Why do Changemakers Matter?
- Art Sherwood
- Feb 18, 2019
- 4 min read
Why do Changemakers matter?
Because they bring the magic.
Because, working with other changemakers who they likely don’t even know; they do their part in the larger collective work of changing the world. And that messy complex amazing phenomena is nothing short of magic.
Good news builds momentum. Not the puppy and kitty kind of good news (although, they do make me laugh). What I am talking about is inroads against the doom and gloom that we have fed ourselves for my much of my adult lifetime and certainly all of the lifetimes of post Gen-x generations.
And a steady diet of all things broken beyond repair meals, leads to lethargy and hopelessness. To throwing our hands up and saying there is nothing we can do. To giving up. Or never even starting.
Back in 1964, Seligman (yes, Martin of positive psychology) and Maeir conducted experiments that eventually turned into what we now know as learned helplessness. If you believe there is nothing you can do, you just lie there and take it. You suffer and give up. You drowning in the mire of the worlds problems that comes at us through a digital firehose is filling societal buckets of helplessness. A world of helplessness. Learned helplessness. We are screwed…and yet…
Changemakers bring hope. And hope is magic.
Yesterday I watched some Changemaker magic happen.
It was our version of the World café we call the Co-op Café.
I was with a group of changemakers who are dedicated champions of food through consumer food cooperatives. Many have committed to lifelong Changemaking through this unique way of people collaborating. And things have been feeling pretty grim. There is one guy who brings the data. For the last three years, he brought disturbing statistical trends. The burden has felt so heavy. So difficult. So hard. And still, these people gathered in Sacramento yesterday to keep on, keeping on.
When he got up to speak, I was ready for the next round of layering onto the burden. To drink in-person from the firehose of gloom. And instead, he said…I have some good news.
He went on to describe negative trends bottoming out and turning in the positive direction--not sure yet if it is solid, but the line shifted. A tick in the right direction. When giving his explanation, he could have gone into strategy and financial analysis and all the business lenses used to describe a turnaround.
Rather…
His explanation was much more powerful. He said believed that people learned and decided to fight. Fight for what they believed in. Fight for a vision of a world that is not full of doom and gloom but rather one of hope and prosperity. And not in the puppy dog and kitty way (although again, they do make me laugh). But rather, in the "We are not giving one more freaking inch of ground" sort of way. The, in fact, "We are coming for you" sort of way.
The fundamental energy shifted. It was magic. It was Changemaker magic.
The day filled up with people engaging together to talk about aspirations and what can be done now to get traction and to bring about the world we believe in. It was filled with people saying we need to welcome more into the collaborative effort. It was filled with people-just normal, every day humans, making choices to act rather than to give up. Like they had been doing for years to make the world match their aspirations rather than their fears. I felt joy. I felt inspired. I felt ready to keep on keeping on. In the sunshine of Sacramento, I walked back to where I was staying and I went to work on my small part of the whole.
So why do changemakers matter? They help us unlearn helplessness. They are the collaborative fighters. They are the ones that accept that yes, there are challenges and really difficult, complex, seemingly impossible problems in the world. And sometimes it seems there are no solutions in sight. But rather than just trying to convince people that problems exist, they work to understand and they act. One action at a time. Over and over. With people they do not even know. Every day, they fight and they say, "not one more inch of ground".
Rather than saying Impossible, they say I'm Possible.
Like a river of possibility, they keep flowing. They see that there are big rocks and rather than saying "oh no, there is a big rock!" and wringing their hands in helplessness, they flow and they go. Rather than just spending all their time convincing people there is a rock and bemoaning their plight, they see the rock, accept the situation as it is and find a way to flow around it. And then, Changemakers collaborate and act to ground that rock into sand.
Changemakers dream big dreams and fight for them on the daily and in the way we can.
Changemakers act and tell the stories of even the small wins knowing those small wins add up to bit wins
Changemakers know that the ratio has to be 8 times getting back up for every 7 we fall.
Changemakers bring hope to a world that has thrown up their hands.
Changemakers collaborate with people we will never meet.
Changemakers change the trend lines through action.
And bring about the world we aspire to live in.
And inspire others to do the same.
Changemakers bring hope.
They bring the magic.
That is why Changemakers matter.
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