What is a “Brave Space”?
At CommunityBuild Ventures, we define it as a structured space to allow participants to be their most authentic selves and lean in more deeply in conversations centered on racial equity.
Why do we offer Brave Space Building?
When a team of professionals seeks to understand, embrace, and embody racial equity and justice within their organization or institution, the conversations can be complicated and downright scary. In her book, The Inner Work of Racial Justice, Rhonda Magee, a professor of law, mindfulness expert, and prolific author, offered some reasons for this:
- We are all human beings, caught up in deeply entrenched social patterns and practices
- Every person carries some sort of anxiety, holding on to some sense that the conversation might not be for them.
- There are many different kinds of elephants in the room – a range of issues, some predictable and others not so much, that people would like to discuss but are afraid to raise.
These reasons can leave the best-intentioned professionals feeling disconnected from each other, themselves, and the work ahead. To remedy and reverse this, we start with Brave Space Building.
Brave Space Building is a 6-part framework structured to allow participants to be their most authentic selves and lean into conversations centered on racial equity.
Our Brave Space Building framework offers teams of professionals a supportive container where they are permitted to unmask and engage in the process of creating a solid foundation. This then allows them to enter into transformational work.
What is the Brave Space Building Framework?
Gratitude
Sharing gratitude helps participants operating from a place of curiosity, empathy, and trust.
Intentions
Setting and living intentions allow participants to focus on who they are in the moment, recognize and live their values, and raise their emotional energy, which increases physical energy.
Feelings
Recognizing and identifying feelings allows participants to understand their current state better, enhancing their ability to notice what triggers them and learn to manage them more effectively.
Assumptions
Acknowledging assumptions helps to surface previously unstated truths, which are called into the conversation to further participants’ abilities to show up fully, willing to not only see other’s potential for growth but their own.
Community Agreements
Establishing consensus-driven community agreements provides a standard set of guidelines for how people should work together as they take part in transformational action.
Shared language
Developing understanding amongst a group of participants based on language (e.g., spoken, text) helps them communicate more effectively.
The Brave Space Building framework is most powerful and effective when used within an ongoing professional learning community and guided by highly qualified and skilled facilitators.
To learn more about Brave Space Building training sessions, email me at ayodele.
