Beauty in Motion: PIE Gathering in February

The second monthly meeting for 2022 of the Powershift Inclusive Excellence body began with the sounds of keyboards clacking, roosters crowing, dogs barking, and the gentle tunes from Breathe Together by The Mothers (listen to this song and others from our Encourager Party playlist).

Our facilitator, Kirthi Jayakumar, began us with a question to describe how we were feeling in the form of a book title. Here were some of the titles that described our feelings joining the meeting:

• The Paradise Papers, the Suppression of Women’s Rites


• Belonging


• Emergent Strategy


• The English Patient


• I am Commissioned


• How the Word is Passed 


• Unsettled Ground


• Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings


• All About Love by bell hooks


• Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

Kirthi invited us to speak up if at any time in the meeting we were feeling unsafe or unheard.

For our community activity, Tamarack Verrall presented two videos for us to reflect on, first from Audre Lorde, “There is no Hierarchy of Oppressions”. In this piece, we hear from Lorde, \"Children need to learn that they do not need to become like each other in order to work together for a future.” And, “I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only.”

We then listened to I Am Beautiful by India.Arie. In reflecting on these two pieces, Tam shared she was filled with gratitude for our second year together as a PIE group. She reminded us to take care of ourselves. \"We work so hard and we face so much...thank you for everything that you do and let’s remember to take care of ourselves as we go.”

Then it was time to break into two groups. We are prioritizing two work groups: Community Participation and Audit of Unequal Power Dynamics. Each group was invited to discuss three key items for 60 minutes:

1. What expectations do we have as a working group?


2. What additional support is needed (as a leader and/or working group member)?


3. What are 1-3 goals we most want to accomplish as a working group in 2022?

After the hour of working together in our groups we came back to share our progress.

The Audit of Unequal Power Dynamics group is prioritizing the following actions moving forward as a work group:

1. List areas to audit power dynamics within World Pulse


2. Decide on an approach for conducting the audit


3. Make recommendations for an outside agency to support the work

The group also talked through the need to define the scope of work and the “why” behind the work in auditing power dynamics. For example: What is at the heart of the work we set out to do as a committee? What learnings can each of us bring to the conversation? Who are the stakeholders?

They also decided to take turns leading the work of the small group by having co-leads that rotate through the group.

The Community Participation group shared that they will prioritize the following goals for the work moving forward:

1. Increasing the number of people and countries on World Pulse


2. Increasing the engagement on World Pulse


3. Looking at the leadership design and finding ways to ensure we are bringing value to members as we ask for increased participation

Examples of the kinds of activities this group will prioritize related to those goals include: Giving guidance to World Pulse on the process for community participation in shared documents like our community guidelines, fundraising guidelines and Ethical Guidelines for research in our community. The group will also consult the World Pulse staff to ease the transition to the new website platform and to suggest enhancements and ideas from the community - especially related to translations, resources and engagement activities. This group also talked about barriers to engagement on World Pulse and how Digital Ambassadors, the leadership programs and the website can help encourage people to see the value they can get from engaging with World Pulse as soon as they join.

After sharing out these takeaways and planned activities we closed by sharing one word to describe a feeling we were taking out of the session. Words shared included: 

• Gratitude


• Love


• Energized


• Ready


• Excitement


• Happy


• Hopeful

If you would like to learn more about PIE, you are invited to read these additional articles:

Read the story of our January session

Read the announcement of PIE’s formation from December 2020