Crisis - A Time To Reimagine What's Possible
Rivera Consulting Inc., was born and established to be home for the transition team. The transition team is those of us that understand that we are simultaneously living in both today’s world as we know it, and one that is emerging. Central to this team is the steadfast commitment that this transition must leverage our diversity and be centered on creating just, sustainable communities.
The sustainability of the public commons is about the art of political decision making, and this spread of COVID-19 has made it clear the arc of decision making has broken down. People of color, the LGBTQ community, individuals experiencing homelessness—everyone who has been suppressed from the mainstream political narrative—have known these systems to be broken for a long time. If we proceed without the inclusion of all people in managing this crisis, it is a missed opportunity to create a multidisciplinary response to systematic failures that have caused this pandemic. It will also prolong our failure to address the litany of other systemic crises we have long been ignoring.
In order for our public commons to evolve into a sustainable community, we have to recognize and learn from the diversity of lived experience across our social hierarchy. The solutions to the crisis at hand must be centered on those whose labor—paid and unpaid—fueled the economic engine of the 20th century and whose livelihoods are being decimated in this current era. If those folks are not at the center of our shift, we know what will happen. Folks who have access to power and resources will be fine. Without each other and a radical shift into how we approach our world, we will sink.
How we decide to innovate while living through this pandemic will directly influence how we solve our current political crisis. This is a generational push that continues to be wrongly delineated by birth year. A generation does not just include the people born at the same time as you. It includes all of us sharing this lived human experience brought together by place, identity and values. Real democracy is making space for people not like us to answer the question of who we are and what we are to become. We need to face this reality head on.
No one knows what is to come next, but most of us know what we want our country to be. The sustainability of the public commons is about the art of political decision making. If we proceed without the radical inclusion of the full diversity of who we are, we cannot envision what we want to become. Let alone build it.
It is only through this inclusion that we can reimagine what is possible.
Join us at Rivera Consulting, Inc, as we double down our commitment to a bold and fierce re-imagination of the American social contract.