The diversity of organizational development that RE practitioners work on can make it hard to define different liberatory approaches and practices. As Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz at RoadMap Consulting says, “Some people are doing finance, some people are doing strategy, some people are doing development, some people are doing fundraising, but they’re all really looking at it from a liberatory lens.” Weiner-Mahfuz believes that there is now “a critical mass of us across the progressive and radical capacity building sector to ground what [liberatory practice] means.”

From engaging the RE practitioners in the REACH cohort, there emerges a common thread in this diversity of approaches. Cynthia Silva Parker at Interaction Institute for Social Change sums it up nicely: “All of this is with an eye towards how you help people tap into their own deepest held values and see the humanity of other people. So it isn’t just technically rewriting policies or redoing job descriptions or reworking an org structure or a communications system. It really is trying to get people to connect at a head level and at a heart level with one another, and with the depth of the work itself.”

Aja Couchois Duncan and Elissa Sloan Perry at Change Elemental have an analogy for liberatory practices. In their essay, “People Stitching Earth: Oppression, Healing, Liberation, and Navigating the Terrain In Between,” they write, “There are many ways to traverse the multi-faceted and challenging terrain created by the delusion of white supremacy, but overall the best possible paths are moving in the direction of intersectional racial equity that engages people and systems in practices of healing and liberation. We liken this process to a journey in the woods. There are a number of recognizable clearings or places that support visibility and understanding. And it is in these clearings that clarity, commitment, and learning is possible.” ¹

Duncan also likens inequity to “a disease that’s running through everything; it’s so poisonous” and describes their work at Change Elemental as helping “people be more authentic with each other to grapple with real live stuff in real time.” She adds, “That means everything they do is better.” To her, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts that focus on discrete technical pieces, like the job description and organizational charts, miss the point. Duncan says, “It’s like painting your nails when what you really need is a full body detox.”

A liberatory approach to organizational development, to these RE practitioners, needs to be holistic, tending to both the technical and transformational. Referencing Maurice Mitchell’s essay about resilient organizations, ²  Steve Lew at CompassPoint says, “For many organizations, even those with social justice values, the emphasis is to focus on hard skills. And that led to deprioritizing or not valuing political analysis. On the other hand, other groups that are steeped in political work may not have attended to the kind of development that young leaders needed around some of the technical skills or just the experience of leading. That’s where I feel like CompassPoint, even more so now, tries to bring those two together.”

There are different liberatory approaches and they are not mutually exclusive. All of the RE practitioners in the REACH cohort use a combination of approaches. This section discusses six approaches that connect the heart and the head in order to create more value alignment in people’s work and to foster an equitable culture, not only for individual organizations, but the broader movement ecosystem.

They include: 1) doing the inner work to walk the talk; 2) decolonizing the nonprofit industrial complex; 3) political education; 4) holistic healing, repair, and rehumanizing; 5) inclusive governance; and 6) field building and networked ecologies.