adrienne maree brown - Holding Change

There are a number of ways to work with this book. All of them begin with the Foreword and Opening.

1. You can continue reading the book in order, front to back.
2. Or, after the Opening, you can do the Assessments and let the results guide you to necessary parts of Facilitation and Mediation, and then come back to finish in the realm of Black Feminist Wisdom.
3. Or, after the Opening, you can read all the Black Feminist Wisdom and then move into the skill areas.
4. After the Opening, you can read all the Mediation sections first, then Facilitation, then Black Feminist Wisdoms, and then do assessments as you pivot to application of the lessons.
5. Or, you can read the book oracle style, opening to a page or part at random and letting it guide the facilitation or mediation of the day.

My body of work is mostly about attention. I want to bring my attention, movement attention, and the flow of our human attention to the places we as a species most need to learn and grow.

With How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office (2004), the focus was: how do we practice complex strategy that advances our organizing work while also harnessing our power to contend for electoral territory?

With Octavias Brood (2015), the focus was: how do we attend to, and liberate, imagination, recognizing that we must imagine what we want to create as a future society; imagine who we need to be in order to move and grow in life-affirming directions; and imagine solutions, even when we are told we have reached an impossible problem or condition?

With Emergent Strategy (2017), the focus was: how do we attend to being part of the living world? How do we learn from nature, from the constant force and beauty and power of this planet, and how do we partner with change?

With Pleasure Activism (2019), the focus was: how do we attend to, and reclaim, pleasure, satisfaction, and joy, in and as the work of justice and liberation?

With We Will Not Cancel Us (2020), the focus was: how do we attend to the ways we treat each other within movement, and how do we cultivate an abolitionist attention for humans who make mistakes?

Now, with this book, the focus is: how do we attend to our collectivity in ways that align with nature, with pleasure, with our best imagining of our future, that support the ways we contend for power, that support our visionary abolitionist movements? Which is to say, how do we attend to generating the ease necessary to help us move through the inevitable struggles of life and change? How do we practice the art of holding others without losing ourselves?

This book is about attending to coordination, to conflict, to being humans in authentic and functional relationship with each othernot as a constant ongoing state, but rather a magnificent, mysterious ever-evolving dynamic in which we must involve ourselves, shape ourselves and each other.

Thank you for bringing your attention to this work.