Develop Community Leaders

This is a long journey. All movements for transformative change require many generations of leaders sharing their knowledge, wisdom, and power.

One of our most important jobs is to build the capacity of the generations that will come after us. This principle is about reproductive labor—the work required to nourish the people who are our future. How do we pass along what we learn? How do we make it easier for the people and communities who will follow in our footsteps?

Developing community leadership means creating the space to share stories, wisdom, and resources with others. It requires the humility not only to share but also to receive. It means asking what elders and youth might add to conversations that people in their 30s and 40s would otherwise dominate. It means asking why people may leave the community, and if we can do anything to support them to stay. If we open ourselves to the possibility that we also have something to learn, we invite the emergence of a deeper truth: regardless of our age, where we come from, or what we have done, we are all teachers, and we are all learners. When we approach leadership development as a two-way exchange, we allow everyone involved to become better versions of themselves.

We should also recognize that leadership development protects us from the system we are up against. Those in power have a long track record of attacking anything they perceive to be a threat to the status quo, including our leaders. That is why a movement full of many capable leaders is more resilient than one that depends only on a few key individuals. If any one person is too essential to a piece of work, it’s a threat to the work itself. We can all create ways for learning to happen across generations of leadership so that our organizations develop institutional memory and so our work can continue for the long haul. Capitalism is a global system. When we share knowledge and skills across borders, we protect each other and speed up the development of solidarity economies as a force that can withstand attacks.

Another way to think about leadership development is in cycles: the cycle of an individual human life, of the planet’s life, and of our movements’ lives. Each of these cycles depends on us to pass along knowledge and wisdom. We should not let individualism prevent us from understanding the ways in which our lives depend on each other and on those who came before us. We are never all alone and we are never starting from scratch.

We are all elders and ancestors in training.