The Power of Community: Balancing Accountability and Care in Revolutionary Times
As I sit with the complexities of this moment – a time marked by both unprecedented challenges and extraordinary possibilities for transformation – I find myself returning to a truth that has always sustained our movements: the power of intentional, loving community. Recently, these words found their way to me like an ancestral whisper: "Be hard on institutions, hard on systems, but as gentle, loving, and caring toward individual people as you can be." In this simple yet profound statement lies a roadmap for how we might hold both justice and healing in the same breath.
In my two decades of youth work, I've witnessed how systems of oppression attempt to isolate us, to convince us that our struggles are individual rather than collective. But our ancestors knew better. They understood that community – real, messy, imperfect community – is both the vessel that holds us and the medicine that heals us. When we gather in circle, when we break bread together, when we hold space for both celebration and grief, we are engaging in acts of resistance that have sustained our people for generations.
The mandate to be gentle with people while remaining unwavering in our critique of systems is not just a leadership philosophy – it's a practice of liberation. When a young person shows up late to program because their metro card was empty, when a staff member struggles to meet deadlines because they're caring for an elder, when a community member expresses frustration in ways that reflect their own unhealed trauma – these are moments that call us to embody this dual consciousness. We can name the systems that create these challenges while holding the humans navigating them with tenderness and understanding.
"We are all we got. There is only us." These words echo in my spirit as I think about what it means to build beloved community in a world designed to separate us. It means understanding that the colleague who seems resistant to change may be carrying generations of institutional trauma. It means recognizing that the young person who tests boundaries is often seeking evidence that our love is unconditional. It means remembering that we are all, in some way, trying to heal while still in the waters that wounded us.
This approach requires a profound shift in how we understand accountability. Instead of replicating the punitive systems we're trying to dismantle, we must create spaces where people can make mistakes, learn, grow, and be held by community rather than cast out from it. This is the work of transformative justice – not just in theory, but in the daily practice of choosing connection over isolation, understanding over judgment, and love over fear.
As leaders in this movement, our task is to model this balance: to be fierce in our analysis of systemic oppression while remaining tender with the humans doing the difficult work of unlearning and relearning. Each time we extend grace to ourselves and others, each time we choose curiosity over condemnation, each time we respond to harm with an invitation to repair rather than a push toward punishment, we are creating microcosms of the world we're fighting to build.
For in the end, there truly is only us – beautiful, broken, healing humans trying to create something different than what we've inherited. The revolution we seek will be built on this delicate dance between accountability and care, between justice and healing, between being hard on systems and soft with souls. This is the work. This is the way forward. This is how we remember that we are, and have always been, each other's best hope for transformation.
