This interview took place over Zoom on September 8, 2020 as part of the Online Exhibit for Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, and Community. Visit the online exhibit throughout Power Shift for more interviews, resources, and inspiration.
Cherie Hill:
Welcome to The Bridge Project’s Power Shift Interview Series. My name is Cherie Hill and I’m here with Hope Mohr. We’re co-curators, along with Karla Quintero, of The Bridge Project.
Today we have the pleasure of interviewing Aisha Shillingford, Deputy Director of Innovation Strategy at Movement Strategy Center (“MSC”). Aisha is an artist, designer, daydreamer, facilitator, and strategist.
At MSC, Aisha leads collaborative design thinking processes within the Transitions ecosystem to design systems, environments, and programs that unleash imagination and generate transformative leaps across networks, programs, and teams. Aisha was born in Trinidad & Tobago and was raised in the hills of Port of Spain by her artist/actress/director mother and her economist/professor/consultant father. She considers herself Caribbean and Afro-Diasporic and believes in the power of small places to effect enormous change. She is an artist, organizer, cultural strategist, searcher, and dreamer. Aisha is a commitment to spiritual, cultural and social transformation:
From isolation to interdependence
From exploitation to love
From disconnection to community
From extraction to regeneration
From competition to collaboration
From exclusive ownership to the commons
Aisha has earned a BA in Environmental Analysis and Policy, a Masters of Social Work with a focus on Community Organizing, and a Masters of Business Administration with a focus on Innovation, Creativity and Social Entrepreneurship. Prior to joining MSC, Aisha was a Senior Associate at the Interaction Institute for Social Change facilitating collaborative capacity building and racial equity change processes with social change organizations and networks. Before that, she was the Director of Racial & Economic Justice at the New Economy Coalition and the Program Director/Lead Organizer at Close To Home Domestic Violence Prevention Initiative and the Muslim American Society Boston Chapter.
Aisha has also worked as an independent organizational development and business strategy consultant with cooperative enterprises. As a member of the Intelligent Mischief collective she works to unleash black imagination to shape the future by using art, narrative and design thinking processes and developing artistic & pop culture interventions.
Welcome, Aisha. We're really excited to have you join us today.
Aisha Shillingford:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Cherie Hill:
Our first question is, what is your current job with Movement Strategy Center (MSC)? Can you talk about the kind of work that MSC does and how you fit into that broader vision?
Aisha Shillingford:
My current role is Deputy Director of Innovation Strategy. I lead the cultivation of MSC’s core network, the Transitions Community and support MSC’s other program leads in areas of Climate Innovation and Cultural strategy. In the past six years, MSC aligned its purpose around accelerating the transition from a world of violence, domination, and extraction to regeneration and interdependence. My primary role is to cultivate a broad community of people who hold a similar purpose and mission. To bring folks together to learn how to navigate that transition and to learn from each other. Now my work is primarily focused on cultivating a network of beloved communities—groups of people in places dedicated to ushering in this transition.
Hope Mohr:
Aisha, you talk about accelerating transition and change. How do you do that as an organizer?
Aisha Shillingford:
Central to accelerating change is building a long vision. One thing that I've noticed organizing over the past 22 years is that what we are moving towards is almost the most important element in how fast we move. Our vision can be within a four-year election cycle or a two-year election cycle. It can be within a one-year legislative budget or legislative cycle. It can be within a six-month listening campaign. So much of accelerating transition is about having a transformative vision. Part of that means lengthening the range of vision beyond what we are used to. When we started working with Norma Wong,, who is a mentor to us, we started asking: How do we want our communities and societies to shift in 100 years? How do we work backwards from that and ask ourselves, given where we want to be in 100 years, what do we have to do in 50 years, in 25, in 12, and in three?
What we found is that using a long range approach, in combination with embodiment, changes how we are aligned with our visions. What we think might take 12 or 20 years to accomplish can actually happen in three years. When we focus on what we want to see 100 years down the road, we start to make it real. Sometimes this happens in a subconscious sense by practicing it in our daily lives.
Another thing is remembering that transformation isn't linear, especially under unknown circumstances. It involves leaps. We can't always predict exactly where the leaps will come. So we have to be in a stance of alignment with our vision. We have to be ready to shift and change depending on what comes across our path. We have to be able to make decisions based on where we're going. All of those shifts can accelerate if we're leaning into the moment, able to shift our direction as needed, while remaining in alignment with our long arc vision.
Cherie Hill:
That's so inspiring. Can you talk more about how embodiment plays a role in your work and in your practice?
Aisha Shillingford:
There are communities I work with that do Tai Chi together. Some groups do somatic practices together. Some groups dance together. Some groups sing together. It depends on their vision and what values that vision implies. At Movement Strategy Center, we do 10 steps of Tai Chi together because those 10 steps reflect different moments of strategy and different ways of being as organizers and movement builders.
Embodiment is an attempt to interrupt habits that we often have in social justice spaces of approaching strategy as something you sit around the table and think about. But really strategy is something that we embody with every cell of our body. There's an article by the cultural somatics coach Tada Hozumi where he says that social change is in the body. He talks about how, at the level of the soma, the change that we want is what actually shifts who we are and how we are. When we practice physically together, it shifts the way we approach strategy together.
As a network weaver, my role is cultivating relationships between people and supporting people to tell their stories. But I don't want to be the center of the network. I want to be someone who's pulling a thread from one part of the network to another part. It doesn't have to go through me. So I took an actual weaving class. I thought that if I could practice with my hands and my body enough to the point where I built a muscle memory around that act of weaving, when I go to think strategically about weaving, I can learn from what my body already knows how to do.
Cherie Hill:
That's fascinating. This approach seems so holistic. Dance tends to be one of the lower ranked arts or careers you can take. And that partly is because we live in a society that's body-phobic. People aren't comfortable being in their body. Our society tends to privilege mind over the body. We see this a lot starting with education, with children being forced to sit more than move. What has been your experience getting people to embrace this idea of the body as a vehicle for social change?
Aisha Shillingford:
It’s challenging for all of the reasons that you shared. Some people with trauma don't want to arrive in their bodies in public space. Some people deprioritize physical practice. They think we're doing this embodiment thing so we can get to the thinking. Some of the work we've done is bringing the strategic question that we have, and then asking, what does that question feel like in your body? For those of us who do Tai Chai, we might ask, which Tai Chi moves come to mind as you grapple with this strategic question?
Sometimes we start with breath, which can be the most accessible way for folks to come into bodily awareness. Recently I did a racial equity training where we said, if this conversation brings up fear or discomfort, pay attention to that feeling in your body. If you want to respond to that feeling through touching something, through pressing on certain points of your body, or through shaking your leg under the table, it’s ok.
The lessons are about how we can transition to being in balance between our minds and our bodies. To expect the answers to come from what our bodies are doing. Looking across cultures, particularly different indigenous cultures around the world, their relationship between embodiment and spirituality shows us that in order to hone intuition as a way of knowing, we have to be aware in our bodies. That only comes from embodied practice.
People may still be skeptical. If people don't like it, they'll tap out, and that's fair. Our goal is not to have everyone do it, but to be in alignment with people who are interested in approaching life through increased embodiment. We encourage people to find what works for them. Even if someone's playing soccer every day or going for a walk every day, that's important. Find the practice that works for you. And then really practice it. Do it every day.
Hope Mohr:
How has your work changed over the past 10 years? Have you shifted the way you approach working with communities? What lessons have you've learned?
Aisha Shillingford:
A lot of what has changed is my understanding of myself and my role in the midst of an organizing practice. When I first started organizing 20 something years ago, I was taught that your work is a sacrifice. I was working in pretty under-resourced organizations in communities that were my own. I bought into the idea that the work was a sacrifice I was making and that the more sacrifice I could make personally, the more impact I would have and the more of a good person I was. Over the last five to six years, I’ve started understanding that I cannot annihilate it myself. It's not about destroying myself in order to make someone else whole.
I'm still working on it. It’s a totally different paradigm for me to put myself first for the first two hours of the day. That can have a big impact. That's not taking away from communities that I'm supporting. Actually, if I nourish myself, I’m nourishing them through coming to the work as a more whole person. I think a lot of my organizing experiences were codependent. It was almost like, I'm going to annihilate myself and in exchange, you’ll accept me into community as a good person. That's shifted. Now I have to be a balanced person. I have to do my meditation and I have to do my art first thing. I have to nourish my body and pay attention to my needs. That will cultivate the abundance from which I have something to give to the work. That's been huge. That's still a work in progress. I still journal every day to make myself believe that. It's a totally new experience for me.
Cherie Hill:
Yes, too often we apply a scarcity mindset to ourselves. I think a lot of nonprofits have been modeled around this kind of mentality of “give everything you can, but don't take care of yourself.” We should be bringing abundance to ourselves and making sure that we're balanced so that we're better for the communities we’re serving. I think that's a transition a lot of us are going through individually and organizationally.
Aisha Shillingford:
It’s taken a long time for the foundations that support us to allow circles of self care. For so long, many foundations gave us no general operating support. And so you kind of couldn't take care of your staff, you had to put everything into programming. I feel like foundations are finally starting to realize that general operating support makes the work better in the long run.
Cherie Hill:
We're also wondering about transformative strategies. Can you tell us more about how these manifest within the work that MSC is doing?
Aisha Shillingford:
Sure. When we started the Transitions Labs, we started off with a framework called “transformative movement building.” That was based on a theory of change that we had developed in work we were doing to end violence against girls and women. We designed a framework that involves long arc vision, embodiment of that vision, connection between the people that are aligned around that vision, and then strategic navigation.
We then took these values and applied them to larger needs for transformation of power in society as a whole. We now have a body of work at MSC that's all about community-driven planning. It addresses governance and deep democracy. If communities can be involved at all levels of decision making around the matters that impact their lives, this can be inherently transformative, especially if there is a long range vision at the center.
This community-driven planning work gets implemented particularly through our climate work. Climate work in cities is very amenable to community-driven planning. We've also worked with restorative economics: exploring the relationships between solidarity, economies, land reparations, and cooperative economics.
Our most recent area of work has been transformative cultural strategy. Here we think about how our communities are involved in shaping narratives and cultural experiences. What narratives do we want to integrate into our cultural forms? How do we work in collaboration with people in various forms of media and local artists to create a culture of the future?
Hope Mohr:
Can you say more about examples or stories of how communities can gain agency or a voice in creating culture? What does that look like?
Aisha Shillingford:
One of the Movement Strategy Center fellows, Calvin Williams, has done a lot of work with the Oakland Cultural Council thinking about how do you invite communities to envision the future of their city. How do people find themselves in positions of relative power and therefore with the capacity to implement that vision and to engage community in that vision? How do you bring together a collective of cultural strategists to share that vision?
Calvin curated an exhibit at the Betti Ono Gallery that was based on Afro-futurism. He used the context of that show to invite people to engage in the idea of a long range future for the city from their perspective as community members. It was a reverberating process because he invited people to talk about Afro-futurism in an innocuous way, through prints and some paintings, but people came in and felt like it was a space reflecting them. And that's really interesting especially as downtown Oakland undergoes a wave of transformation that people feel disconnected from. They're not sure what the new buildings going up are. Like, can we access the We Work building? Is this for us or not? And with this exhibit, people would walk in off the street and engage in conversations around what do we want Oakland to be looking like because we didn't have a say in these new buildings? How do we express our desires? The next step would be to collectivize those desires and then translate them into policy.
Cherie Hill:
I'm attracted to long range visioning. I don't feel like there's much opportunity where we as a community can think about 100 years from now. Especially now during COVID, I feel like it's day by day. Can you share more about long range visioning and how you've seen it change people's work?
Aisha Shillingford:
One thing that I learned about long range vision is from indigenous communities, who started the idea that we have a sacred responsibility for both the places that we're in and also for seven generations of our descendants, whether blood descendants or whoever will be in this place.
There are three stories I want to tell. There’s a project in Idaho called “We choose all of us.” They want to have an Idaho where everyone feels welcome. This project is aspirational because it doesn’t reflect the current political reality of their state. But over time, it has attracted people who, even as they're grappling with their relationship with communities that they may not have grown up in or feel connected to, feel connected to the idea that we choose all of us.
We recently did an exercise where we invited people to imagine that in 100 years, human beings are no longer the dominant rulers so other beings have taken responsibility for governing the planet. We invited people to imagine what governance might look like if it had the attributes of other beings like stars, planets, water, or earth. This exercise invited folks to step out of deeply held assumptions about how we manage our resources, finances and relationships. The exercise created some powerful strategies.
In the transitions network, where we generated a 100 year strategy together. We asked questions like, what's water like in 100 years? How are children learning in 100 years? How are we treating the elderly in 100 years? Based on the responses, we generated a beautiful mural. We also found that a lot of folks in our network went off and started aligning their work with aspects of that vision that felt most prescient to them.
Recently we had a gathering at a former plantation in North Carolina. While we were there, some people felt uncomfortable, like there were things that were not resolved in the energy of the space. Being interdependent has to involve both acknowledging the past and also being brave about what we want the future to look like. We need to repair harm. But we're not going to try to reverse harms by flipping them, that is, by exercising harm on communities we feel may have caused harm to our communities in the past, or even present. We want to transition to black liberation and indigenous sovereignty in a peaceful way that is desirable and interdependent for all people. That's the vision.
Hope Mohr:
That's inspiring. Thank you for sharing those stories. We're talking with you in the context of a festival called Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, and Community. We're curious about whether improvisation comes into your practice and what that looks like? Sometimes I think of improvisation as choice-making within constraints. As an organizer, how do you balance strategy and improvisation?
Aisha Shillingford:
In our work, we're guided by a North star. And there are milestones or stopping points along the way. But if a storm happens, we're going to probably get thrown off course. Strategy is figuring out what to do in that moment. We know what skills we need to get there. We know that we need to travel with people who know how to navigate and with people that we can trust. But we may have to adapt our path as we go. We know where we're trying to go but everything else is adaptation, improvisation, and emergence. When you practice improvisation, your body gets used to not knowing and then trusting and then adapting.
Cherie Hill:
Is there anything else you want people to know about MSC or about your own work?
Aisha Shillingford:
I'm trying to do a collage practice as a way to allow things to flow. It’s a work in progress to let the art tell me what it wants to be. That’s my way of navigating unknowns right now. It’s a practice of every day waking up and starting to approach life like I knew it, and then saying, wait, I don't know if that thing is going to be there anymore. I've been doing collage as a speculative practice. It’s putting together a bunch of things that didn't start off together. Rearranging and adapting things so that they fit into a brand new context that also might seem impossible feels like a good exercise right now.
Hope Mohr:
Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your experience, it's really inspiring.
Cherie Hill:
Thank you so much, Aisha, for spending this time with us and sharing all the amazing thinking, embodiment, and planning that goes into your community organizing work. It’s been really great to get to know you more through your stories and your examples. We really appreciate having you.
Aisha Shillingford:
It’s my pleasure. Thanks so much for the opportunity to reflect together.
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If you want to engage in embodied long range visioning, please join us for The Keystone of the Arch: Embodied 100 Year Vision, a workshop with Tammy Johnson and Yalini Dream, part of Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, and Community.