Key Learning Questions

• What priorities do change agents working in the American South have regarding leadership,mentorship and career support?
• What supportive practices matter most to enhance work relationships between change agents and cross-race colleagues (esp. interested in stories w/ cross-race supervisors)?
• What challenges & opportunities do change agents experience doing social change/justice/equity work in the South?
• How might change agents' home organizations better support their leadership development& career growth?

Who are the change agents?

In different contexts, different people take up the role of change agent.  Situational leadership can lead to long term leadership?  Shift in emergence and development can catalyze sustained change agency.

Reflection Questions

1. Why does place matter in your leadership experience/practice?
2. How does race matter in your leadership experience/practice?
3. What generational differences surface in your leadership experience/practice?

Group responses

Question One

• our early years create filters for viewing reality
• immed. between IND, Public Policies, Env, history & Institutions, Systems that have created circumtances that people must relate
• Urban vs. rural
• Difference between place of origin and current home
• 2nd generation place schizophrenia
• The  land, place, energy, ancestors - defferent converations/connections
• place and race connections in ways that manifest themselves
• how to model success and give others' space to grow
• concept/experience of frame -- choosing a home as an adult
• regional - choosing to connect to the South, after leaving places
• place is a space inside where we have a place in humantiy (psychosocial reality)
• Place is everything & simultaneously place is nothing a question is how to talk/connect across that reality

Question Two

• authority, competence, acknowledgement, presence, privilege, access to resources
• marginalization "race continues to shakle me"
• visible and invisible "otherness"
• learning to remember that I have the privilege of forgetting
• assumed prejudice - stereotyping
• race matters greatly because I have a race equity lens around my life & leadership -- "leading with race"
• visible leadership - erasing people

Question Three

• generational bias overcome before real listening
• come to things with beginner's eyes (buddhism) to converation to improve conversations & connections
• language that helps people engage around learning vs. labels.  Get to cross-directional exchange.
• the tyranny of labelling.
• we are born with 100 languages, 100 ways to communicate.  western education strips us of all but a couple.  we spend the rest of our lives trying to relearn. xgen is about listening. listening is the essence of leadership.
• we need to create and honor value of what people bring to the conversation from any age.
• blessing to be able to bounce back and between generations
• bridge building & boundary crossing
• what brings us together

These are the three legs of the stool, can be more if we add class, gender, others..., the seat is our change agency.