This past year was challenging for many—a harsh reality, nourished by our news cycle and media feeds, which can sap energy and fuel a sense of hopelessness. Yet, scratch the surface and hope can be found in the most unlikely places. Because many of us live on a diet of despair, I wanted to offer stories of hope, encountered on a journey around the world, supported by a Westpac Social Change Fellowship. Come with me as I bounce from Brisbane to Santa Fe and then Milan, and from consideration of our inner world, to the external world of social movements. It will be a short trip, and you are sure to feel a spark of hope and a promise of possibility by the end of it.
Santa Fe: Zen and the Art of Social Change
The first stop in my journey was the Upaya Zen Centre, founded by Roshi Joan Halifax. It is a beautiful campus grounds and temple in the high mountains of New Mexico, providing support and training to contemplative change makers and medical practitioners. Roshi Joan is a renowned anthropologist, well known for her educatory work supporting clinicians in high-stress situations and in the practice of holistic care for dying people.
Upaya (which translates as ‘skilful means’) was running its bi-annual G.R.A.C.E. training, a mindfulness practice intended for those in care settings or social change work; however, it is applicable to anyone and any situation.
G.R.A.C.E. is a mnemonic (aid to memory) for a practice which has five discernible steps, which can be undertaken in a few short moments, they are:
Gathering attention (e.g., mindful focusing on breath or body)
Recalling of intention (i.e., what are my core moral, professional, and ethical commitments?)
Attunement to self and other (a sensing into the situation, beginning with the embodied I and then intuiting what is happening for others)
Consideration of what will serve (i.e., what do I do, or not do, in this situation?)
Engagement - as well as ending (action arising out of this process, including the appropriate completion of that action)
For those who don’t have a meditation practice, G.R.A.C.E. is a great introduction, and for those who do have a practice, it provides a framework for taking this from the quiet of the cushions into the world of everyday human interaction. I’d really encourage you to check it out; it is non-religious, grounded in science, and offered through a range of online and in-person formats. You can touch into it here: upaya.org/social-action/grace/
The G.R.A.C.E. teaching faculty was led by the inimitable Roshi Joan and included leaders in emergency medicine, oncology/palliative care, and medical ethics. Participants were primarily people from caring professions, with many holding positions where decisions of life and death for those in their care are made daily. The training offered the opportunity to pause and connect with one’s deeper aspirations and provided a practice supporting that.
The take-away for me was the criticality of embodiment. It was suggested that ethics and morality is best understood as an embodied process—not residing solely in the head, but permeating the whole person: head, heart, and hand. It is also something that we are trained in throughout our life, requiring regular reflection and recalibration so that we can maintain alignment with our deepest values. Finally, the best news of all is that embodiment of our ethics, in the form of compassion, is not a dry, mechanical, “rote” process, but one that is responsive to the unique particularities of a situation and is dynamic, creative—and, above all, deeply connected to life. Like a breath of fresh air, it is freeing for self and freeing to others.
As a brief aside, when you go to Upaya you can participate in the temple practice in the morning and evening for an hour or so, which being an old Zennie, I did. One morning, during the final meditation period, I felt very strange - as if something was wrong in my body. I’d never felt like this before and decided to sit through it, thinking it would pass. Well, it kind of did - as soon as I stood up at the sound of the bell, body and mind fell away. Not of the ecstatic kind, but literally! I lost consciousness briefly and fell to the floor – my first ever faint. People rushed over including some Japanese doctors who were attending and someone who is an E.R. physician and priest at the centre. They whispered a few quick questions, diagnosed me correctly (a faint due to the high altitude and too little water) and told me to rest and drink plenty of water. The closing liturgy continued with a minimum of fuss. An example of the kind of appropriate response you seek through the practice of G.R.A.C.E.
Local, Ethical Economies: Hope Hidden in Plain Sight
Now from the internal and interpersonal worlds to that of the economy.
Whilst staying at Upaya, I took the opportunity to connect with local economy expert Vicki Pozzebon. Vicki manages a consulting firm that works with not-for-profits and social enterprises and leads the local economy work for the city of Santa Fe. A conversation we had on social enterprise movements in Australia and the USA led to this powerful piece by her, “Social Enterprise Lessons from Down Under,” which was picked up for publishing by Not-for-Profit Quarterly (NFPQ).
Vicki took me to visit two world-class social enterprises in Santa Fe (Reunity Resources and Youth Works) doing critical grassroots change work. These were humble local entities doing profound work on urban food systems, walking alongside indigenous peoples, assisting unsheltered young people, and those who might struggle to find employment or gain an education. They were real, raw and earthy, doing the work that heals broken communities. I was half a world away, but it felt like some of the not-for-profits I know and value at home. It made me think that even if one solely considered small not-for-profits like these, they are, in fact, part of a gigantic worldwide movement and a deep force for good. This insight brought me hope.
The Canadian singer Neil Young has a great line in one of his songs that is appropriate to bring up here:
“Some people take pure bullshit and turn it into gold.”
Local grassroots organisations, like those I visited in Santa Fe, engage in very challenging social situations created by powerful historical and structural forces, but somehow manage—from the ingredients they have available to them—to craft a life worth living, and one in which we can find limitless potentiality for hope. If you are looking for hope in your community, then one of the best ways is to reach out to local not-for-profits and social enterprises where people are already organising around social and economic issues and ask: how can I support, or how can I get involved?
Milan and Brescia: The Hope of Broad-Based, Democratic Social Movements
The final stop for me was Northern Italy, to find out more about their social cooperative movement. Social cooperatives are a relatively new type of not-for-profit which are democratic and participant governed. Italy is well known for pioneering the social cooperative movement in the early 1990’s but it has its roots back in social change movements of the 60’s and if you go back even further, the response to fascist rule. This model has led to the flourishing of participant-governed social services and enterprises, which now number more than 17,000 and employ half a million people.
I began my trip with an espresso at one of Milan’s first social cooperatives, Olinda, which has transformed a gated psychiatric institution into an employment-generating social enterprise for people with psychiatric disabilities. The change—described to me by their president, a former psychiatrist within the institution—was astonishing. They have revitalised a public space in the former hospital grounds and opened thriving hospitality and arts-based businesses, that create employment for people with psychiatric disabilities. Importantly, and unlike many social enterprise models, participants are encouraged to be involved in the governance of the organisation. The workplace inclusion and integration of the space within the broader community felt seamless, it was deeply impressive.
Figure 4 Olinda Pizzeria by night (from Olinda Website)
If you were wondering about the name ‘Olinda’, it takes inspiration from a chapter in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Calvino is known for a type of fiction called ‘magical realism’. The transformation of the psychiatric hospital felt to me like magic in real life. Olinda demonstrated to me, above all else, that the social change we seek is perhaps only limited by our imaginations.
Well-Organised, Principled Movements: Grounds for Hope
All in all, I visited twenty social cooperatives in and around Milan. Some of my favourites were Cauto Cooperativa, Il Giardinone, Spazio Aperto, and L’Impronta Group, but all were amazing and doing deep work of inclusion. My overall impression is that they have taken what was initially a small grassroots social movement and embedded it within society.
Important lessons from this movement are that they have:
Retained a culture of local ownership successfully embodying principles of subsidiarity (decision making closest to those most affected by it) and democratic governance.
Established robust mechanisms for movement building (e.g., through development of support associations, consortia arrangements/partnerships, and movement-building ‘solidarity funds’).
Created a viable market for small community orgs and social enterprises (i.e., they have created lasting change through advocating for legislative support which includes expectations for all businesses in the economy to find ways to include people distanced from the labour market. In Italy it is legislated that 7% of staff of businesses over a certain size must be people from disadvantaged backgrounds, otherwise they receive significant fines. They can also partner with social cooperatives to meet their obligations).
In short, due to having a place carved out for them within the broader economy, the social cooperative model seemed to work economically and to be growing, it was also playing a valuable role in humanizing the broader economy. Italy has its own array of social and economic challenges, but this is gold in my view from a social policy perspective, and an example of what many systems interventions around the world are seeking to achieve.
Figure 5 The author and team from Il Girdinone Cooperativa Sociale, who not only employ people previously incarcerated and others distanced from the labour market but have partnered with the University of Milan to make a bio plastic product from industrial coffee waste!
Hope is a practice.
Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road
Only wake upon the sea.
Antonio Machado, Campos de Castilla
The famous adult educator Paulo Freire borrowed the phrase ‘the road is made by walking’ to describe his action-oriented philosophy of dialogue and consciousness raising, based in the hope of people working together for constructive change. Many teachers and actors in the world of social change likewise tell us that hope is not something we wish for in the future, but something we practice now because it is essential. Hope springs from our deepest values and opens us up to possible—and what once might have seemed impossible—futures. It is an orientation and activity, not a destination or fixed path. Examples of others practicing hope can support our own efforts, and that is the spirit in which these stories have been offered up.
Further Reading and Resources
If you are interested in reading further about putting hope into practice with others, we wrote a book last year for that very purpose. It is called The Community Builders Journal and is aimed at supporting citizens who want to build community in their life and locale, no matter how humble. It is published by ‘Practical Action’, a legacy organisation of Ernst Schumacher, the famous British economist and author of seminal work Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. The Community Builders Journal
If you are curious about Social Cooperatives, you can read this dialogue with Italian academic, Michele Bianchi who kindly took me on a tour of social cooperatives in Milan. It has been published by the national body for Cooperatives in Australia.
If you are interested in ethical decision making and practice within the caring professions this book Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering in Healthcare by Cynda H Rushton (PHD) is an excellent one. It is a deep dive and academic in nature. I am slowly working through it.
Standing at the Edge by Joan Halifax (PHD) is a must read for those wanting to understand how to maintain a healthy and balanced inner life, whilst engaging in challenging social change or care work. It’s a clear a practical framework, beautifully written and accessible.
This article has been written for our Sun Mountain Zen newsletter - a practice community in Brisbane and Kenilworth Australia. If you are interested at all in learning to meditate you are welcome to join us. If you are elsewhere in the world, find a practice community and tradition that suits you – you won’t be disappointed.
Thank you for sharing your experiences! I'm sorry to hear you had a "high altitude" experience here in Santa Fe but glad you had good care.