iNTRoDuCTioN

MAREN OSTLUND & KIARA MARYOTT

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Traditional conceptions of social impact, even within progressive circles, often place outsized emphasis on checking the boxes of impact outputs, versus engaging in the strategic and ethical value of human relationships and relational processes leading to them. Social impact and humanitarian work have a long history of homogenizing communities while overlooking their capabilities, intelligence, innovation, and culture. This dehumanization leads to “solutions’’ that are often highly colonial, unsustainable, or irrelevant. Effective, ethical and sustainable social impact must be cognizant of biases and privilege, guided by community-identified needs and lived experience, and respectful of the nuanced balance of data-driven objectivity and sociocultural relativity. However, this cannot be achieved without a humanization of the field that places people in reflective relationship with each other and themselves. We propose the following humanizing principles as a form of praxis to be taken on by practitioners of social impact and advocates of social justice:

■ Compassionate relationality ■ Maintaining humanity for others ■ Maintaining humanity for ourselves

We explore and explain each of these ideas further in the following sections. We stand by these practices as methods of interpersonal, community, and societal healing that we believe will not only serve the reader but also empower them to bring healing into spaces of hurt and aid in collective action toward just, community-centered social impact. As Reverend Jennifer Bailey stated, “Relationships move at the speed of trust, but social change moves at the speed of relationships.”

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Compassionate Relationality

A quick Google search of the term compassion defines it as “to suffer together,” and these linguistic roots point to the word’s intrinsically relational nature. Cassie Bingham, program director at the UVU Center for Social Impact, presents the idea of compassionate relationality as the intentional interconnecting of relationships in order to mutually witness human complexity, pain, and experiences that can push us towards a collective response to harmful systems. To truly be compassionate, and to receive compassion, we must be in deep - and often messy - relationship with one another. By definition, relationality is the relationship or connectedness between two or more individuals, groups, or entities. As a theoretical concept, however, its roots reside in Black feminist thought and Indigenous political autonomy.

The lived experience and relational practice behind Black feminism situates relationality as something to be experienced between kin who are not restricted by biological or genetic ties. For example, the practice of othermothering - maternal care for children and youth who are not a woman’s biological offspring - as a Black feminist and relational system goes back to enslavement when families were literally torn apart at auctions. Enslavement created organic systems born out of survival that recognized family and kinship as not necessarily biologically associated, but rather a relational effort to preserve one another. Additionally, Black feminism informed early coalition politics from the civil rights era on, and acknowledged the difficulty of building trust and relationships within difference and the courage needed to form solidarity sufficient to redesign systems. Angela Davis writes of these experiences as a risky solidarity among the intersections of our identities within society and suggests that “behind this concept of intersectionality is a rich history of struggle.”

Among Indigeous theory, relationality lies at the core of the political struggle against colonization, which coercively organizes the world through categories, biological division, and Eurocentric superiority that seek to separate and divide. Instead, Indigenous knowledge highlights the relational nature of a balanced humanity, while also making room for complexity. Potawatomi

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author Robin Wall Kimmerer asserts that contending against colonial narratives of division requires the ability to see oneself in relationship with not just other humans but also with land and animals. Kahnawà:ke Mohawk author Audra Simpson states a similar ethic in seeing a recovery of relationality as one of the strongest decolonial acts undertaken by Indigenous peoples. Tongan author Tevita Ka’ili states that colonization operates through a categorical view of humanity, seeking imbalance in a world where harmony and tension should exist as complements to one another within close-knit communities. In Latin America or Abya Yala, the late Lenca activist Berta Caceres recognized relationality as a political means to exist beyond gender, nationalist, and racial categories to unite various Indigenous communities into a single organization that could confront corporate exploitation and land-grabbing projects.

Additionally, interfaith philosophy inspires our conception of compassionate relationality. Valerie Kaur, a Sikh Muslim, activist, and author shares her ethic of shared connection and need for compassionate relationality when she states,“I see no stranger, I see no enemy. All of us belong to each other.” Her work echos a diverse array of cultural voices and identities, including Ubuntu, the African philosophy meaning “I am because you are” and the Mayan In La’Kech, “You are my other me.” Kaura conveys the profundity of the relational human experience in this quote:

“What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside furnaces of long-dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say – as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know.”

We intend compassionate relationality to be a specific value of social impact work and education that is inspired by Black feminist and Indigenous political ethics, as well as culturally diverse theology and philosophy, and that seeks to make fractured

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humanity whole. In our context, to engage in compassionate relationality is to listen, feel, and seek to understand; to favor generosity and nuance over purity and dogma; and to build trust as a strategy for collective action and advocacy. It is to truly see another person, group, or entity, and to respect and embrace our inherent interconnectedness with them, while seeking to further the depth of shared understanding and shared goals of safety, progress, and joy for all parties.

Maintaining Humanity for Others

Maintaining humanity for others means seeing and embracing human nature in those around us. It means seeing others as simultaneously capable and flawed. It means choosing to sit with the discomfort of engaging with people as their holistically complicated selves. We assert the need to assume that every person has great potential and positive contributions to offer, and to provide both accountability and grace for their ignorances, weaknesses, shortcomings, and biases. Without committing to such nuanced terms of engagement, social impact practitioners risk alienation of valuable changemakers and gridlocking of progress. Abolitionist and community organizer Charlene A. Carruthers writes the following in reference to social movement building and collective relationships: “Did we set ourselves up for failure by opening a space that espouses values no one can completely live up to? I can’t accept that.” The messiness of relationality requires us to reject toxic perfectionism culture - identified by Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones as a tenet of white supremacy - and lean into the reality that mistakes will be an inevitable part of journeys towards social impact.

Therefore, maintaining humanity for others means that when those around us misstep they should be called in with love and trusted to do better. Activist and professor, Loretta J. Ross expressed “When we ask people to give up hate, we have to be there for them when they do.” Ross is the proponent of “calling in” theory as an antithesis to “calling out,” and speaks often of “speaking up without tearing down.” We must make it clear that Ross’s theories are relational, and meant to be applied in the context of interpersonal relationships. Ross

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clarifies that there are systems, structures, and other manifestations of oppression and corruption that absolutely need to be “torn down.” However, within interpersonal relational contexts, Ross states, “calling out happens when we point out a mistake, not to address or rectify the damage, but instead to publicly shame the offender.” Alternatively, a call-in can happen publicly or privately, but instead of shaming someone who has made a mistake, we patiently express curiosity and ask questions to explore why someone has behaved the way they did. Call-ins can be agreed to between people who work together to consciously help each other expand their perspectives. They encourage us to recognize that growth never ends, to admit our mistakes, and to commit to doing better.

Calling in cannot minimize harm and trauma already inflicted by hurtful words or actions, but it can get to the root of why the injury occurred, and can help stop it from happening again. Ross adds her own disclaimers that calling in is not always the right action for the moment. “It’s not fair to insist that people hurt by cruel or careless language or actions be responsible for the personal growth of those who have injured them; calling in should not demand involuntary emotional labor.” Additionally, “Calling out may be the best response to those who refuse to accept responsibility for the harm they encourage or who pretend they are only innocently using their right to free speech.”

However, calling in rather than out when appropriate demonstrates a kind of connection, relationality, and humanizing lens that enables us to say to others, “it is my compassion and respect for you that inspires me to let you know about the ways your actions were hurtful, as I trust that you are a person who does not want to cause harm to others.” Admittedly, striking the balance of calling in while attempting to combat deeply harmful social problems is a complex endeavor. However, maintaining humanity for complicated and nuanced humans in order to build trust and work towards collective action requires complicated and nuanced practice.

Finally, maintaining humanity for others also means the obvious - avoiding the dehumanization of those around us. In the context of social impact work, this means that people in vulnerable populations do not have to prove their value or “rationale” in the face of oppression in order to

be heard or believed. It means that we intentionally avoid joining the narrative as “saviors,” that we center lived experience, and that we produce social impact communications in ways that do not infantilize, fetishize, or erase cultures, communities, or individuals. Chris Atim, a health economist from Ghana stated that step one is to “let local experts tell their own stories.” He added that global powers and media “sometimes perpetuate colonial models and... [turn] local experts into objects rather than subjects of their own development stories and narratives.” We cannot simultaneously maintain humanity for others and objectify them.

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Maintaining Humanity for Ourselves

Maintaining humanity for ourselves looks much like maintaining it for others. As individuals, we can accept two things at once: we are worthy of grace, love, and compassion, and we are worth being held accountable to uncomfortable truths that challenge our perspectives. No two journeys toward effective and ethical social impact work look the same. We can offer ourselves flexibility and generosity in growth and evolution, and avoid dehumanizing ourselves or inflicting the toxicity of unattainable standards of perfectionism that lead to unproductive shame spirals.

Humanity embodies complexity, and we must allow ourselves to show up however we can in the face of systems of oppression that demand uniformity and a singular narrative. Instead, we maintain our own humanity by expecting variance and fluidity. We allow our levels of engagement with social change action to flux and flow with our levels of energetic capacity. Learning to embrace this requires an (un)learning of the colonial processes

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that have shaped Western society and conceptions of productivity. Argentine scholar Walter Mignolo calls this epistemic disobedience, or the rejection of Western knowledge and ways of being to pursue alternatives. This does not happen passively. Rather we must intentionally allow ourselves rest and renewal between moments of energetic engagement in social impact work, and trust that when we are at rest others are engaged, and vice versa. The Black feminist writer Audre Lorde asserted, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Additionally, seeking an internal ethic and practicing the sound of your own thoughts is key to valorizing self-humanization. As Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert puts it, “There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with…I can choose how I’m going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life - whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.” Gilbert stresses agency and autonomy in a world of limiting social structures. We can translate this into our ability to change society despite the intense and embedded reality of colonial, exploitative, supremacist systems of oppression. We ultimately have the power to honor our minds and bodies as autonomous from the systems within which we exist, while also re-examining and ultimately redesigning said systems for the better.

The following essays make additional commentary on humanizing social impact through each of the Six Pathways of Social Impact, a framework developed through a cohort of universities led by Stanford University’s Haas Center for Public Service. The Pathways describe a holistic range of possible approaches for addressing social challenges. Each essay will offer a definition of one pathway, explore its relationship to humanizing social impact as defined by this publication, and provide an example of one intervention within the pathway that exemplifies aspects of humanizing practice.