Presencing: Disrupting Table Talk Culture to Build Community and Find Home
Check out our President Wilnelia Rivera’s take on why The Jar is an opportunity to present, connect with others, to stretch yourself and an important convener to help us restitch the public commons.
“We are all trying to evolve together, we’re all evolving in the right direction. What is the theory of evolving?”
In the midst of the pandemic, we began a series of conversations with our friend Guy Ben-Aharon and his team at The Jar, Ire Roach and Board Chair Samantha Tan. Our mutual admiration for the work of our organizations and our mutual commitment to foster belonging, melded our desire to plant joy, grief, and radical candor as a catalytic disruption to white dominant table talk culture. I mean, how often do you get invited to community events, where you come across the same people or you feel like you are at a meeting with a few main characters!
Together we dreamed of the cross-pollination of gifts and wisdoms from the arts world and the local political ecosystem to invite others to practice and connect, and experiment with us. We dreamt of a process that embodied a creative, emergent, participatory process that we would invite our movement allies, political moderates, executive directors, and activists alike. We wanted to create an unlikely room where players who viewed themselves as miles apart, if at all, could begin to create a theory of evolving for Massachusetts. As Wilnelia said, “we can’t just connect at certain levels, and that is not what we’re trying to do when we’re trying to evolve. The outcome in this way can’t be written, it has to be lived.”
While some took to the invitation, for most it was unclear or too abstract what was being asked of them. Our initial vision of convening donors and activists did not materialize. But we were successful in learning that the Jar’s "Convener Model" invites you as a convener to become present to your own community and ecosystem. By having to invite people that we experience and do not experience culture and/or politics, the RC team had to practice vulnerability and generative listening. Every call, text, email!
Together, we have conceived of The Democracy Salons: a three part series where we invited thought leaders, change-makers, and everyday folks committed to co-foster and co-build a community that is built with each other to create the conditions for a multiracial democracy. We kicked off the series with a Finding Home seminar at Dudley Cafe in Nubian Square. We invited our conveners to come together to talk about what home means to them. Then, we asked our conveners to bring 3 friends to a Salon. Our salon hosts, Grace Moreno of the Massachusetts LGBTQ Chamber and Wilnelia, were able to build a space for deeper engagement with people we already knew, and the new folks they brought with them.
Both nights were filled with joy and vulnerability, and we are so grateful to everyone who was in community with us. We’re proud to share the imagery and heart of our first experiment with The Jar, and look forward to future partnerships with our interconnected mycelial. Stay tuned for next year’s invitation to break bread, find home, and belonging.
