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What would our ancestors say? Applying ancestral wisdom and power-sharing principles to a community art project

October 18, 2024 @ 11:00 am - 12:15 pm

  • Leadership-2

About Session

Our workshop explores how we can apply community power and power sharing in spaces beyond the workplace. We’ve taken on the concepts of community power and power-sharing and applied it to an anthology writing project. The end, tangible goal is an anthology of ancestral wisdoms for and by the global majority from 30+ contributors from around the world.

We’d love to share how we are co-creating this project and centering power sharing. Traditional publishing creates a system of gatekeeping where a small group of people get to decide which voices are heard and which are not. We set out to question that system by asking ourselves: what do we need to do and change in our mindsets and behavior to allow for maximum inclusion? How do we do this every step of the way especially when it comes to decision making? We will invite participants to assess the areas of their lives where they are potentially gatekeeping and discuss this together.

In the second part of our workshop, we will invite participants to engage with the topic of ancestral wisdom itself and what it teaches us about power, power-sharing, and community. This will involve reflecting, exploring and questioning how our ancestors did or didn’t share power in community? We will also consider the future, where we will be ancestors. What will power-sharing look like in an imagined, future reality? What steps must we take now to actualize that? We will provide some creative writing prompts and non-verbal activities in this portion of the session.

Our goal is for people to walk away thinking about:

  • How they might apply power-sharing principles in settings beyond the workplace
  • Creating community and deepening connections using these principles
  • What we can learn from our ancestors about power sharing and community

Speakers

Sara Farooqi

Sara Farooqi

Facilitator & Principal, Interdependence Lab