Connecting in Community Step 2: LEAN INTO THOSE WHO'VE GOT YOUR BACK
For the end of the year we’re sharing 10 small, easy things you can do to start to understand yourself, your context, your community, and the conflicts in your setting. See Step 1 here.
Our 2nd step is to LEAN INTO THOSE WHO’VE GOT YOUR BACK.
Peacebuilding is all about relationships, so an important practice is to recognize and celebrate those who care for us, encourage us, and challenge us. Here are a couple questions to help figure out who those people are for you:
Who’s in your support system that you can turn to when things get hard?
Who isn’t but could be?
What other sources of support could you look to?
Peacebuilding is incredible, extremely important, and rewarding; but it can also be a challenge sometimes, so it’s helpful for any peacebuilder to think through their support system and know who’s got their back.
If you want to go beyond the above questions, we also like a practice developed by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective called “pod mapping.” They developed this exercise in the context of their work, which is dealing with physical abuse, but you can easily adapt it for yourself, and you can also create separate pod maps for your different contexts (like antiracism, church conflict, community building, etc.). They also provide a worksheet you can use. You can find it here.
Don’t forget to also join Connecting in Community Facebook group to continue the conversation and get more resources.
