Building a Curriculum to Support Organizational Change

I sat down with our Associate Director of Curricula Jana Lynne (JL)  Umipig to get the inside scoop on the curriculum development process at OF/BY/FOR ALL. JL has been working hard, infusing the Change Network curricula with insightful tools and robust pedagogical concepts that support organizations to center care and relationship building at the root of their DEI commitments. JL authored a number of brand new frameworks in the curriculum, including The 4 P’s of Relational Organizing” - Protocols, Practice/ Praxis, Process and Pedagogy and the 3 As: Awareness, Accountability, and Agency. In this article, JL goes even deeper, giving us a glimpse into the process of developing a curriculum that can hold the nuances and complications of this challenging work, as well as some of the deeper understandings that inform the tools and frameworks of the Change Network program. Here's what she had to say...

What is the process of developing a new curriculum like from the inside?

The work of developing curriculum to expand and grow the foundations set by the original core curriculum takes a lot of generative thinking. We have to envision that any formulations we make of protocols, practice/praxis, process, pedagogy (what I like to call the 4 P’s of Relationship Centered Organizing), must mean to be revisited, reworked and even have the room to be changed entirely with time. Equity and Inclusion work complicates itself as we evolve as human beings. The work that confronts the injustices of the world is a conversation that requires presence, sincerity, and care — which can only be engaged with integrity if there is a continuous investment to grow and change with the needs of the individuals that make up a community. We cannot be afraid to question and to complicate what already exists. When dealing with human beings, we must question anything that does not invite us to honor our holistic lives.  That is the way I have been approaching the revisioning and creation of this next phase of our curriculum at OF/BY/FOR ALL — with the readiness for it to be shaped with every conversation that is had between our team, and all the teams that enter into our network. As our own growth and reach continues to expand, so will our curriculum need to change and expand to meet the ever evolving needs of our members and of our ever-changing world.

How did feedback from the Change Network community influence the development of the expanded curriculum?

It is important to understand that all the developing changes of our curriculum is in direct response to our relationships with our members, relationships which are in turn informed by the lived experiences of our members who are and have been working with and serving communities for decades. We also bring in the teachings of intergenerational connections with our teachers in community and culture throughout the years.  We don’t just draw from institutional wisdom that is measured as valuable by Capitalist, White Supremacist, and Patriarchal measurements (though we do have that learned experience also). We additionally draw from the richness of knowledge that comes from our families, ancestry, and cultures. This web of wisdom grows with every organization and each member that enters our relational sphere of existence and influence. 

What are some of the key elements included in the expanded curriculum?

The curriculum is focusing greatly on care — which is necessary, but often lacking in our individual, interpersonal and institutional relationships. Organizations say they want to do "the work" of being more equitable, but aren't really clear on what that really means. We offer that building, sustaining and being committed with intention and continuity in our relationships is actually “the work” at the core of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In fact, the constructs of injustice and oppression are built on the disruption and destruction of relationships. Oppression persists when we prescribe to individualism, divisiveness, when we buy into isolation, and when we do not create the means to care for the complexities of our lives. The growth of our curriculum asks again and again, “How do we honor the wholeness of each others lives/your life?” and brings us back to the centralized understanding that we hear across cultures — that we are interconnected and interdependent on each other and that we are responsible for each other’s lives. 

What is your favorite part of the curriculum?

I feel like my favorite part of the curriculum is the openness it facilitates to hold the diversity of many peoples' lived experiences — both as a team and as individuals. Each practice and process is meant to be a flexible, agile, and compassionate container that can hold the human complexity of those that come to the table to do the work together.  It is a mirror to the positions and placements we hold in the conversation of oppression, the parts of us that embody victimization to that oppression and/or the ways we embody privilege and power that exerts that oppression over others. I relish in the opportunities that we build into the curriculum for us to be in conversation about the ways we individually and collectively uphold, contribute and are affected (unconsciously and consciously) by the constructs that create inequity and injustice. The more a team approaches the “work” in the curriculum with presence, vulnerability, and intentional care, the more we can come away with the relational strength to become more equitable and inclusive with each other — and ultimately with the communities we want to grow closer to. 

What other resources, experience, or knowledge inspired you or informed the creation of the new elements of the curriculum?

My life has been so deeply rooted in Knowledge Bearing and the power of Education for Liberation. So much of our curriculum comes from the generative teachings of Radical thinkers of the past, including Paolo Freire, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, bell hooks. It also owes to the insights of some contemporary thought leaders, such as adrienne maree brown, Premptis Hemphill, and Sonya Renee Taylor, to name a few. Some of the work is also drawn directly from intergenerational BIPOC and ally circles that I have participated in and contributed to through the years, including The Embody Lab, Minka Brooklyn, and Cultural Somatics Training and Institute

Tell us a little bit more about your background and what you bring to this curriculum building process.

My work is sourced from the work of creating educational spaces throughout the past two decades in intergenerational spaces — including detention centers, rehabilitation centers, schools, in the streets, on the land and with families (including my own blood and chosen). I could move to name all of the spaces that I have been a part of and in contribution to which have evolved and revolutionized my ways of seeing the world — but I know it would be endless. I bring in the teachings of the Mothers and Fathers, the siblings in my life that have taught me what it looks like to persist in the pursuit of liberation — who taught me what it looks like in so many ways to choose to be free in a world that thrives from us being separated from the truth of our liberation.

I know this is also asking maybe for my “authority” to create this curricula — with the idea of "authority" often being based off of White Supremacist measurements of approval — but I’ll name some anyway and celebrate ways I have contributed to my communities:

• I was the creator of the Center for Babaylan Studies Decolonization School, supported by a core team of diasporic Pilpin@/x healers who are committed to the work of intergenerational and ancestral healing.
• I was also one of the founding members (and still a trainer who is brought in to lead sessions with community) who developed the foundations of El Puente’s Global Justice Institute, which worked to codify the 40 years of pedagogical framework of this AfroLatino social justice organization who have strived to their mission of raising leaders for Peace and Justice.
• And I boast also that I created a comprehensive Art and Social Justice program at a Charter School, where students were challenged to confront the very structures of oppression that they lived in within their own school. I taught this liberation framing while also meeting the Core compliance measures of the New York State Department of Education, and being the teacher of one of the highest rated students in our school and network for the five years that I taught there.

From a curriculum standpoint, what do you think is the most challenging part of this curriculum/ process? The most exciting/ rewarding?

The most challenging and rewarding parts of this curriculum are the same. It is in the most challenging parts that make us confront what exists of inequity within ourselves — in our institutions, in our teams, in our personal lives — that we are “rewarded” with growth, with change, an invitation to the radical change, the type of change that digs into the root.

What do you want potential members to know about what it means to do this work?

This work asks if YOU are ready to change. Your team may not. Your organization may not. But to get there it takes each individual committing to the deep, radically transformative change that is necessary, within themselves and waking up every day, moving through every moment and choosing liberation.