Key Ingredients

• Get used to being uncomfortable
• Humility, humility and more humility
• Deep listening
  • Deep listening means not just listening for information, but paying attention to what a person is saying, listening for needs that might be surfacing, or uncertainties or insecurities. It also means taking people seriously, (for example, if they express discomfort or worry about an idea). Do not brush this aside.

• Non-judgement
• Positive affirmation
  • People thrive, blossom and bloom off positive affirmation. If you think someone made a good point, say so. If you think something was well expressed, say so. If you think it took courage to bring forward a concern, say so. Making people feel valued and appreciated will open up vast amounts of potential in the people around and in your group or organisation.

• Awareness of existing power dynamics
  • Try to consciously think about power dynamics in a room. They will subtly, but profoundly, affect how people feel and engage. Power dynamics that are not addressed or understood can lead to resentment or exclusion. Does somebody come from a more economically challenged family and so does not feel comfortable going out for a lunch meeting? Is one person with a highly privileged education talking over other people? Is somebody who was raised in a different cultural context being side-lined? Does somebody have caring duties for children or elderly that means they cannot take on as much work as others? The potential power dynamics that can affect groups and meetings are endless. Take the time to reflect on those in your group or organisation. This can even be done as a group activity.

Why this recipe matters

In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town rose up in defiance of the epistemic and emotional violence they felt their university was afflicting on them on a daily basis. The University of Cape Town is a historically white institution, founded on land donated by one of the arch-colonists of the British Empire, Cecil John Rhodes, the university was a ‘whites only’ space during South Africa’s Apartheid regime. With free elections and the new South Africa this changed, and many more black students arrived at the university. Although no longer excluded from the university students rose up in protest against what their experienced as the continuing of the colonial legacy and reproduction of structural racism that was embedded in universities as institutions. They called for decolonisation, not just of their own university, but of universities world-wide.

In the wake of their calls to tear down the Rhodes statue, the University of Cape Town students set a powerful movement in motion that completely unsettled the norms of practice at the university and challenge many students and staff, in particular white students and staff, to fundamentally rethink their classroom and teaching practices, as well as their practices of knowledge production. The students occupied the central administration building of the university, held huge collective meetings and had extensive teach-outs. One of the most striking features of the students’ collective meetings was that while white people were allowed to attend they were not allowed to speak. No matter how upset they were, angry, or attacked they felt, the condition of their attendance was that they would listen and not speak. I was one of these white people.

I am a white South African who grew up privileged, educated and very convinced of the importance and validity of my own ideas. As I sat there in these meetings, listening to other students speak in anger, rage, frustration or pain, an enormous transformation came over me. For the first time in my life, I was forced, because I was not allowed to speak, to truly listen, to listen with real humility, to listen in order to hear and not in order to build my own counter argument or figure out when I could say my piece. My only job was to listen, and to listen even when it was hard for me to hear. It was then that I learnt that so many of the meetings, classes, seminars that I had been part of, where I had thought everybody had been participating on equal footing, based on their interest or ability to share ideas – so many of these meetings has been spaces of conflict, hurt, humiliation and silencing for those around me. It was not until I viscerally felt it was it like to not be heard, to not be able to speak, to feel like you don’t belong, this is not your space, you are not welcome here, that I understood how deeply exclusionary and painful spaces of conversation can be when they are not consciously made to be inclusive, open, affirmative and supportive.

Holding inclusive meetings and building accessible organisations may seems like a very small part of any activist work – but these intimate spaces, in which much organising work happens, can be the site of many of the most distressing micro-violences or aggressions that members experience. They can also be some of the spaces where the most profound learning, listening, sharing and healing can take place. Meetings and gatherings lie at the relational core of how many organisations are run.

It is in our meetings that we build the communities that our organisations are built on. It is also the practices of our meetings that we build, affirm and re-affirm the basic modalities of engagement and care that our organisations want to foster. How we treat each other in our meetings and interactions will deeply inform how we treat others when we go and do our work.

How to cook the recipe

Some ideas on creatively making meetings more inclusive

• Begin openly with positionality and be aware of it

Positionality is “the notion that personal values, views, and location in time and space influence how one understands the world” (the quote if from author Luis Sanchez). It means that where you grew up, what experiences you went through, what class you grew up in, where you were educated etc will have an effect on how you perceive and experience things. Acknowledging our positionality (eg white, cis-female, middle-class, British) allows us to also engage with how this will influence our perspective on the discussions we participate in. For example, the British actor Laurence Fox famously stated on Question Time that he knew that Britain was not a racist country and didn’t have a racism problem. In this Fox did not consider his positionality, as a white British male, and how this would influence his perception of racism in Britain. If he had taken his positionality seriously, he would have seen that as a white man he cannot know whether people of colour in Britain experience racism or not.

If you really want to take positionality seriously you can open a meeting or workshop by going around the circle and having everyone state what they see their positionality as and briefly have them reflect on how they think this might influence how the see the topic at hand.

• Take notice of who speaks how often

At a basic level, this can mean actively asking for other thoughts or opinions when chairing a meeting if someone is dominating. If you are chairing, this could also mean taking careful note when quieter people want to speak and making sure to give them the space at some point in the conversation. At a more complex level this can mean having conversations in your group or organisation about how speaking space is being used. As discussed in my story of South Africa above, one can quickly fall into patterns of having the people with the most privileged educations and backgrounds, who were never made to doubt their opinions, dominate conversations. Have open conversations about why some people seem to feel very confident about speaking while others might not feel there is enough space for them to speak. Discuss techniques you can develop in order to assist them. This could even go as far as creating separate spaces for certain groups to discuss topics and issues. You can also practice more radical techniques such as stating that all young people, or all women, for example, will be given first precedence to reply before others will be given space to speak. Making clear that your organisation or group care about giving everyone the space to feel free to speak can already have a significant impact on making people speak up more.

• Do a check in at the beginning of the meeting

Check-ins can take many forms. You can ask everyone to say one word about how they are feeling before the meeting begins in a few words. Checking-in with people’s feelings before a meeting starts will help everyone in the meeting have a better understanding of how that person is engaging. You can be creative with how you do your check-ins, for example, people bringing one word about their hopes for the meeting, or mentioning one nice thing they saw that day. Check-ins help to bring everyone into the meeting with emotional presence and understanding.

• Ask about people’s pronouns and be conscious to use pronouns as given

Many people do not identify with the binary genders of ‘male’ and ‘female’ and might therefore feel uncomfortable being addressed as ‘he’ or ‘she’. At the start of meetings, this can look like people introducing themselves by name and pronoun, e.g. “Max, she”, or “Regi, they”. On zoom, it is easy to add your pronouns to your name, eg. Flip (she). It is important that everyone in a meeting introduces themselves with pronouns to foster an inclusive culture.

• Do some breath work together at the beginning of the meeting

Doing some simple breathing exercises as group can help everyone come together as one. It also helps regulate people’s emotions and clarify their minds.

• Agree on some hand signals that people can use during the meeting to signal things such as agreement, questions, uncertainty etc.

Using hand-signals can allow more people to participate in a meeting and have their opinions heard without disruption the meeting or only giving preference those who speak up. Below are examples of hand-signals from the occupy movement:

• Make space for emotions!

Far too often emotions are treated as unprofessional or problematic. Emotions are however at the core of how we communicate, engage, learn, and interact. Inclusive meetings make space for people’s emotion – if someone feels hurt by something that is said, or made uncomfortable, or feels emotionally driven, all these emotions should be embraced and listened to. Allowing and listening to people’s emotions in meetings can open a lot of new insights and understanding and can produce outcomes that make people feel truly seen.

• Make conscious efforts to give people affirmation

Affirmation is very simply to give, but very often forgotten. The more people are given affirmation, the more they will participate and give to the organisation. It is the simplest, but one of the most powerful, mechanisms to make your meetings and organisation more safe and successful. 

• Make conscious space for people to discuss meetings

If you have meetings regularly, as a group or an organisation, try to make a space in which you talk about how to have meetings. Try to make sure people are happy with the way the meetings they participate in are run.

• Don’t be afraid of safe spaces

Safe spaces are spaces where people can feel safe to freely express themselves and who they are. In some circles, safe spaces have received a bad reputation as exclusionary or over-protective. But it is important to remember that every space is always a safe space for somebody. Almost every space will be in a space in which some faction feels safe to freely express or be themselves. In many contexts these people are white, cis, middle-class and often male. Therefore, creating ‘safe spaces’ can often just mean creating spaces where people other than white, cis, middle-class men feel comfortable. Don’t be afraid of creating these spaces for people in your organisation.

• Rotate chairing roles at every meeting

The chair often has a lot of agency in a meeting and a lot of say in what is discussed. Rotating the chairing position allows a distribution of this power. It may be uncomfortable or awkward at first as people get used to taking on the role, but soon it will produce far more interactive and engaged meeting participants.

• Make sure to have accessibility breaks

Accessibility breaks benefit everyone. Make sure to take them regularly. Even in zoom meetings.

• And finally, again, be humble, truly humble.