Empowering And Listening To People on the Margins

This is the last installment in our series from this summer on “Creating Momentum for Change," in which we’re highlighting ways you can begin to create change as leaders in your organizations and communities. In June, we discussed taking action that aligns with your values. In July, we highlighted centering collective action in our efforts for social change. Now, in closing the series, we’re featuring the importance of empowering and listening to people on the margins in your organizations. Check out the newsletter version here.

Equity Includes Empowering Marginalized Leaders

A key part of change in our organizations and communities must include empowering and listening to people who are marginalized. Indeed, as Zuri C. Murphy, a principal at Social Insights Research, LLC, writes for NonProfit Quarterly, “Practicing equity starts when the ideas and strategies of marginalized people are elevated.”

Murphy describes how elevating marginalized people allows them the full use of their oppositional consciousness—“a way of thinking and being in which the individual [is able] to read the current situation of power and consciously [create] strategies to navigate and reconfigure it while resisting its dysfunctions.” In other words, this ability allows people on the margins to resist the dynamics of power, oppression, and injustice in their environment and to create new possibilities for being and doing for themselves and others. In this way, all stand to benefit when marginalized people are given the power and space to use their knowledge, vision, ideas, and strategies to advance social change.

Organizations can empower marginalized people in their institutions by acknowledging the conditions in which marginalized people lead; by cultivating space for unjust dynamics and new possibilities to be identified across all levels of the organization; and by providing opportunities to promote the knowledge production of marginalized leaders. In addition, anyone can begin a practice of listening to people and leaders on the margins and allowing their stories and perspectives to shape one’s own.

Start Here

One practical way to begin empowering people on the margins is to recognize the array of skills and assets they bring to the organization. Darren Isom, Cora Daniels, and Britt Savage found that these assets arise not only from their formal qualifications, but from the particular ways their identity, culture, and experiences shape them as people and leaders. As they share in “Lessons on Leadership and Community from 25 Leaders of Color,” leaders of color (and more broadly, people on the margins) bring several key assets to their organization:

• Motivation. Leaders who come from the communities experiencing a particular issue often have deep personal ties to an organization’s purpose. Because of their proximity, they are highly motivated in their pursuit of collective success and the accountability it requires.

• Relationships. Leaders on the margins learn to cultivate relationships across lines of difference, resulting in diverse networks they can draw on to learn, grow, access opportunities, and navigate challenges. They also often recognize, value, and tap into what each person brings to the table, which stimulates transformative thinking.

• Leading Self. Self-awareness and being comfortable with discomfort are often strengths that leaders on the margins bring to the table. These attributes allow them to understand themselves, adapt to new experiences, overcome obstacles, and see alternative possibilities.

• Leading Others. Because of their identities and experiences, leaders on the margins have learned to cultivate a high degree of empathy, to deploy observation and listening skills in their work styles, and to model collaborative leadership in the positions of power they occupy.

• Leading with Vision. Lastly, leaders on the margins often operate with an asset-based lens, as opposed to the deficit-based lens they may have experienced, as well as with a radical imagination for new possibilities even in the midst of the limiting systems they are required to navigate.

We believe that recognizing these assets in your leaders, no matter their background, will help create a truly inclusive culture in your organization. Lastly, as we close out this series, we hope that you are not only inspired and informed, but equipped in your efforts to create lasting change as leaders in your organizations and communities.