Community Connections
The Work That Reconnects Network nurtures a regenerative and thriving world for all beings by providing support, connection and inspiration to the global Work That Reconnects community. They invite you to experience the WTR through the Webinar and Conversation Café program or look for facilitator-hosted events in their online calendar.
The Anti-Oppression Resource Group
This group of facilitators (initially all from the U.S., now international) has been meeting since 2016 to explore undoing oppression in Work That Reconnects facilitation. Please see below for the story of how and why this group coalesced, and how it has evolved over time.
The Anti-Oppression Resource Group supports facilitators in their growth and learning (including both facilitation preparation and processing post-program). Members of the group have provided in-person facilitator gatherings and currently offer webinars online. In addition, they have developed a number of Anti-Oppression resources for the wider Work That Reconnects community and have worked with listening to harms that have occurred from systems of oppression replicating in Work That Reconnects spaces.
Projects Include:
- A well-attended webinar, White Supremacy in the Great Turning, in August of 2020.
- De-escalating Patterns of Harm in White Dominant Spaces: a guide for Work That Reconnects facilitators and participants. This document summarizes and expands upon patterns of harm that were named at a 2018 gathering convened by Aravinda Ananda and Mutima Imani to explore harms in WTR spaces. Specific examples of patterns of harm are paired with suggestions for what facilitators can do differently.
- A two-part, well-attended webinar An Exploration of De-escalating Patterns of Harm in White Dominant Spaces and Continued Exploration into De-escalating Patterns of Harm in White Dominant Spaces based on the De-escalating Patterns of Harm document in the fall of 2021, with follow-up practice groups for participants during 2022.
- A revised framing of “The Three Stories of Our Time” to better include an anti-oppression analysis. This material has been woven into an updated version.
- Revision of WTR practices that have problematic elements, and development of new practices.
- Crafting Toward Greater Solidarity and Diversity, a statement created for the Work That Reconnects website, documenting some of the efforts made to shift the Work That Reconnects with respect to oppression, and articulating the intentions behind those efforts.
- Creating the power, privilege and oppression questions and topics posed to bioregional facilitator gatherings in 2019.
- Some of the members of this group encouraged Joanna Macy to write a public letter in fall 2017 to white facilitators in the US encouraging them to take certain steps to address oppression in the Work That Reconnects.