Viewing
the
United States as a nation rife with social and political inequity,
Social Justice Leadership (SJL) seeks
“to help usher in the transformation [of America] to a just society
by catalyzing a new generation of individuals and organizations to
lead a renewed social justice movement.” This movement, SJL
elaborates, must be
rooted in a commitment to “social
change values” that endorse “direct action organizing on racial
and economic justice issues”—the
overriding objective being to “transform”
not only “the material conditions in which [people] live,” but
“ultimately the structure of society.”
To
train this “new
generation” of social-justice activists and community organizers,
SJL has developed a seven-month Transformative
Leadership Program designed to “offer leaders and organizations
a unique experience of personal transformation, organizational
improvement, and movement building.” The program begins with an
intensive four-day
session focusing on such topics as “reconciling values and
behavior,” “maintaining vision and balance during stress,”
developing “performance measures,” and “managing difficult staff people.”
Over the ensuing five months, the trainees attend a series of
retreats designed to reinforce and build upon what was taught during
the initial session; they
also receive structured
individual coaching to help advance “their personal
leadership development and that of their organization.” Eventually,
the program concludes with a three-day
session that explores possible opportunities for future collaborative work among the
participants.
SJL also offers a four-month fellowship called
“Activate!” which introduces the methods and goals of community
organizing to young people who wish to make a career of helping
the “disenfranchised”—particularly
“low-income communities and communities of color”—in
their “fight for social justice” and wholesale societal “change.”
Further, SJL helps each person who successfully completes the fellowship program to
obtain a full-time position with a community or labor organization.
According
to SJL, “a key component of transforming an organization into
one that actually lives its values is a personal transformation that
individuals at all levels of the organization must undergo.” This
transformation, says SJL, is contingent upon each individual striving to achieve high levels of “personal awareness” as well as
“honesty and fearlessness toward internal and external
organizational issues.” Toward those ends, SJL encourages
social-justice activists to practice meditation,
yoga, and reflective writing.
SJL
emphasizes
that in order to be successful, social-justice groups must
collaborate, in a spirit of “interdependence,” to “build
alignment and power across organizations.” In addition, SJL stresses how
vital it is for such organizations to achieve “significant,
regular, concrete victories” that “affect broader policy change
and resource allocation” to some degree. This theme is patterned on
the recommendations of the famed organizer Saul
Alinsky, who
advised organizers to judiciously initiate only those battles which
they stood a good chance of winning, so they could use such successes to
“build confidence and hope” in their movement as a whole.
