#thisisimaginationatwork #33

Five years is a long time to be quiet in a space that was never supposed to be about silence.

This blog was always meant to be where we documented the work as it was happening — not after we had figured it out, not once we had something polished to show, but in the middle of it. Somewhere along the way, I let other people’s imagined judgement guide what I shared and what I kept to myself. I’m not doing that anymore.

So here we are. I come back to you from within the same organization and same role, but over the last 5 years, we have all changed. While many of the parts of this work may look the same, things have shifted. Not all the shifts are obvious, trackable, fully evident, but they are there nonetheless. This is some of the hardest parts of our work to put into words, because so much of it is inside the care we put into our work.

In 2021, DIA began centring equity explicitly in our work. This was not a pivot away from who we were — it was a clarification of what we had always believed but hadn’t fully named. I had assumed, until that point, that everyone working in social innovation was doing the same thing. That assumption shattered around that time, and the shattering changed something in how I understood the space we occupy and the work we were meant to do. 

Some of the most pivot moments of my career happened within 2021. As a practitioner within the social innovation space, I was witnessing the illusion and faith I had once held for this sector quickly dissolving. While this happened over a series of months, perhaps even years, it seemed to be happening overnight. It was a time of performative statements about equity and anti-oppression juxtaposed against an overwhelming amount of increasing acts of racism and hate. It was a contradiction that was overwhelming for me to endure. I was witnessing so many leaders in nonprofits, academia, government and philanthropic organizations saying out loud that there wasn’t anything else they could do. Each time it happened, I was speechless at the idea that people with so much power seemed to have given up even trying to make the world a more equitable place. So in turn, I felt it was necessary for us to take a further step towards equity rather than away from it.

What I know now, looking back, is that while I knew this shift was right, I didn’t give that story space here — in the very place designed to hold it. I was afraid of what it would mean to share a process that was still happening to me. I worried that saying something out loud would lock me into a position I might later need to leave or potentially be wrong about. I didn’t know how to explain what we were doing because I was still inside it.

I was also less than a year into leading DIA on my own. I am still vulnerable about what that means and whether I am truly living up to this role. There is an imaginary jury I carry with me — I don’t know who they are — but I am convinced they will eventually figure out that I don’t know what I am doing and put an end to all of this. The imaginary jury is always scarier than any real one. The stories I tell myself are usually far worse than anything in reality. That’s the curse of an active imagination, and it is something I am still learning to work with rather than against.

With all of that said: I am still here, still figuring out what part of the story I am in.

I was recently introduced to C.S. Holling and Lance Gunderson’s definition of resilience by Melanie Goodchild: the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances, adapt to change, and reorganize while retaining its fundamental structure, function, and identity.

What strikes me about this definition is that it isn’t about returning to what was. It’s about remaining recognizably yourself through the reorganization. That’s what the last five years have been for DIA — continuous adaptation within the existing structures and systems, while continuously honing what is truest about how we work. What are the processes, the conditions, the roles, the structures, the feedback loops that make us who we are?

These are the constant questions that remain at the centre of everything we practice. 

In the nonprofit sector, we share publicly because of specific expectations, some mandated by the government to maintain our tax status and others created by charitable culture within Canada. 

A proposal is a record of anticipated outcomes.
A set of financial statements makes money decisions transparent. 
An annual report is evidence that work happened and impact was made.
An evaluation report is accountability to previous commitments.
A developmental evaluation is a record of what emerged.
A social media post declaring a proud achievement.

Practice is something else entirely.

Practice is connective tissue. The stuff that exists in-between that holds together the work between separate projects, separate clients, separate funding agreements, separate staff. The glue that binds all of it. Practice is what makes each organization distinct. Practice is what keeps us anchored to our values. Practice is what asks us to clarify what we want. Practice is what requires us to be honest and humble. Practice is the messy stuff that no one is asking us to show evidence of and yet, we know this is where the real work happens.

Perhaps an example will help: I sometimes choose to start running again. I am not really a runner — I pick it up every now and again — but whenever I do, I’m struck by what running brings my attention to. I notice how fast (or slow) I’m going, how long I can last (not long), how long it’s been since the last time, how many people pass me, how my body wants to stop and also keep going. It is always a mixture of confusing and satisfying. If I only look at the hard data, I can easily be disappointed with my stats. But when I focus on the patterns, something else is revealed. I kept going even when no one else would know. Sometimes I run faster or longer than I expected. Sometimes I take a break. While I am running, my body feels like it is failing me. Afterwards, I reflect on how extraordinary it is that my body can run at all.

It is a pain that no one is forcing me to endure, it is one I am choosing.

Practice is a lot like that. The constant train of thought about what is happening, what am I noticing, what do I think this means, feedback on potential changes, questions about why am I still doing this — and then the flow of ideas that emerges during.

Practice is the conditioning of the muscles to do the work.

This always feels indulgent to share. And I want to name that tension directly, because I think it sits at the heart of what makes this kind of work hard to justify in the sector. We are all convinced we don’t have enough time or resources to spend on ourselves — that reflective practice is a luxury when are just trying to survive the polycrisises of our times. That is a false narrative, and it is one that capitalism and white supremacy, especially within the charitable sector, has been very effective at producing. The tension is real. I’m not dismissing it. But practice has become my answer to the false choice between inner work and outer impact. You cannot hold the contradictions this work requires without building the muscles to hold them.

We are an organization that has always been easier to show than to tell. You have to experience what we do and how we do it to truly understand it. I know I cannot fully capture what practice is like in a blog post. But I can tell you that I have been told I rarely ask someone to do something I haven’t done myself. When I ask our clients, our partners, our participants to engage in reflective practice, it is because I know what it can do — and I know the pain it requires.

My relationship with Mathura Mahendren has been a core anchor throughout the existence of DIA. She is my longest-standing partner in this work with me. Nearly eight years of three-month contracts, with periodic breaks and reconfigurations along the way. After her role with The Stories of Us ended, we didn’t know what, if anything, would bring us back together. Each time Mathura rejoined the organization, we needed to set out specific context for what that work would look like for that specific contract. Unlike when she was working on The Stories of Us, where we knew what the work required, the last 5 years have required a different kind of format. One of the key anchors of that work has become practice.

Mathura first introduced me to practice in 2023. And since then I have engaged with practice 4 times.

For four seasons of practice, practice has arrived in my inbox as prompts — invitations to dump my thinking, then find a way to organize it. Each season, Mathura designs for what I need at that particular time: sometimes audio, sometimes art-based, sometimes post-it notes, sometimes mind maps, sometimes quotes or examples of something I didn’t think was possible. The format of the activity is part of how she understands me as a person and figures out how to nudge me along the journey of expanding my own thinking. Over four seasons, I have been in practice around conflict and tension within governance, around developing our core values, around what it means to offer services aligned to our values without compromising them for funding demands, around dismantling white supremacy within our own work and within the systems we occupy.

At the end of each season, we close with something that wasn’t there before we started.

Over time, we have learned how to share this practice — with the Board, with partners, with participants. I have brought it into my client work. Soon I will bring it into a systems change course I am teaching. What we have learned together is that continuous nudging creates expansion: in our thinking, in our understanding of a problem, in our ability to hold more possibilities.

This time, we are ending how we have been doing practice. We don’t yet know what comes next. We are holding that uncertainty together, the way we have held everything else — with the knowledge of where we have been, and trust in what that history has made possible.

We don’t know what comes next. But we know where we have been.

That is enough to start from.