Activating the Resource of Community with Libby Hoffman

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth Tener

Welcome to the Living Love podcast. My name is Beth Tener. Today, I look forward to sharing with you this conversation with Libby Hoffman, who’s the founder of a private foundation called Catalyst for peace. She worked most of her career in the fields of peace and development internationally. A big part of her work was working in partnership in Sierra Leone with a human rights activist named John Caulker. She supported him in his vision of founding an organization called Fambul Tok, which in Sierra Leone language means family talk, sitting down and having frank talk about what matters.

The two of them had a vision of working for change in a different way. They called it inside out. A quick explanation of what this might look like: think of a classroom teacher trying to do their job. They get mandates and requirements flowing down from the school board, from the principal, the federal government, whatever it might be. Often, they don’t really get a say in what they think would work best. This happens in workplaces: to the nurses, the frontline supervisors, it happens in communities, particularly those labeled as marginalized or low income communities. They might have years of nonprofit and government programs flowing in, grants and people coming and going. The residents themselves, even though they have ideas and agency and know what’s needed, don’t get asked. They don’t get the investment to be able to make their own decisions. We overlook having places for people to work together on behalf of the whole community.

Inside out is about focusing on the people themselves and saying they have the answers. Those coming in from the outside trying to “help” are there to support and grow that local leadership. When we don’t do that, we see the pattern of one thing after another and people getting demoralized and resistant to change. What Libby and John did in Sierra Leone, this small country in West Africa, was they held this vision of putting people at the center and supporting them in building the structures and the processes to make good decisions together and rebuild the health of the community.

I think we need this lesson at all levels, you can call it inclusive governance and participation. And we’re not talking a 1 or 2 year project. Libby and John have worked together for 15 years in this ongoing way of supporting leadership and building the capacity for the people in different levels of the community in the country to make good collective decisions. When I met Libby through a mutual friend and heard about what they’d been doing in Sierra Leone, I was so excited by it. I know we all say we need this but we don’t have many good models of what it looks like.

I had the chance to travel there, as part of a learning gathering, go to some of the villages, meet the people and see what they’ve done. It is remarkable. It’s grown from what we talked about last episode with Charles Gibbs talked about the Sierra Leone phrase of small, small, small. They started in one community with a healing bonfire after the civil war. That worked and they started another one and another one. They did 250 of these community reconciliation bonfires across the country. You’ll also hear Libby talk about the Peace Mothers, a wonderful way of bringing women together and giving them a place to connect and build their leadership, make good decisions on behalf of community, and build projects. Those groups have now grown to several hundred across the country. Libby has a book called The Answers Are There, which has a lot of the story in it. I really encourage you to read it. In today’s episode, we only talk about the first part of the story. There’s a lot more to it.

One other note I want to bring in is to pull back and see this story within the larger story it is part of. We have John from Sierra Leone, which is a country of the 50 or so countries in Africa. It is in West Africa and it has a long lineage of indigenous traditions there, which they somewhat reclaimed with Fambul Tok. That country was part of the slave trade, the colonizing powers of Europe came into those communities and did tremendous harm. The country endured a civil war, which you can see as a consequence of so many years of oppression and traumas. John’s a man from Sierra Leone, working with Libby, a white woman in America who’s got wealth and privilege. In the American part of story, we have patterns here of enslavement. So, someone who inherited wealth and asked: “How can I use my wealth and my resource and my position for good?”  With these historic traumas of racism and the social injustice, all of us in the generations on the back end of these traumas, in societies that are so unequal, with such disparity of resources…to me what Libby and John did, finding a way to work in partnership over 15 years, to heal the wounds of war and rebuild community using the wealth and privilege that Libby can provide. Their partnership helped activate and restore the health and wellbeing of communities in this other country, across the ocean. This imprint of a story and a way of working for those wanting to do good work and heal our communities and heal these long historic trauma patterns we’ve all inherited. I’m really excited for you to meet Libby today and hear this conversation.

Libby Hoffman

I run a foundation called Catalyst for Peace. Our focus has been to create the space where the people most impacted by the war, get to be the ones who lead in the rebuilding after the war. And about 15 years ago, I met a Sierra Leonean human rights advocate named John Caulker, who had been leading calls for human rights during the 11-year civil war in his country. He was leading efforts to end the war and then to build a just peace process.

When we met, Sierra Leone had been devastated by this civil war. They had had a special court a tribunal that had prosecuted 13 men at the cost of $500 million. They had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission modeled after South Africa’s, in part, but the people most impacted by the war weren’t able to participate in either one of those, and didn’t feel impacted by them. So, you had people living next door to somebody who might have amputated their arm or killed their mother, or forced them to harm a family member or burn down their house or a community center. They had never talked about what happened. The country simply couldn’t move forward without addressing some of those and John knew it.

He had a vision for a process that instead of being modeled after international justice mechanisms, would draw from Sierra Leone’s culture and tradition. He wanted to have a process of truth telling and apology and forgiveness that draws on Sierra Leone culture of family talk, fambul tok in Krio, which is this process of solving problems through conversation oftentimes around a bonfire. He and I met around our common commitment to create a space together, where the people most impacted by war could be the ones who get to lead in doing that work. We came together to build a process and ultimately an organization that would be designed to do that: to center a justice and reconciliation process in Sierra Leone and culture and tradition, and to create the space where the people most impacted by the war could be the ones to lead in the process.

The heart of the fambul tok process was bonfire ceremonies at the village level, where people would come together and tell the stories in front of their community of what they had done during the war, or what had happened to them. If the person who had done that was there, they would come forward and acknowledge what they had done and apologize. They were given an opportunity to forgive. These bonfire ceremonies took several months of work to plan. That consultative process was also the heart of the fambul tok process. That’s what I want to tell a little bit of a story about.

Beth Tener 

Before we get into that story, I’d love to just to translate this to those listeners, many of whom might be living in America. Part of what I think is so powerful in the way that you and John approached this work was this idea of creating a space for something that was needed. They needed reconciliation at the local level after the war. In the US, a lot of things are broken and there have been harms done. We haven’t found a way to come together and move forward so that we can come together as one. As  people listen, think about this story, not only in how it applies to those affected by the war, but those on the frontlines of teaching, or being a nurse, or the people in communities. How do we center those closest to the work? How can they have a voice and a space to take leadership on what’s needed?

Libby Hoffman

Another dynamic that resonates in domestic contexts is that the people most impacted by the war didn’t have a voice. Their ideas of what justice would look like or what reconciliation look like weren’t even invited. They didn’t have any space where it was assumed that they might have an understanding of what justice would look like for them or a space where they would be asked: “What do you think it would look like? and how would we go about doing it?”

The fundamental impulse, behind the fambul tok process was to look for the resources, even in the places most decimated by war, by the legacies of colonialism, corruption and these forces that had been at work in that region for so long. Even in those places, they have resources, cultural, individual, and physical, to address the problems that they face and to step into their own leadership. What happens when you ask people what they want, and how they want to achieve it – that was the core behind the work that we were committed to.

The Fambul Tok staff would go into a region. Before they started working, they would they bring together all of the leaders representing all the different groups: victims and perpetrators from the war, elders and young people, Muslims and Christians, men and women, and ask them what they wanted to do. Did they want to reconcile? If they wanted to reconcile, how did they want to do it? What resources did they already have in their community? What help would they need from others to move forward with this work? As I say it, it sounds simple. But the reality of it is that it was so fundamentally new to people in that context, so fundamentally different.

One example on my first visit to Sierra Leone. John and I had already been working together for a few months. They had been preparing the ground for the first of these bonfire ceremonies. I went over for the first ceremony. They were getting ready to start working in another community. I accompanied the staff, as they went to do the consultation in that community before they started working together. They brought together all these leaders sitting around an open air community center. They asked people: did they want to reconcile? How did they want to do it? What resources did they have? What helped do they need from the outside?

There was such a lively conversation that was sparked by that. At first the energy was subdued. Here it was seven years after the war, and they hadn’t had any kind of a reconciliation process. They were assuming that it wasn’t possible. And being asked if they want it, it awakened in them this possibility. There was lively conversation about it. And then what resources did they have? Well, then that awakened to them, oh, we have all of these and we have this tradition. It has been dormant but we want to reawaken it anyway, the conversation and the energy level was palpable.

After an hour or so of this conversation, a gentleman who had been sitting on the edges stood up. He was a tall gentleman dressed all in white. He had kind of the air of a school teacher. He said, “You are the first people to ever come here and ask us what we want.” He recited this litany” “first, the Christians came, and they told us, no, your culture is bad. You need Christianity. And then the Muslims came, and they said, no, no, no, that’s haram, you need Islam. And then the British came in, they said, no, no, no, no, your culture is backward, you need our civilization. And then the war came, and that destroyed everything anyway. And then the aid organizations,” (another in a long number in a long series.)  And he said, “You were the first people to come here and ask us what we want, and to see our culture as a resource.”

I was stunned when he said that. It matched everything that I was hearing. But both the rarity of it shocked me. And the power that it unleashed, to go in to a community and see the potential that’s there, see the resources that are there, see the people, not just as victims, but as leaders. And as leaders of their own process. The power in that invitation unleashes incredible energy to work together on its behalf.

Beth Tener 

Libby invited me and about 100 other people to travel to Sierra Leone, it was about 12 years into their work. We’re going to share where the work went after this bonfire phase. We had this global learning week there, where we got to meet all of the people from the villages all the way up to senior people in the Sierra Leone government who had been touched by where the sparking activation went. I can speak to how alive and activated people were. I see it in the way we think about this kind of work in many places, like how often do we do things as outsiders imposing ideas, like the missionaries or the nonprofits? We see it in hierarchical organizations. Things roll down from the top, corporate initiative after corporate initiative. The people themselves never get asked about what’s needed. As you can hear in the story, showing up with the eyes that you believe people have the answers, and that you’re actually going to listen to what they say – it unleashes something, as you said, that wasn’t there before, right? I mean, it was latent. Is that how you would see it?

Libby Hoffman

I would see it as latent. The centuries of rule from the outside, in whatever form, it was imposed rule. Then the years of the war had destroyed the capacity to really access it. Plus, it had fragmented the community fabric. The Fambul Tok process took three to four months to walk a village through it. They are not coming in and running these bonfire ceremonies for the village. They are inviting the village to lead the process themselves and facilitating that process. In the process, you’re also reweaving the networks of the community, reweaving the fabric of that community. That community itself is like a living entity. It’s an organism in and of itself. It’s an actor in the process and has its own vitality and power.

The bonfire ceremonies became these places where yes, people could acknowledge what happened in the war and apologize and forgive each other, but it was reclaiming the wholeness of the community. It was also the space within which it was safe to talk about what happened. There was an implicit understanding that there are people that will be there to help you deal with the results of this, in an ongoing way. So, reclaiming that communal resource, understanding what it is and repairing the container of the community, that is what then releases the potential so that people can really help themselves.

Beth Tener 

What I’ve seen a lot in the US, is that we work in ways that are transactional. We’re focused on the deliverable: are you going to get to this goal? Are we going to get 27 kids to score this? Are we going to make a profit? We ignore the group process, or see it as is secondary to our goal. Then we’re done with the goal we say “let’s move on.” What I see in the way you approach it is that the process itself of how you do the work together, is the work. You see building the container to be as important as the bonfire. Many amazing things come out of that truth telling and the rebuilding of relationships, but the process seems to also be the point.

Libby Hoffman

The phrase that we use is the process is the product. It’s counterintuitive to the way a lot of humanitarian aid works. We use a metaphor. You can see the community that’s having the problem as like a cup. The aid that’s coming in to address whatever challenge that communities is having is like a bottle of water. The aid community comes in and pours water into the cup to try to deal with the problem. But it flows right through because the cup itself is cracked. The cup itself is invisible in the international aid community, as is the work of repairing the cup. If you just you pour the water in and the problem doesn’t change, then pour more water. Oftentimes, all it does is actually makes the crack in the cup wider, it leaves the community worse off than it was before and more divided and fragmented. And it depletes the aid community.

It is not about pouring water in, it’s about repairing the cup. To take the metaphor one step further, what we found is that when you repair the cup, obviously then it can hold water. It becomes not just a container, but like a well. It allows the community to tap into their deep reserves of groundwater within the community itself. They tap into their own reserves of water of inspiration, of resource.

Beth Tener 

I remember at the gathering in Sierra Leone, people came from the different communities that you worked in. They showed up at the big deck outside the hotel in the morning. These women had little signs saying “Thank you John Caulker and Fambul Tok, our cup is now strong.” The metaphor of the cup is one that you used throughout the country. It’s such a beautiful relatable one. Once something gets named, you can see it and you can all pay attention to it. How do you see that relating to some of the struggles we’re having in the US?

Libby Hoffman

I think oftentimes we don’t pay attention to relationship. We don’t pay attention to the communities where we do live and work, much less to the work of repairing and strengthening our communities. We don’t see that that’s a resource.  A place where I’ve seen the potential in doing this is in schools and classrooms. Those are places where we’re with a group of people over time and you build a sense of community. I spoke about Fambul Tok at middle school in Philadelphia. The students there were so impressed by what they had seen and experienced. They had been plagued by all sorts of conflict all year long in their classes. After I spoke, they had been out on a field trip and a fight broke out. One student hit another student and instead of running to tell the teacher, they gathered everybody and sat in a circle and talked it through and worked out the issues. Then one boy raised his hand and said, we just had our own fambul tok.

They told their teachers about it. The next day, the teachers sat them all in a circle and said you know, enough is enough. We’ve had these problems all year, let’s have a fambul tok bonfire process without the bonfire. And two hours later, everybody in the class had spoken, almost everybody had cried. When we come into these communal spaces, we’re not just bringing ourselves as a student, somebody who’s learning math or reading, we’re bringing the rest of our lives with us. How do we interact with each other as people and not just as objects or as functions in whatever function we have? Creating space for that, to remember our humanity and to interact with each other as humans, is critical and creating learning environments, spaces where we want to do something together, that helps all of us. A space that acknowledges the communal and relational dimensions, and gives us some tools for just for acknowledging our humaneness and dealing with it constructively is so important and powerful.

Beth Tener 

That’s a great story. In the first episode of the podcast with Nancy Gabriel, we talked about the value of circle as such a core space to create that’s not that expensive or involved. The lack of that causes so many problems – that we could add an adding those spaces in.

So that’s a good segue for the next part of the story. In these villages, after the bonfire, can you share a little more about what happened next for the women in the villages?

Libby Hoffman

In every fambul tok process, they formed committees at the community level to lead the process. They made sure to have equal numbers of men and women and to create spaces for the women for the women’s voices to be heard. They wouldn’t ask for their participation once or twice, but multiple times. They went to great lengths to bring women in into roles that they hadn’t traditionally been in, in that culture.

And still, the women said, we were uniquely harmed in the war, and we need something more. Fambul Tok brought the women together from the communities where they were already working to do a consultation about they needed. They said, “We just need a space to come together as women. We want to heal from the war by working together for our communities. And we want to do that as women.”

And they wanted to pick their own name. They didn’t want a political name. We want to be called the Peace Mothers. And so that structure then became part of what Fambul Tok would set up in every community where it worked. A Peace Mothers structure that invited the women together, to lead to come together. They identified not just own individual needs, but what their community needed and how they could come together and work on it. It gave them a sense of empowerment. They were reclaiming their role as leaders and not just as victims. As they were doing these things for their community, they had the informal conversations with each other as women to talk about the things that they couldn’t talk about with anybody else. That was what they most needed, just time and space with other women to be resources for each other on the difficult things that even with their husbands, they couldn’t talk about.

The Peace Mothers have unleashed incredible energy across the whole country. Being invited into leadership with and for each other and having a space in their community that they could step into as leaders. They’ve built community centers, they have started farms, they’ve started micro enterprises to raise funds for sending children to school or building a health center. They’ve built these local networks of trust. Whenever there’s another crisis, those networks are there and the women can be mobilized to help educate and reach their communities about it, which is what happened in the Ebola crisis. It’s what happened when there was election violence. Over the course of a couple national elections, these local networks have mobilized trusted women have been incredibly effective at preventing election violence in their communities.

Beth Tener 

It reminds me when we were at the conference, one of the days they organized for us to go in little groups of people to different villages. Many of those were having Peace Mother gatherings the day we went. It was all the women, but the whole village was there, like the men were all there too. It was such a profound experience to witness that. We came back the next day and had this lively discussion in this ballroom full of 100 people about what we saw. Someone from Kenya said “I’ve just been so impressed with the Sierra Leone people and their level of their motivation and the way the villagers are pulling together and doing things. In my country, it’s like people are kind of waiting on aid and handouts. What is it about the Sierra Leone people that’s so special? I remember John laughing and saying, “no, that’s exactly how Sierra Leone, people were, after so many decades of colonialism and war and past histories. It was the process of that accompaniment and the inviting for the leadership over the time that activated what you now see.”

Libby Hoffman

It’s the legacy of pouring water into a cup and it continues to go through  – it creates these cycles of dependency. People feel that they have to be present in their need, and heighten the expression of their need in order to secure the aid from the outside. It’s unlearning what John would call ‘NGO complex. We had to unlearn NGO mentality. It was just an educated process of dependence. We would say, “we’re not here to give you money. You don’t need us. You have answers, you have resources. And we’re going to see that and we’re going to invite them forward. And we’re going to be here to help you animate and activate them.”

My sense is that that is a pattern and a process that is fairly universal. One of the things that I’m curious about is what are the ways like for you in your work? Have you seen that we’ve internalized these definitions of limitation that aren’t necessarily true, but have become part of the way we operate? The system has pushed us into thinking that that’s the only way it has to be. What does that look like in your arenas of work?

Beth Tener 

One of the things I often do with groups is teach them to collaborate and co-create. I come in using open questions like “how could it… what would it take to…?  I see it in a lot of organizations as a compliance mentality. If it’s been top down and you’re supposed to do what you’re told to do you are not invited to think creatively, and if you have a fear based orientation (if you mess up, you’re going get fired) then in an organization, all that potential is just dormant. You have to set the context and allow the space to think creatively and encourage that.

I see it in life coaches and mentorship and organizational forms based in hosting and partnership, that idea of stewarding leadership. I think it holds such promise, because with the right conditions, all kinds of human creativity can happen. But, if you’ve been told for years, we don’t pay you to think, then it can be hard for people to think creatively. It’s the context around them that has suppressed that human quality I feel like we have a lot more possibility to create these kinds of spaces for this, the spaces where we care about the community together.

You have to really invite people into that because they’re used to just focusing on their organization and their mission. They don’t see the cup. I invite them to show up wearing two hats  – you have your organization hat (focused on I’ve got to get funding for my organization). And you can have the hat of:  Let’s care about the ecosystem. You can put that organization ego aside for a while to like have a conversation about what the whole thing needs. Those are examples how I see it play out.

Libby Hoffman

I love examples because what it illustrates to me is when you are an outside facilitator and you’re helping to create the spaces. How are you envisioning them? Are you envisioning them as spaces of creativity? I think there’s so much potential if we could see the whole humanitarian system as: how do we create spaces of co-creativity?

That requires is not seeing the cup of the community and the work of rebuilding the cup, but it’s actually a different role for the outsider. What does it ask me, if I am not about working in a one way – me to you outside-in way, but envisioning this as a space of co-creativity. I have to come in completely differently, I have to come in from an orientation of seeing your potential, seeing your capacity, creating a space to invite it, listening for it, accompanying it, helping it to grow learning from it. So bottom line, I have to come in as a learner, not as an expert. I think that’s where we need to reorient our international peace and development system to actually help those who want a support from outside of a context, to learn how to come in as learners and accompany errs and co-creators. It’s a different orientation.

Beth Tener 

To translate to other contexts beyond the international aid one, this is about how we have to rethink “leadership” or how we organize. In a school environment, how do we help the teachers and center on the students to create the most effective learning environment? How can we accompany them as opposed to having people who never work in the classroom, rolling down requirements? In a community, you have all these nonprofits and then you have the citizens themselves, people in neighborhoods, just like your villagers, who for years have had other people coming in saying, “Hey, we got something for you.” It’s the same process.

As someone who’s been a consultant and a facilitator, coming in, “from the outside” or as the expert, I spent a long time in that inner reorienting, to say, how do I come in with questions. I picture myself standing side by side with the person, asking a question, as we both look in front, like what’s happening here? What do you need? Asking open questions. I’m orienting from like, I don’t know, I’ve seen other things to work, but you have the answers.

Libby Hoffman

Is that hard for you to go in with that “I don’t know” orientation? What does it take to go in with that, to be willing to be present, not knowing? I find that to be a place where all of the structures that I learned how to do in international peacebuilding and conflict resolution, international development, we’re all really about cultivating my own expertise. And it’s been a continual unlearning process. What’s your unlearning?

Beth Tener 

Because you’re trained to have answers, right? “We’re paying you this money, you come in with answers.” For me, learning the method of asking good questions, which I learned as I was working in starting a sustainability nonprofit. For many years, I’ve focused on the open question of “how could we?” One of my teachers was Fran Peavey. Her quote that I’ve just always kept central is “it’s a far superior strategy to get all minds working on what needs to change rather than trying to convince people that I have the best answer.” I’ve found that by asking the open questions, and trying to imagine that the people themselves have the answers, I’ve found it to work. I’m not getting resistance as much. There are still times that I will advocate and bring my expertise is the process of how to hold it. At times, I will say, “Hey, we’ve got to do it this way and this is why.”

When I interact with people, I imagine they have answers within them that they haven’t even articulated before. If I can really listen and reflect and mirror and invite forth, their leadership and their knowing, I feel like it’s magic. The feeling of that man in the village who’s said, no one ever showed up this way. It’s something I just love. I love interacting with people where they’re like, “Wow, you’re actually asking me and you’re listening, and you’re not talking about yourself?” You know how people just come and talk about their own answers, right?

Libby Hoffman

One of the things that I hear in what you’re saying to Beth is an acknowledgement that we’re not talking about just individual one-on-one things, or an individual action for improvement or an individual mindset. It’s the communal and the collective spaces that allow for an invite like that. I can nerd out on all of the technical details of it. At the risk of being a little too nerded out on that, I would say the way that we’ve done that in the Sierra Leone context is through what we call creating learning and emergent design spaces.

In other words, at every level, you create a learning circle. It’s not just going into a community and doing a bonfire; it’s creating a structure in that community, at the local level, that called reconciliation committees, outreach teams, and Peace Mothers groups. Those structures stay in place. Those become a place where the community can go when new problems arise – it is a collective decision-making process. It used to be that this was a problem. Now we addressed it, what’s the next issue we want to address. The space is where you can come together and nurture collective action and collective decision making, and ongoing real time discernment. We’ve established those at every level.

At the organizational level, the Fambul Tok staff meets monthly to share learning from different areas, to address collective problems to share what their reflect learning. We do that regularly at the international level, to step back and reflect on where we are, what are we learning. Investing in those real time learning spaces is critical. It’s another place where process is product. It’s not a visible result but if you have good communal discernment and decision making spaces – it is what awakens and enables people to bring their whole selves to the process. It’s what enables the process to be sustainable and adaptive and responsive.

People know what is needed, not necessarily individually. But when we come together with the right people in conversation, those things surface, and you can trust that process is reliable and powerful. I’m assuming that you know these spaces –  how might you tdescribe that kind of a living learning space?

Beth Tener 

I resonate with that. What I find to work well is when I’m doing work with a group, we have a design or a hosting team carries forward a piece of work. We will discuss: what does the next meeting need to cover? What’s needed in the next phase of this project or initiative? Then you design it with a lot of input and you arrive together at what is needed for that conversation? What are the right questions? Then after the meeting, we have a debrief about what where the whole team reflects. We ask what worked and what didn’t? What do we want to do for next time? What’s beautiful is the noting, what did we just create together? I think of it as collective efficacy. We talk a lot about the individual, and what are you good at what are your capacities, but this is the ability to build our collaborative muscles and our collective efficiency and effectiveness. And it’s joyful. My favorite parts of collaborating are those pre and post debriefs. I feel like we need to build a lot more of that in. We focus on being productive and efficient, like we’re done with that, let’s move on, and we don’t pause to say, “Wait, what just happened? What can we learn?”

Libby Hoffman

And what’s the role of the outsider in that? I think that’s also really important. It isn’t just somebody who’s there holding a vision of what you’re trying to accomplish that you’re working towards that a linear sort of objective mechanically, but it’s actually the one who brings an outside eye who’s looking for the questions that are there, the answers that are there, who’s inviting them forward. One of the things that we’ve discovered over and over again, is the critical role that an outsider can provide in seeing potential that people who are embedded in that situation don’t see themselves it’s there but they can’t see it. You need the outsider to see and invite it forward; who is proactively looking for the resources and the potential.

Learning how to do that as somebody coming in to support is a critical skill. Lilian Morsay, the director of Peace Mothers in Sierra Leone does this over and over. It is embedded into the Fambul Tok process. We were in a village called Bonda, which was ground zero for Ebola. They were starting to rebuild after it. We went when they were having a meeting to organize the Peace Mothers. These women had walked out there from 60 neighboring villages. A young woman in the middle was speaking so powerfully, inviting and organizing them and telling them about the larger purpose and process. She was so articulate. I was standing next to John and turned to him and said “Oh, my gosh, you should snap her up for Fambul Tok. He thought the same thing.

Well, it turns out, Lilian had seen her in the community work and had seen some potential and said, I want you to help organize this. She literally ran away. And now she’s like, Oh, I can’t do it. I can’t do it. And Lillian had to invite her out. Yes, you can do it. And not just once or twice, but several times. And there she said, yes, you can. She needed to have that invitation and that encouragement. And we all need that. Right?

What are the spaces where we can encourage and invite people forward? How can we make space within whatever initiatives we’re doing for that outside eye: the one who sees the potential who invites it, who encourages it? How can build in encouragement into our programs? It can unleash so much potential that’s there, but we have to acknowledge how powerful it is.

Beth Tener 

I’d love to flip back to the friendship level. In the last four or five years, this idea of holding spaces for learning, hold each other’s journeys, I feel that’s the kind of friendship you and I have been developing.  I have that with several friends who are kindred spirits. We’re interested in the same questions, in life and in work. It’s so fulfilling to set regular times to get together, where we’re returning to some of the same questions we’re holding. We ask “What are we seeing?” I have a standing weekly call on Zoom with some friends who all do facilitation. One of our colleagues is a therapist. We hold a space once a week, and whatever is up and moving personal or professional, we explore it together.

Libby Hoffman

We’re at a time where the old ways of working just don’t work anymore and the new are still emerging, they’re not totally clear. We’re making them as we go. We’re imagining them into being, into expression. When you are at the emerging edge of something, you’re always moving into the unknown, it’s impossible to be there alone. Developing relationships with others who are also at their learning edges is an incredible resource. They might not be doing it in the places or in the ways that you are. What I like in our friendship and in the gatherings that we have with others, it’s being with other people who are living into something new. It’s like repairing my own little community cup and it unleashes new resources.

The most dramatic example of that was where I had just poured everything for about six or seven years into this work, in terms of time, energy, and heart resources. I felt like I poured myself out, lost myself in the process. We were at a turning point and I had no idea how to go forward either as a person as a leader or organizationally. I convened a few colleagues, people who knew me in different ways. I ended up calling it my wisdom circle group. I was at a point of such depletion and not knowing that at first what I had to do was to have them hold the space with me in the middle.

I was always the one who’s holding the space for others, and didn’t have any space where it was held for me. It was so hard to hear people reflect on my strengths and capacities and uniqueness , like I literally didn’t have a muscle that allowed me to receive that. But ultimately, what I found that this communal space, is critical. There’s something unique about a community that becomes visible, not even in our closest one-on-one relationships.

I learned the humility that it took to receive from others. I think sometimes my desire to always be the one who’s giving comes from a place of guilt, or of control, or of these old patterns that just can only go so far. What I learned was, ultimately, I can only give to the degree that I’m also willing and able to receive. That was a profound learning for me and it’s been an ongoing invitation. What I realized is actually, there is so much more good available to and for me on my behalf than I even know to imagine or ask for. It’s one of the reasons why I love having other gatherings like the ones that you and I have done where we brought together small groups of people who are at the leading edge of their own learning. I find it resourcing for me, it opens up new imagination for me of what is possible. And I think, like there’s a beautiful question, as David White would say is like, how much good is available for each of us individually? And communally if we were actually able to envision it, and imagine it and receive it? And what would it take to receive the good that’s available for each of us? To me? That’s a question that love with a capital L is asking on our behalf.

Beth Tener 

That’s a beautiful way to say love with a capital L. We talked about resourcing each other. I can be a resource to you at certain moments, you can resource me. And there’s something in the interaction, when we show up for each other, not knowing asking the question, giving you space to just talk out loud, and in a way that where you just go on and on. You’re not sure where it’s going. And you’re saying things out loud that you haven’t ever said before. When those spaces, their magic, they are they’re so nourishing. I feel there’s a need to create a lot more of those as we think about what’s missing right now. we could create those spaces.

You had also mentioned in your story, that in Sierra Leone, you and John had to drive miles over very poor roads in your work. How did that unstructured drive time ended up being helpful?

Libby Hoffman

As much as I resisted it at one level, because first of all, the roads are really bumpy. It wasn’t always physically comfortable to be driving that long, in those difficult conditions. I am accomplishment oriented – I wanted to get stuff done. If we’re going to a community for a meeting, the purpose was the meeting, right? So let’s get there so we can do the work of the day. Let’s just get through the car ride to get there.

But I began to see when John and I had these hours together in the car we were able to have rambling conversations. We’d circle around an issue that was a challenge that had come up or a vision or something that we’d been thinking about. We’d circle around from problem to concept to dream. We were the two that had the most sort of big picture view of the programming, we could dream together in ways that other people weren’t necessarily in a position to do. The car rides became this incredibly rich time for the evolution where we supported each other as leaders and the evolution of the program. You could step back and reflect. Would task-oriented me ever have built that in? Let’s have a five hour conversation time that’s not structured? No way – but it was precious time.

Car Talk was the space for a different kind of learning, visioning and growth. I think sometimes it’s the circling around that actually moves things forward. It’s not the intentional time to move things forward, you have to stop, you have to go slow. Sometimes you have to do nothing in order to move things forward. I think it was the relationship and the ideas that we grew in those conversations that ultimately has been the strength for the program growing in the way that it did.

Beth Tener 

I feel clarity arises out of that circling. You might start talking about something you see on the side of the road, or how’s your daughter or, and then you come back to the problem. We don’t always get to it by focusing right at it. It’s a different way.

Libby Hoffman

In fact, I find more that focusing right at it actually makes it harder. So how do we build in this unstructured time and value that? We make time and space for learning spaces as a structured part of all of our programming, because it’s critical or retreat time. It’s like you have to go slow to go fast.

Beth Tener 

Beautifully said. And that is a practice any of us can adopt personally and professionally, in different ways. I think we are coming to the end of our time. Thank you so much for your time today and all your wisdom and your lived example. And I was really excited to invite people to check out your new book called The Answers Are There.

Libby Hoffman

Thank you, it’s been a pleasure to have this chance. And I love the invitations that this conversation has given me. I’m grateful.