Sisters in Conversation

On Saturday 28th January I was graphic harvesting at Sisters in Conversation; part of the Ubele Initiative. The workshop took place at the Women’s Resource Centre and attracted 24 African and Caribbean community leaders, activists and change agents, plus a hosting team of six of our women, drawn from all over London and beyond.

As one participant wrote on her Facebook page this morning:

“It was a fabulous day and I even changed my plans to stay until the end! I met a potter, writer, singer, entrepreneurs, business advisor, film-maker, photographer, graphic recording artist, administrators, consultants, an academic and university graduate….. and we feasted on fruit, ‘Cummin Up’ lunch & ‘Black River’ chocolates!”

Mindful Maps has provided support to Ubele since it’s conception nearly a year ago, and has documented several of the critical friends sessions. Images of these are in this flickr set. 

Comparing this event’s visual to those created in past sessions, it’s clear to see the language generated in a female-only session is very different. Anger and aggression were still extremely present, but the overarching vocabulary seemed to be about reconnection, trust, healing, empathy and support. Things that struck me particularly were:

• The parts of the conversation about storytelling, people wanted to tell their stories and find a home for them. This would preserve oral history and pass on important information to future generations. The women also wanted to be able to access stories of people like them so that they felt less isolated.

• A statement I found written on the back of a napkin (which I fed into the main visual). It read: “begin the journey of self healing, self discovery and self empowerment“. This isn’t the same kind of statement which came through in the mixed gender conversations.

• A language of parenting, nurturing and cultivation. Again because of the female environment this element was much stronger. This resonates with the project’s inter-generational nature.

• A need to be vulnerable. Several women mentioned vulnerability and how the image of the strong black women sometimes is unhelpful as it limits space to be vulnerable. Here I am reminded of the work of Brené Brown’s and Deborah Ravetz.

• A desire to find a sense of the whole, not re-inventing the wheel all the time but pulling together things people are already doing, and their stories. At the same time I felt a strong urge for a radically different approach. Could it be that Ubele is part social technologies such as World Café and the Change Lab (Reos) for moving conversations forward and initiating action), and part pulling together what is already out there and has already happened?

• The empathy and expression in the room. Being around so many strong women freely expressing their emotions and stories was awe-inspiring, deeply moving and personally healing.

Sisters in Conversation has got me thinking about how a group of women can co-design a change process and co-create a future that is very different to those imagined by mixed groups. This article on Theory U and the feminine principle was distributed in the welcome packs.

Although there was a process planned for the workshop, certain parts of it expanded to fill the day. For the facilitators Yvonne Field and Yvonne Christie (or Yve x 2 as I like to call them), it didn’t feel right (or indeed possible) to push participants through a pre-defined process when people were having such passionate and emotional conversations.

As the author of the above article, Arawana Hayashi writes:

“There is a habitual tendency for many of us to focus our attention on content – on the words, on the figures, and on the actions. Feminine principle invites us instead to notice the space or the background. It expands our attention to the atmosphere or the environment. It invites us to notice the space out of which expressions arise.”

It is feminine qualities within the hosting of space and conversations which allow real connections to happen.

Organisations often pretend that gender is a neutral issue but I don’t believe this is helpful to creating a balanced future (which of course involves the masculine principle too), quite simply because it isn’t neutral. One of the next steps for Ubele is to host a Brother’s conversation, then a mixed one. The outcomes of this will be interesting to compare to this session, and I hope that visualising these meaningful conversations will continue to help Ubele evolve and grow.

Read more about this event on the Ubele blog.