Becoming Unstuck With Relational Activism

(Photo by iStock/siraanamwong)

As the media gives us a daily drip-feed of the deep and intractable splits in our politics and society, person-to-person relationships can seem too small to matter very much. We can feel isolated; we can feel stuck. But social change doesn’t just happen at the macro-level. Person-to-person compassion and the desire to relate can create movement and change where before there was none.

It can take many forms, like the girl who plastered signs to lampposts in her village with tear-off strips reading “love,” “hope,” “confidence,” and “happiness,” or like Kal Turnbull’s ChangeAView.com, a site designed to encourage healthy, thoughtful dialogue as an alternative to angry conversations on social media. The change can be large and strategic, as when the Camden Citizens Assembly on climate change organized conversations among randomly selected residents to identify practical climate solutions. It can be specific to a cause: In April 2015, for example, the Craftivist Collective presented embroidered handkerchiefs to the board of the large British company Marks and Spencer to convince them to pay their employees the UK living wage, which they subsequently did. It can be almost anything.

These forms of activism have in common a focus on connection and personal relationships, as well as a desire to avoid being paralyzed by recalcitrant, complex social problems.

We call using relationships to take action—and make action possible—“relational activism.”

Getting Unstuck 

Relational activism makes change happen through personal and informal relationships. It’s open to anyone who wants to achieve social change but may not choose to participate in the demonstrations and campaigns of more “traditional” forms of activism. Sara O'Shaughnessy and Emily Kennedy first introduced the term in 2010, after noticing that relationship building was a kind of activism operating quietly within and alongside more conventional campaigns. While their research focused specifically on environmental change, we were struck after 2016 by relational activism’s potential to re-engage people into social action, re-invigorating them through compassionate community and causes that matter. When politics is paralyzed by division, we believe, the “exhausted majority,” caught in the middle, often just needs somewhere to start. The aim of the relational activist is to compassionately change the bit of the world we can touch.

Here are three relational activist values that can be practiced in everyday relationships and workplaces, along with examples of how they can lead to social action.

1. Be Curious and Connect

Certainty can drive a wedge between people. We might presume, for example, that a young person carrying a weapon is dangerous and wants to hurt others. But consciously staying curious about others can help us resist settling into those comfortable, polarizing opinions; by questioning why we think what we think—“I wonder why that young person carries a weapon? Why did I jump to that conclusion?”—we can learn what we might not otherwise think to ask.

The Human Library is a good example of a space opened for curiosity. First developed in Denmark two decades ago, it recruits volunteers with a unique life story to tell to take on the role of "books," explaining aspects of their lives that might arouse prejudices, such as autism, bipolar disorder, homelessness, unemployment, or refugee status. After the visitor selects a “book,” that person tells their story and answers questions. By creating a safe space between people who might otherwise never talk to each other, and in which questions are actively encouraged, it becomes possible to discuss taboo subjects openly and without fear of condemnation. “We learn from their questions to us and we get our own knowledge tested,” one of the participants commented. “After a few hours together, we move a little closer together, as if our defenses are abandoned.” 

The Empathy Museum’s “A Mile in My Shoes” project is another good example. Participants put on someone else’s literal shoes while listening through a headset to a recording of the shoe owner telling their life story. The shoes might be uncomfortable, but that’s part of the point: It’s all the more important to listen to stories that aren’t our size.

2. Examine Everyday Interactions

There is power in the everyday. Relational activists consciously check in on the language we use, whether inflammatory or respectful, and whether the tone of our voice feels challenging or open; simply taking a breath before we respond angrily to a social media post allows us to reflect on why it provokes that reaction and on what other perspectives we might have. Examining everyday interactions helps us become conscious of how our own actions feel to other people, to stay open to more than one idea, and to hold ourselves to account for how we behave.

Interfaith Philadelphia's The Year of Civil Conversations Project, for example, set out to “plant relationship and conversation around the subjects we fight about intensely.” It trained hundreds of people to have civil conversations in their schools, congregations, workplaces, and communities, engaging more than 2,000 people as facilitators, participants, or attendees of public events. Using the “Better Conversations” guidebook, they encouraged readers to practice generous listening, humility, patience, hospitality, and “adventurous civility,” which as they put it, “can’t be a mere matter of politeness or niceness,” but must “honor the difficulty of what we face and the complexity of what it means to be human.” 

Though the topics of the conversations were often matters of large-scale public policy —race, religion, and other divisive issues—the effects of the conversation were an increased ability to talk about those issues respectfully without falling out. After attending the Civil Conversations training, people said they used the skills they learned most often informally with their friends and family. “Several sensitive issues came up,” said one participant. “Without the training, I might not have had those conversations.”

3. Storysharing

Relational activists share stories, something powerful and distinct from storytelling. While telling stories can lead to empathy, the act can also create barriers between the speaker and the listener. Storysharing, by contrast, is reciprocal. We believe that if you want to connect with someone, you have to be open to sharing a part of yourself as well. Making sense of each other by showing vulnerability helps us build compassion and break down barriers, rather than creating new ones.

Take, for example, the “Relationships Making the Difference” event we ran at Camden Council in April this year, which brought together a diverse group to share stories in facilitated conversation. The format was a “fishbowl”: a small, intimate circle of participants shared stories while being observed by an outer circle of the remaining attendees who were then invited to reflect on what they had heard and felt. As the outer and inner circles changed places, each participant moved from contributor to listener. More than 100 people from across the country turned up: citizens with lived experience, activists, academics, local residents, and senior local government officials (there was even an assistance dog named Kingston).

Human services can sometimes fall into “othering,” creating divisions and power inequalities between the helpers and the helped. But the shared sense of power and connection between strangers in the room was palpable, and we have already seen positive action come out of it. By hearing each other’s stories, parents and local authorities demonstrated a willingness to be vulnerable which led to new power dynamics and deeper trust. In 2018, our parent-activists led a major participatory research project into child protection practices, engaging other parents to talk about their experiences, which enabled them to participate and influence the system.

Their final report has already led to real change, something very different than a more common “professionals know best” culture: parents now lead monthly “learning exchange” workshops, sharing with practitioners their experiences of subjects such as domestic violence and of being in state care. The relationship between the independent chair of the child protection meetings and the family is being improved; the chair now keeps in contact with the family between meetings so the family has the opportunity to give feedback and build a trusting relationship so they can speak openly and honestly.

The Call to Relational Activists Everywhere

Research has shown that practicing everyday compassion is “both emotionally reinforcing and contagious”: not only is it a positive experience for the giver, but it’s likely to be paid forward by the receivers. What psychologists call “prosociality” is mirrored by the receiver and then modeled and passed on to other people in their own social circles. In his way, the circle widens; ordinary acts and person-to-person interactions resonate outward.

The world will always need traditional activists. But if kindness, emotions, and human relationships are “the blind spot in public policy”—as a three-year project by the Carnegie Trust emphasized—then relational activism fills in the blanks by starting change at the most basic, fundamental level. Compassionate, humane relationships help achieve positive change in the worlds we can touch. That change propels wider social change when the aggregate of individual actions is collectively added together and felt. Relational activism offers hope and action, a way of unsticking ourselves and a way for a large number of people to help regenerate the civil society we desperately need to tackle the biggest social issues of our time.

Read more stories by Becca Dove & Tim Fisher.