I have spent the majority of the last 20+ years of my career working in social or public services of some kind. In the early 2000s it was hard to reconcile what I’d been taught in school about our public systems with the reality of the lives of the people I met.
By my upbringing, the media and education, I was taught to believe that our public systems are doing the best they can, that people who use them simply aren’t trying hard enough. That they need to learn “consumer math” and budget better. That people “get out” all the time and if they were just more resilient and studied harder they too could leave all that behind. If kids’ outcomes are so closely tied to zip code, why raise your kids there?
And after 20 years, living in three states – and advocating for issues across the social determinants of health, and listening to literally thousands of stories, this is what I know.
__
Imagine being in a meeting – in a coalition where everyone is there with a shared purpose. The facilitator asks everyone to introduce themselves and share their “why.” I have struggled with this question for a long time. I used to say, because I want all kids to have access to the same opportunities I had and my kids will have. But that never felt quite right.
What I have come to know – what feels true now – my “why” is me – at 4, 6, 15, or 22 – when opportunities to have agency and power were outside my grasp. With all the opportunities I had growing up in this country, white, middle class and with educated parents – there were times I had zero power. The times when I learned first hand that access to opportunity is not a choice individuals make, but must be purposefully designed into public life.
In times of crisis powerful people often talk about the resilience of a community, that people with atrocious choices in where to get their food, where to sleep, when to have children, or how their kids will be educated, will rise up again. People who have always “made good choices” will never understand the lives of people with only bad options to choose from. Our societal structures rely on the resiliency of the oppressed – but individual resilience is not a substitute for empathy.
Resilience is not a substitute for empathy.
Empathy, or a shared understanding, requires relationship building in order to see our own experiences reflected in the hearts and stories of others. In order to understand that our fates are tied, we have to talk about power – who has it, who gives it away and how we can build a movement toward redistributing power to the people farthest from having access to good choices. Dr. john a. powell coined the term Targeted Universalism.
This is what we’re working towards: justice, in terms of wealth, opportunity and privilege in society – access to power when decisions are being made.
After years of thinking about why working in systems change still makes sense for me- sometimes it can feel daunting and endless – it comes down to power. Cultivating opportunities for people to see that they have agency – to understand they are the experts, and that they hold power to create a world where the choices everyone has are better than what we have today.
Further reading –
Practical guide on redistribution of power and what it means to truly be civically engaged.
You’re More Powerful Than You Think, by Eric Liu
Two books for folks with privilege to understand our role in dismantling systemic oppression and our shared liberation:
- The Sum of Us, by Heather McGhee (daughter of Dr. Gail Christoper, mother of THRT)
- Our Problem, Our Path, by Ali Michael and Eleonora Bartoli
Some history of our public systems:
The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein
White Space, Black Hood, by Sheryll Cashin
The Schoolhouse Gate, by Justin Driver
Written by Beth Berglin, Director of Policy & Strategy, Michigan Transformation Collective