Angela Clinton Shares About Her New Role Guiding CEIO's Vision & Program Alignment:
I started working with Co-creating Effective and Inclusive Organizations (CEIO) in 2010 when I was a part of the project development team that guided its creation. Part of our team’s role was to notice ways in which the accomplished heart-led co-founders, Niyonu Spann and Bill Graustein, were working together and point out when they might be replicating the very systems that the whole effort was seeking to transform. Like all partnerships and teams, many dynamics and intersections of identity and experience were at play. Niyonu – a black woman, transformation facilitator and artist with many years of practice in the field of organizational development and equity training who did not grow up with wealth – and Bill, a white man, scientist and philanthropist with wealth who’d been supporting education equity and building community leadership but was less developed in organization transformation and equity training – were partnering to help bring about AND to be about inclusivity, equity and justice. Race was at play, experience was at play, class was at play, expertise was at play, gender was at play. And so much more. So we asked questions: How were they doing? Were they deferring to each other when it was comfortable? Were they challenging each other as much as they needed to be?
One of CEIO’s theories of change is the belief that the more we can bring our whole selves to our work, the more effective we are. Our team asked, were Niyonu and Bill doing that? What was holding them back? How were they – or were they not – being the change they wanted to see in the world? How were they taking responsibility for their part in what was being formed? How was every aspect of the project development process aligned with their vision?
At each phase of CEIO’s development and growth – with organizational partnerships, Deeper Change Forums, the Organizer’s Path, the Youth Program – the people who sign up for the work of CEIO as both staff and participants, sign up to ask and be asked some version of these questions as both individuals and as organizations. These questions have shaped my life for the last 10 years when I was organizing in Philly and taking the train to New Haven to serve on the project development team, when I was co-designing and leading the Organizer’s Path, when I was serving as a Capacity Building and Training Partner for our partnership with Planned Parenthood of Southern New England and when I, and we at CEIO, listened to ourselves and others to shape this next phase for CEIO.
At CEIO we believe that to be effective in the mission of serving community, actions must be true to inclusivity, equity and justice. The primary goal of CEIO is to operate, as individuals, organizations and throughout the community with conscious co-creation (conscious use of power). Conscious co-creation is our core value and also a core tool that is necessary to create greater equity and to pave the way for liberation.
In this phase of CEIO, we seek to widen our circles of participation and with that, the awareness, practice and use of conscious co-creation. More organizations and individuals who are seeing their part in transforming systems of oppression are showing up to do their part and bring about AND be about greater equity, justice, well-being, and liberation. As we expand in this way, it’s my honor to step into a new role of guiding, implementing and ensuring vision and program alignment across the full range of our offerings and within our CEIO team. Alignment between who we say we be (our vision and values) and what we do (our programing and our actions) is the ends and the means of CEIO and the responsibility of all of who sign up to be part of our work. It was what drew me to the CEIO project development team 10 years ago.
My particular role in this next phase is to keep my eyes, ears, mind and heart focused on our whole system and to monitor both our internal and external alignment with the core values that guide our work: conscious co-creation; co-learning/teaching in communities of practice; whole systems transformation; inviting, listening, honoring people’s stories and justice – equitable sharing of power throughout the community. We aim to be a living practice in conscious co-creation and loving responsibility to all. I have always been pulled to create both large systemic change and individual level change; to movement building and to deep healing. In this moment, more than ever, I believe the call for each of these is ringing loud and clear and I’m inspired and honored to be answering it with the CEIO community.
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