youth activists pioneering projects for climate justice.
What I noticed emerging through the presentations, Q&A and discussion was a powerful theme around becoming – by which I mean that all changes we affect* change us, and also change what is possible.
Originating from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari [see note at the end], becoming is an important lens for activists to use. It can help us explore how our relationships, presence, togetherness and influence can become generative, make new possibilities happen.
Changemaking and leadership imply a process of becoming. In the co-creative spaces where they best occur, new potentials and possibilities come to life. These compel ongoing emerging change for ourselves and our communities.
Artists explore, experiment and are compelled to materialise these investigations into the world. Community changemakers are compelled in the same way. They find imaginative and creative ways to collaborate for social justice, they heal collective trauma and they become custodians for places forgotten or neglected.
From our webinar, Layla June eloquently summarised that “truth, faith and love are your greatest weapons”. Where activism and self-care is occurring, love is justice for all beings. This is the love of being present with each other, listening with empathy and compassion. It’s also crucially about holding spaces of openness to include voices often absent, unheard or denied agency in their communities.
By sharing our authentic truth and being vulnerable we sustain openings for responding radically and courageously, and in particular to what our community and our ‘self’ need. When we are authentically present with community, expressing it through nature, place and people, we can be mindful of our shared stories across time. We can co-create meaning with others for ‘sacred’ moments where generative solutions emerge.
Thus, becoming-changemaker** means working with an ethic of inclusive voices, care and empathy. It means being ready to encounter plurality—finding ways to bring diversity into spaces where ideas are being explored and solutions co-designed.
Becoming-changemaker means moving towards vibrant groups with joyful, caring and loving social fields. If we do, not only do our projects and ideas access an amplified visibility and influence. But our own personal fields transform, through discovering ourselves more deeply.
As Layla stated, we begin “honouring ourselves. Honouring each other. Honouring our places”. KM Freedom Teacher added that being a community leader and changemaker is “a journey of self-discovery” with community. You find authentic collective solutions by testing, trying and maybe letting go of ideas, as you change and shift your way of thinking.
Becoming-changemaker is also an embodied practice. This isn’t just a shift of consciousness about ourselves, whilst we journey with others and with our locality. But it’s also an openness to interconnect systems and bridge ideas across projects and groups.
Salvador Gómez-Colón poetically calls this “mobilising empathy into action”. By identifying your purpose and holding it as a daily mantra, you can extend this into all the relationships and connections you encounter. Live as the human you want to be, for the community you imagine can exist.
Gathering with others is therefore paramount to becoming-changemaker. In gathering, new possibilities emerge. We find different ways to live and co-exist in the future landscapes we aspire to inhabit.
This relies on meeting our communities where they are and finding the local knowledge keepers who are already leaders--be they elders, children, youth or adults. This resounded through the words of Salvador and Noga Levy-Rapoport; youth voices need to be present around the table.
Layla also really highlighted the need to honour the leaders who carry local knowledges about ecology, holding the stories of place. By learning with and for the community, changemakers build relationships of mutual receptivity and iterative, step-by-step solutions. Salvador added “we can’t do it alone!” and Noga shared that being “intergenerational and collaborative is key!”
This again highlights the plural and generative characteristics of becoming. Our capacity to co-create an entirely new and unimagined solution or project requires sensitivity to our diverse community histories and hopes. We are all entangled with systems of knowledges, cultures, politics, creativity, morality, ethics. In every community , ‘leaders for tomorrow’ hold space for what is possible and imaginable.
Layla rendered imagination as ‘sacred’. Changemakers or leaders have to hold a trust in our visions and hopes; a trust that this passion is inside us for a reason. Without this sense of purpose, this care for self and community, Layla worried we may end up with an ‘atrophy of imagination’, a wasting away and neglect of creativity, ideas, possibilities and hope.
Lastly, I want to return to the theme of self-care that flowed through the dialogue and presentations, especially the call to find balance and joy that Salvador and Layla both raised.
Becoming-changemaker is not only about being open to personal transformation and self-discovery, but about being fully present with one’s own healing, needs and capacity for influencing change.
Through feedback and dialogue, we eventually must integrate new ideas and knowledges, consciously improving our practice and well-being. To explore personal inner transformation and wellbeing one must be conscious of ‘self’ and where to access support for renewal, energy and inspiration.
Being “as/with” nature was highlighted as an essential source of healing. To let go of anxieties and apprehensions is to find the place where a deeper reflective knowledge can form.
Finding one’s own ceremony and rituals for feeling grounded and present with activities, groups and tasks was also suggested. Also, finding a network of others who hold space with you reciprocally, joyfully and playfully.
At the close of the Q&A, KMT Freedom Teacher also poignantly reminded us that to affect change and really bring the new into being we have to be prepared to 'take time'. As leaders and changemakers we are all planting seeds we likely won’t see bloom in our lifetime.
We cannot predict nor experience the future we influence with others, nor can we know the whole story of the world as it changes. Yet it is vital that we do participate and share ideas, visions and hopes: even the smallest contribution could be significant.
It is through the ethical and personal commitment to participating in the story of our communities—trusting that our singular story thread will weave into the ongoingness of the tapestry—that we will enable emerging planetary justice.
Being here, turning up, sharing spaces, supporting and caring, opening ourselves to change and being fully present with our ethics and essence… These qualities are fundamental to becoming-changemaker.
NOTES
* Roz is using “affect” rather than “effect” here because she is referring throughout to the thinking of philosopher Gilles Deleuze. For him, affect means “an emphasis on bodily or embodied experience” (Wikipedia). Or take this entry from the Deleuze Dictionary: “Affect is the change, or variation, that occurs when bodies collide, or come into contact”. The intention is to emphasize how powerful and transforming it is to fully open up to and “be(come) with” other activists and communities.
** “Becoming-[something]”, in Deleuzian terms, points to how any entity in the world is not static and fixed, but full of diverse and unpredictable possibilities, because it’s much more connected to other phenomena than we realise. “Becoming-animal” is Deleuze’s signature example – for instance, the ways that both wasp and orchid adapt their forms to each other, creating a new field between them. “Becoming-changemaker” thus implies that the activist’s identity is always co-produced with communities – and thus can emerge and surface surprising new forms.