Speech at First Board Meeting

(This is the speech I gave at the first board meeting of F4DC in July of 2007. It lays out part of the vision for this organization. This works continues to be a challenge.  ELW)  

Today we are called upon to seize this moment.  We are here with gardeners, artists, technicians, philosophers, mathematicians, organizers, musicians, theologians, story tellers, nurturers, analysts, and all other forms of trouble makers.  We make trouble for the status quo, but beyond that — we have the capacity to analyze end replicate our understanding so that the trouble is made world wide.

This may be the most incredible board ever.

But with the infinite human potential, it doesn’t matter.  We are who we are.  And today is now.  In the early part of the last century, scholars, activists, intellectuals converged onto New York.  Some had been displaced by the NAZI regime in Germany.  Others had decided that the repressive atmosphere at Columbia University was more than they had to bear.  They were sociologists, economists, linguists, psychologists, political scientists and educators. They began an intellectual movement that has helped shape the latter 20th century and the 21st.

Thirty some years ago, another group of scholars, intellectuals and activists sat around in Cuernavaca, Mexico discussing issues of education.  Ivan Illich, John Holt, Everett Reimer, Paul Goodman, Paulo Freire and others had incredibly stimulating discussions that have shaped a worldwide movement whose repercussions we are just beginning to feel.  An anti-development paradigm has emerged that takes seriously the finite capacity of the earth to sustain the demands placed on it by its human population. Educational, social, political and ecological movements rooted in that thinking and the “culture of soils” has emerged and is playing an increasingly significant role in defining the direction of peoples all around the globe especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Today, we sit here in Greensboro, in the shadow of the Woolworth building which 47 years ago was witness to the birth of yet another movement that changed the world. We are made up of incredible people, with a wide range of talents and with a variety of experience and insight into life and social movements.  We have the capacity to be just as instrumental in sparking a movement to really make a difference.

Our greatest sin would be to underestimate our potential and not rise to the challenge of what we are faced with in the world.  Without succumbing to any level of arrogance, we need to understand the awesome responsibility that we hold in our hands. The world is broken and we can be a significant part of getting it fixed.

We have bitten off a particular piece of the problems in the world.  We have seized the question of democracy.  We seek to facilitate the democratization of social movements and communities.  We claim that through that democratization, those communities and movements will become more effective tools for their own emancipation.  We claim that a major problem has been the extent to which people are not allowed to own the process and have the means of solving their own problems.

We are not satisfied with charity.  While we understand the need and participate in sharing our abundance with those less fortunate, we know that this will ultimately not change the inequitable relationships that exist.

We are not satisfied with advocacy.  While we know that our voices can make a difference in speaking for the needs of people and communities at the bottom, we also understand that much more is done by creating opportunities for them to speak for themselves.

We believe in solidarity.  We unite our interests with the interests of the least of our sisters and brothers.  We speak as a part of the whole.  We are silent.  We listen and we learn from those who have never been accepted and appreciated as teachers.  We know that there is much to be learned and that ONLY through those lessons can the better world that is possible and necessary can be built.

We know that democracy is a key.  That when people are empowered to rule themselves, that when people understand their relationships with others and develop mutually respectful relationships with them, that when people take ownership of their own and their communities’ futures that great things can happen.

We are agents of social change and still vessels of community. We carry the culture even as we struggle to transform it into a healthier, more nurturing, more wholesome and more meaningful culture. But to do that we have to grow and change.  To do that we have to choose joy even as we understand that there are those whose lives are characterized by sadness, we have to trust others around us even as we understand that there are some who cannot be trusted to consistently do what is needed and we have to constantly try to learn from many people who have been told they have nothing to teach us even as we continue to share what we have learned with all who will listen.

Change is on the horizon. A better world is possible. We have all already been part of making changes but we have so much more to do.  We are a group dedicated to democracy and enlisting the community itself in its own transformation and we have a chance to model that dedication and develop means and methods that will be felt around the world.

That is our challenge.  That is our task.