The Human, Relational Work of Systems Change
By Elise Belusa, Executive Director
Our journey toward racial justice asked each of us to set down the performance of goodness and step into real relationships.
Episode 15 of Make Shift Happen is called “The Personal Work of Systems Change,” but listening back to my conversation with Ruth, I keep thinking it should be called “The Human Work Necessary for Systems Change.”
The system in question in Episode 15 is Tara Health itself, and the change is how we first grappled with the white supremacy embedded in our structures and culture and then reoriented our work toward racial justice. What I keep coming back to is how much of that journey, at every stage, was about each of us finding our way back to our own humanity, and to one another’s, against a current that works so hard to keep us apart.
Our racial justice journey started when a grantee offered us a piece of honest reflection about how the whiteness of our staff, practices, and structures at Tara Health were creating blind spots in our work. To really hear them, I had to move through the layers of defensiveness and a familiar kind of shame that often surfaces when we are shown what we haven’t been able to see.
In doing that work, I started to notice how much of my energy was going into being perceived as a “good person,” and how little of it was going to actually witnessing and honoring the full humanity of the people I was working with and cared deeply about, particularly our grantee partners of color.
While performing goodness, I was never in true relationship with myself. And without that relationship, I couldn’t fully show up for anyone else.
When we perform goodness, especially in philanthropy, we get stuck in a cycle that continually disconnects us from the people and work we want to be close to. I still have a lot of questions about what it means to actually do good work—as opposed to just performing it—but one thing I’m learning, and that Tara Health’s journey with racial justice has taught me, is that we can't figure out this doing of good work (let alone actually do it) without others. It cannot be done alone. We are deeply interdependent and connected, and when we orient ourselves toward that interconnectedness, another person’s experience of harm is no longer something “out there,” an abstract concept, an anecdote. Instead, it lives inside us, one of countless threads that weave each of us into our full, collective humanity.
My performance of goodness has insulated me. It has held my defensiveness and shame in place and kept the real impacts of white supremacy and racism, and my own complicity in them, at a comfortable distance. I haven’t been the only one carrying this. Each of us at Tara Health has had to do the slow, tender, and ongoing work of softening those layers so that we can practice, rather than perform, our true connection as humans.
Through that softening, I’ve come into a durable trust with myself and with my colleagues, which is allowing good work—in all its messy humanness—to be possible.
For me, this is what good philanthropy asks of us: the steady practice of being in real relationship with one another, especially in the places that are the hardest to face. This is the work I have given myself to for the past several years, and what I intend to keep giving myself to in the years we have left at Tara Health. If you are interested in exploring this practice too, I welcome the conversation.
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