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Growing up I was involved in a lot of different activities that involved practicing. Whether it was sports, school subjects, skills for Boy Scouts, or learning lines for school plays, there was always something to practice. I was always told that practice makes perfect or that practice gets you as close to perfect as possible, so that was how I went about getting better at just about everything. I practiced, made corrections, and repeated, all to get better at whatever activity was going on at that time.
Reciprocity: “The practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit, especially privileges granted by one country or organization to another.”
Last week, I was glad to have the opportunity to speak at SHARE Charlotte’s Fifth Annual Nonprofit Summit, presenting a talk on building and leading social movements. It was a culminating topic following nearly two years of exploration of how generational change is disrupting so much about how our society functions.
It wasn’t until last year, during a staff meeting outside in our parking lot as we tried to find some sense of togetherness during the COVID pandemic, did I realize the toll that years of racial equity work was taking on my mental and physical health. I was exhausted. But it wasn’t the exhaustion induced by the pandemic alone. For the first time, I was physically feeling the toll of racial equity on my health, and it frightened me. I heard a speaker at a philanthropy conference describe that for BILPOC (Black, Indigenous, Latinx and People of Color) staff working in the space of racial equity, the work can be experienced as the equivalent of walking around with a low-grade fever.
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