The older I get, the more I realize how little one person can know. It’s not that I don’t stand by what I’ve written here. It’s so much me I can’t not. But at the same time, I’m just me and…
I’m only living my one little life and the world is so big.
There are experts who claim they know exactly what we need to do in this time of trouble. That’s definitely not me. We humans are in such danger, I don’t see how anyone could possibly have all the answers.
What we need, those of us who end up here on the far side of hope, is not experts or gurus or preachers of gospels…
We need each other.
And…
We need to join together in the spirit of fight—our most loving kind of fight.
Which means we’re not living in an expert place. We’re living in…
A potluck place.
But instead of bringing random dishes to share, in this potluck…
We’re bringing our whole selves, as tenderly and fiercely as we can.
We’re sharing our best fight stories to inspire each other.
This site is my contribution to the potluck. I’m giving you quite a collection of my favorite strategies and principles…
But still you need to make your own decisions about everything I’m saying.
Please don’t think of my ideas as shoulds or received wisdom. Think of them only as possibilities to consider. Then…
Take what you need and toss the rest.
If you decide you want to adopt what I call the moral-fight way of activism, in part or in total, still you’re going to have to make it your own, shaping it with your values and your personality, and grounding it in your own moral core.
And when you do that…
You’ll be making discoveries.
You’ll be adding new dimensions to post-hope activism. You’ll be helping to develop it.
So I’d like to ask you to please share what you discover, because what you have to say might turn out to be very important to the rest of us.
Why so many stories?
I appreciate theory and explanations. And how-tos. I really like how-tos.
But when it’s time to actually put a skill into practice, stories are far and away my best teachers. I learn from them better than from anything else. And I’ve found that to be true for an awful lot of the people I’ve worked with.
Which is why throughout this site, you’ll find stories, lots of them.
And I’ve cast many of the stories as dialogues…
So you can see the give and take of the moral-fight system as it plays out in relationships.
You’ll notice that these dialogues are actually coaching conversations because they’re not casual, they don’t wander around. They’re going somewhere, somewhere important.
And some of them go long. Here’s why. I’ve been a coach for nonprofit leaders since 1999, and over that time I’ve read many books on coaching. But there’s one thing that always makes me grumpy about those books. The illustrations they give of sessions are always too short for me. You only get snippets of conversations.
But snippets are not enough to get a genuine feel for the dynamics of a serious conversation or the arc of it. The snippets don’t give the sense of richness, nuance, and depth that I know the best real-life coaching conversations always have.
So on this site, I’m giving you complete conversations, only a little condensed. I was going to say, “with the boring parts taken out.” But actually, in my experience, coaching sessions don’t have boring parts.
Now, a caveat. When I tell you stories about myself, I recount them just as they happened. The ones I tell about others, though, follow a different trajectory.
Each one started with real people and real events, but as I wrote them out, I changed details, often every single detail—the fiction writer in me took over. At first this was to protect identities, because in their communities, the activists I talk about are so much in the spotlight and under the microscope, that they need a special degree of confidentiality.
Then I noticed …
The freedom to invent was helping me go deeper into what I wanted to show you.
You know how fiction sometimes captures the truth better than nonfiction? That’s what I was experiencing so I kept on inventing. But I want you to know that…
Every story here stays true to the reality of moral-fight activism.
Why no salvation strategies?
On this site you won’t find any grand political strategies for transforming a nation or saving our species, and that’s for a simple reason…
I don’t believe in salvation.
I don’t believe it’s possible so I don’t include it.
And thus you might find yourself a bit disappointed bas you read what I’ve written here. I’m disappointed myself. I wish I had some salvation magic I could offer. But we’re talking about post-hope activism and that means by definition that there’s no grand hope that’s going to make everything all better.
The truth is, as I see it, that…
We’re living in the final chapter of the human story.
So what matters most?
Relationships.
We’re living in a dark and challenge time, and…
We need each other.
We need each other more than ever.
For us post-hope activists, relationships are the be all and end all.
But even for hope-based activists…
Strong, sustaining, cooperative, loving relationships come first.
They are the key to whatever progress will be made. They are the key to whatever joy there is in this work for every different kind of activist.
So on this site, I focus 100% on developing the best possible working relationships and friendships.
A favor I’d like to ask of you
I’ve put hundreds of hours into my coaching and writing to develop my system of post-hope, moral-fight activism. Given the urgency of the times, I decided to give it away for free instead of turning it into a print book to sell. And I’m really happy I made that decision.
But if you try out any of my strategies and they work for you…
I’d love to hear from you.
You can click on the Contact page and write me a short note.
Or if you’re in the mood, you can go long. You can tell me your story in detail. I love details. How did you take care of yourself? How did you claim your power? How did you take what you got here and create something new?
Hearing about your successes, having that kind of sweet connection with kindred spirits, means an awful lot to me.
Thanks!
Rich
Two notes:
1. Advocating for Activists is a companion to my first book, Love with Fight in its Heart. The first four sections here have a fair number of passages I took from that book. I did that because I wanted this site to be a stand-alone for activists who haven’t yet read Love with Fight, or who might not want to read it.
2. This site is a major upgrade of nonprofitHearts.net which I wrote starting back in 2006. As the title indicates, I was writing for nonprofit leaders. This current site retains a focus on nonprofits because that’s still the main vehicle for activism, especially for people who need to be paid for their work. But the principles here can be used just as well in activist networks that don’t follow the nonprofit structure.