Hi Matt, I was wondering what first made you curious about learning facilitation and developing it as a craft?

When I was nineteen I had an internship with a peace education group where I had to develop a resource file on nonviolence education and training. In putting that together I was directed to check out Training for Change. That year I went to Philly and took a training with George Lakey on nonviolent action. It was an exciting training, introducing theory of nonviolence and experiential activities like going out and giving a speech on a street corner. After that I took a training on coalition-building and then got curious about taking the TSAT, the Training for Social Action Trainers" back then it was called the Training for Nonviolence Trainers. It set my course! I got so excited about the possibility of working with groups to make social change happen and being a facilitator of groups developing their own wisdom to change their communities and be more effective in social change initiatives.

I saw how George worked with groups and thought" that's what I want to do! Later I came and worked on staff with TfC for a couple years and really got an understanding of the craft of training and facilitation.

What are the parts of your present work that you find most engaging?

Largely what I do is supporting local community organizers to do their work more effectively, and in that work I use skills from TfC. I try to create a space for organizers to look at what they're doing, how it's working and how they can support each other to be more powerful. What gets me going is when I can facilitate a group of people who are engaged in a community initiative to share their experiences and to support each other to get the knowledge and resources they need to be more effective, while also connecting to the larger context of struggles in the present and past.

One thing that I'm doing right now is coordinating conference calls with people who are active" or want to be -- in organizing around military recruitment and generating positive (non-military) alternatives for young people. There was a woman who started calling in this spring, who was just getting started and mostly still thinking about it. She participated in two to three conference calls through the summer, and she just sent me an email to let me know that she has her plans together and is starting to more actively organize in her community. The conference calls provided what she needed to step out as an organizer in her community, and I love that!

I'm really excited about finding ways to mobilize people to get connected with what is happening in their communities. The way that is related to TFC's direct education approach is asking people to notice what is going on around them" to connect the dots that they have already experienced. It's not me selling a program, it's me asking them to look at the social issues that they are concerned about and supporting them to engage with those issues in a way that is grounded in their own experience and wisdom.

One example of this is a project that I'm involved with through the Church of the Brethren. We are organizing as part of the International Day of Prayer for Peace (Sept 21) which is an initiative of World Council of Churches, and at this point 80 congregations have signed up to plan community prayer services related to violence and peace. [By the end of the campaign, 101 congregations participated.] We've set it up it so that congregations naming the types of violence they are concerned about so that it is relevant to their context. I'm excited about the ongoing impact of people taking public action and then how can I support their continued growth as community organizers, after the day of those vigils and prayer services.

I want to ask you a little more about that because I know that one piece of your life journey has been your study of theology and your faith practice in the Church of the Brethren. How have your used your spiritual grounding as a Christian in your work as a trainer?

One time I was going to do a training which was a new big risk with a group that I hadn't worked with before. I had a bunch of logistical problems the day of the event, and was feeling nervous because of the level of risk, and then had transportation problems. I was getting flustered -- getting beyond flustered" I was scared, worried, seriously nervous.

So I prayed, I said, "God, I can't do this." I didn't mean, "poor me, I'm small and unworthy," but "I need help that is beyond myself, so come help me facilitate tonight." And it was a dream of a training, and I was able to connect with the group and flow.

Is it about an external divine reality, or is it that through prayer I found something powerful inside me, beyond the edge of my immediate identity, that gave me what I needed that night? I think both can be true. I don't know how it works, but there is some kind of creativity and power beyond the edge of who I am that I tap all the time in training and in roles of leadership. There is something beyond the edge that I can open up to that helps me be even more powerful.

Also, scripture is full of stories about oppression and of God having a preference for those who are excluded or on the margins. And so as an organizer rooted in Christianity, I have all these stories that I can turn to for ideas and inspiration for how I do my work. In preparing people for doing social change work I can say, here are some ideas about how to do it" look at this long history we're a part of.

For me as a Christian, there is also an aspect of this which is spiritual formation. We're caught up in empire or domination and need to look at how that creates spiritual realities inside all of us, it could be low self-esteem, arrogance, racism… I find a path to address those things in the Christian tradition, it helps me do my work more effectively.

That touches on something that I know is theme in TfC's training philosophy; transformation. What does that word mean to you and your motivations as a trainer?

I guess I'd like to talk about it on three levels, the individual, the group, and the ripples beyond the training room.

Transformation on the individual level as we talk about it at TfC, is our interest in making people effective social change agents. It's not as simple as handing people a tool" a hammer, say -- and telling them to go build the world you want to build, because people sometimes have feelings or inner realities that hold them back from actually engaging their struggles as powerfully as possible. I can teach someone how to write a press release but that person might still need to ask the prior question, "What is holding me back from speaking up and speaking out in the most empowered way?" Part of our work as social change trainers is building skills, but it's also engaging the emotional realities that keep our trainees from using those skills effectively.

At a group level the transformation that often needs to happen in social change movements, and especially in left-leaning white social change movements, is about addressing the culture of cynicism, despair, lack of trust in each other. One of the things I've seen happen at training in TfC is that people get a sense of shared power and build a group that is strong enough to trust each other. They began to feel that "we can do this," even if it's not a group they will continue to work with. They go away feeling that, "because of what we've experienced we see that we can trust ourselves and each other and be connected and that can help us step towards victory."

Then that has a ripple effect of people going home from those groups and those trainings. They go back to their organizations with new skills, and maybe they're more freed up to respond creatively to situations in their organization or community and they actually become a more effective leader, by which I mean someone who can see and respond to what is really happening and responds in a creative, present, and empowered way.

How has being in this work transformed you?

One of the ways that being involved with TfC has transformed me is in my growth as an ally to people of color. Partly because of my relationships within TfC, and as a part of my TfC work in the past few years. I've been able to get perspectives on racism and how it works but also to look at what keeps me back emotionally from building strong relationships with people who I want to work with who are people of color.

Do you have a specific example?

Yes, actually Erika Thorne [another TfC Training Associate] is working as a consultant with another organization that I work with right now around racism and she has been bringing a TfC approach to personal transformation and skill development to the work she is doing with us. One of the early things I worked with her on was that I was starting to build relationships with a Haitian congregation in Brooklyn and had a lot of confusion and nervousness and fear about that, I wasn't comfortable. And Erika helped me take all that stuff out and look at it, and look at what my values were and what I really wanted. She helped me play out some of those fears to get to a new place to stand. That led me to develop a great working relationship with the congregation. I've been to visit them more than once, and we planned a delegation to go to a conference on counter-recruitment for training with their youth group. Now there is a strong foundation for continuing work, where before I was so scared I would mess up or make a mistake and didn't have much confidence.

In the same way I've been developing relationships with congregations in Puerto Rico, l've struggled with not knowing what's happening, loss of control, not understanding how the communication patterns are working. The work that Erika has brought with personal coaching and with our entire staff [of this other organization, On Earth Peace] has helped me to loosen up and be present and not be as worried.

Do you have a favorite story or accomplishment that comes out of your training work from the past year?

I was leading a retreat for a peace and justice center in Cincinnati. It was a strategy retreat, and we were working on how to make their organizing work as powerful as possible. I was offering the perspective that building campaigns could support their organizing and the group really struggled with that. What was a campaign and how does a campaign work? -- we went off track and the group needed to do something else for a while. I was feeling discouraged because I didn't feel that they had gotten what I hoped they would get, as far as really grappling with the notion of campaigns as a way of focusing and developing their organizing work (they could have grappled with it and rejected it, but at that point, they hadn't even really grappled with it). I decided to come back to it in the afternoon session, and pulled out another activity related to campaign planning and had the group divide up into several initiatives they were working on. The work that the group that was doing counter-recruitment was able to do in that session led to a much more focused and clear set of goals for the next few months for organizing, especially around engaging their school board. When I lost heart, I returned to the goals for the training, which were under-girding my design, and that kept me focused and helped the group advance.

[Note: The activity that Matt references here is the Paper Plate Challenge, which can be found on the website under tools. It can also be found in the training manual, Before You Enlist and After You Say No.]

What are a few social justice issues that feel particularly urgent or compelling to you right now? What is your vision for how TfC can support the activism that grows out of these issues during the next few years?

There are so many issues. I hesitate to name a couple because there is so much work at so many different levels to be engaged. In 1965 Dave Dellinger wrote an essay titled "The Future of Nonviolence" in which he said that the current stage of understanding nonviolence was the stage that electricity was understood was in the age of Edison and Marconi. Now, forty years later, we are still in a period where we get to work together in local, regional, national, global social movements, to develop the art of social change and build the world we envision. Social change movements that emerge of pressing concerns don't always get to connect themselves to the heritage of other struggles because they are doing what they need to do right now" go to this meet, organize this rally, respond to the media -- they are acting in an immediate and grounding context, but TfC can often offer a chance for them to get connected to that heritage, to get connected to people's movements. We help groups tap the wisdom they already have, and reflect about the work that activists are doing today and how they become even more powerful, how they can actually achieve victory in their struggles right now. TFC says we can stand on the shoulders of giants, we don't need to re-invent the wheel.

Betsy Raasch-Gilman, another TfC trainer and former Training Associate said, "One thing I have learned from a life in the struggle is to cook with the recipes that have been handed down." We provide a place to remember the recipes we already know in our communities and develop them for cooking up social resistance in order to prepare our communities a delicious party of social change!

Nice.

I wasn't sure I could pull off that metaphor.

I wasn't either, but you did. Thanks for the interview!

Interview conducted by Nico Amador (Oct 2007)