Feminist Founders Subscriber-Only Podcast

Welcome to the Feminist Founders audio series event. This is a bonus for paid subscribers of the Feminist Founders newsletter, so if you're here, thank you so much for your support. I'm excited to bring you this series, featuring incredible thought leaders who will share insights about doing business differently in a way that honors equity and social justice. I hope you learn a lot from this. Let's dig in.
Becky Mollenkamp: Hello again, I hope you're enjoying this audio series. It has been so much fun for me to put together and have these conversations, and I really hope you love listening to them. Today, I'm bringing you my friend Faith Clarke. I absolutely adore Faith. She helps people create restorative work cultures by decolonizing them, creating places of belonging. She does this for corporate clients and also smaller founders who want to ensure their spaces create belonging, rather than pulling people farther apart. It's all about inclusivity and creating people-first spaces. That's what we're talking about today: belonging and how to create spaces of more belonging at a high level. Obviously, we can't get to everything— that's her work—but we are going to talk about how to create spaces of more belonging, whether you have a membership, work one-on-one with clients, or are just out networking or holding events. How do you make sure that the spaces you're in, creating, or part of, are places where belonging is happening? I hope you really enjoy this conversation with Faith, and I'll make sure you can find all the links to follow and connect with her in the show notes. She also shares them at the end, so please enjoy.
Becky Mollenkamp: Faith, hello, my friend, and thank you so much for doing this. I'm so excited to share your amazing wisdom with people. You know, I find you brilliant and love having conversations with you. So I'm really excited. We're going to talk about belonging and how that can look inside communities. I'd love to start by getting to a shared place of understanding of definition. Can you share with me what you mean when you talk about belonging? What does belonging mean?
Faith Clarke: Hi, Becky, thanks for inviting me to participate in this experience with you. Talking about cultivating belonging in communities is one of my favorite things to talk about. So, defining belonging, I have to connect it to inclusion because most of my work is about how to create the experience of being included. How does the state of inclusion get produced in communities, teams, and workplaces? A lot of traditional DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) work has focused on diversity, and I tend to say that if we don't focus on inclusion, then our diversity efforts are in vain. When I look at inclusion, I'm using Claude Steele's definition. He's a social psychologist, and he says that inclusion happens when a person feels like they belong, feel grateful that they belong, and feel like they can thrive. That clued me into the idea that belonging is a core element of inclusion.
In my research on belonging, through interviews with 20-something people, as well as all my reading and work with organizations, there are a couple of elements to this experience of belonging that I focus on. The first thing I want to say is that belonging is a subjective experience. It's individually experienced and dependent on individual and communal factors, but it's an individual person's experience. So, there isn't a way to 100% guarantee that anyone will feel like they belong. That is pretty subjective and specific to an individual. However, belonging is something that's experienced in community. There's no notion of belonging without the other. So it is this individually subjective experience inside a community that belonging or not belonging emerges. It has a physical component. People describe how it feels to belong through the lens of things like relaxation, feeling like they can exhale, feeling like they can drop their shoulders. Maybe a little bit on the emotional side, feeling like they're at home. It's tied to the feeling of safety. This feeling that they're safe enough to be authentic without fear of punishment, rejection, or negative reprisal for that authenticity. So it's, "I can let myself be seen, and I don't have to worry about the ill effects of being seen." And back to the communal component, it's that ability to feel safe being seen, knowing that the community is holding that safety and that container. It's safety that is not being created by the self. I don't have to keep myself safe. The community that I belong to and with is keeping me safe.
The last piece is that belonging is about need fulfillment. So there's something about the community meeting the needs of the individual, and this is a communal responsibility. This individual in this community where they belong—they are not the ones making sure that the resourcing for their own specific needs exists. The community meets the community's needs, including this individual's needs. When I think through what the core needs are for humans, the three needs I tend to focus on are the needs for autonomy—to be able to direct your life in the way you want, the need for quality relationships that reflect you, that mirror you, that feel aligned with you, and the need to be able to express your competence, your expertise, in ways that are meaningful to you and meaningful within the community. So, whenever those needs are being met and supported by the community, the resourcing needed to meet those needs is being provided by the community, and the barriers to meeting those needs are being actively monitored by the community and are being overcome by the community. It's not this person's responsibility to keep noticing the barriers and bringing them up to other people. When the community is owning and holding need fulfillment, then that person can feel like they belong. So, the sense of safety, subjective yes, in community yes, a sense of safety, physical sense of relaxation, exhale, feeling like you're at home, safe in terms of vulnerability, and safe from negative reprisal, and then need fulfillment, where the community is holding the responsibility for meeting this person's needs.
Becky Mollenkamp: I love the way you talk about belonging, and thank you for all of that. You mentioned safety quite a few times, and I'm wondering if you can talk a little more about the distinction between or commonalities between belonging and the term that we hear so often, "safe space" or "safer spaces" or "brave spaces." These are things that are really common right now when people talk about communities, and I wonder if belonging is part of that, different from that, and where people go wrong when they're thinking about safe spaces but not really thinking about belonging.
Faith Clarke: When people say that they feel safe when they belong, they feel that sense of safety. As I said before, one of the things they're saying is that they can allow themselves to be fully seen and not be afraid of punishment, judgment, or negative consequences of being seen. They also feel like their protection from negative consequences, their protection from whatever things that could happen, it's not just their responsibility. There's a communal monitoring for their safety and a communal effort to help keep them safe. So the community, as in the individuals in the community—the community together—is caring for their needs, is on the lookout for barriers to their need fulfillment, is together protective. In some ways, the community is also sharing the brunt of the effect of whatever negative thing happens. They're not just out in the cold; the community is holding. So the idea of a safe space is not the absence of "bad things" happening. It's not even the absence of harm. It's the presence of communal holding and communal support and communal care, communal monitoring for harm, communal protection, and communal grieving when it happens, communal responsibility-taking. So I'm not going to comment too much on the technical meanings of safe space or brave space. I'm going to comment on the implementation of whatever space we're holding.
When we try to create this safety by removing everything that could bother anyone, it's like the extreme elimination diets—by the time you take out all the potential allergens, you're down to like three items of food. Part of what some implementations of safety in community do is create enforced groupthink or remove any exposure to any difference. So this idea of being seen fully as you are isn't possible because if there's an element of how you are that bothers another person, that can't be seen. So there's an element of communal control, even, so that only the things that no one will be bothered by are available. And then, who determines what people will be bothered by, right? Part of what I tend to challenge is, in our creation of safe spaces, how do we build our capacity to be with difference? Because fundamentally, if we can't build our ability to be—not to moralize difference, but to actually witness difference and to build bridges towards difference—if we don't build our ability to others—this is John Powell's wonderful work at the Othering and Belonging Institute in Berkeley, California—if we don't build our ability to notice when we're othering, when we're making difference a problem, and then build bridges towards each other, then we can't build these spaces where people feel like they belong.
So what would we be doing wrong? Well, definitely when we try to control the expression of difference, we're definitely doing something wrong. Also, when we don't acknowledge that the people who can fully express themselves, the more fully a person can express themselves in spaces, tend to be the people who are supported by those spaces. And typically, spaces support people with power identities, with privileged identities. So we're talking about white, hetero, male. We're talking about the majority types. It's not majority because a lot of marginalized identities are majority identities, but they're just not supported identities. So it's the identities that are considered the power identities in our societies. Those identities are well supported, and so those people, those identities, already have their needs met. Part of what creating safety needs to be about is people who are well resourced being even more on the lookout for the needs of others, noticing when other people aren't at the table, aren't having their needs met, are being overly exposed, are experiencing extreme critique, noticing when they themselves, who are well resourced, are having a reaction to another person's difference. When people with power identities do that noticing and do that reconciling for themselves, they put themselves in a better position to become a part of communal care, communal bridge building, communal support, and communal safety for people with more marginalized identities.
Becky Mollenkamp: Your answer gives me a couple of questions that I want to explore, the first being that you mentioned safe spaces or spaces of belonging not othering, allowing people to feel that safety to speak differences of opinion and those sorts of things. I'm wondering how you balance that with preserving values inside of a space and also where differences can actually lead to a lack of safety. So I'm thinking about things like differences of opinion on something like a person's humanity, meaning, you know, if you are somebody who's trans-exclusionary as a feminist or if you are somebody who is supporting Donald Trump or whatever those things are that are differences of opinion, but those differences of opinion are about someone's humanity. How do you balance that, allowing space for differences, knowing that there are some things that just don't align with values? And then also when things get more complicated, like having a discussion around what's going on in Palestine, where there can be some real tricky issues around identity and humanity. I know this is probably a huge answer, but I'm hoping you can give at least some idea of how to allow for differences of opinion without allowing for things that can actually be really harmful for someone to say to someone else.
Faith Clarke: Let me simplify this question by asking, how do we allow for differences of opinion without allowing things that could actually be harmful to another person being said? You referred to it as a balance between allowing people to speak their differences of opinion and preserving safety. I just want to pick that apart a little bit before I go into some suggestions. The idea of "allowing" suggests a leader, a person, or a body setting rules that, if people break them, they're... setting some rules that say you can say this, and you can't say that. I'm not going to debate whether that's happening, but I am challenging all of us in this framing of "allowing." Is it a single leader who is making sure that these things do or don't happen, or is it, as per my definition of belonging being communal responsibility, a community working together to ensure that the community remains safe, that the community is honoring of individual differences, that the community is protective of all its members, that the community actively reduces barriers to need fulfillment for everyone, and that the community shares the pain of unsafety whenever it occurs or lack of need fulfillment whenever it occurs? If we agree, if as a community, we agree that it's communal responsibility, not the need of some person to set rules and then I determine whether I come in or not and how I engage based on an externally determined set of rules, then the community, as a group of people who themselves want to be safe, needs to work together to make that happen, right?
I don't know that it's as much about what are the ways to do this standing on the outside and making this community as much as how do people together co-create communal safety. If we're asking that question, then I think the community wants to have some general agreement on how we listen, how we speak, how we act. I don't mean "you can't do this or you can't do that," but definitions of care that we're talking about, safety and so on, mean that I want to listen with curiosity, for example. I want to be aware of my triggers so that when somebody says something and I feel myself being triggered, I attend to that. I know when I can be in conversations with particular members of the community and when I can't, but also my triggers are known by other members of the community who, out of care for me, may moderate, balance, think about how they offer some bits of conversation. It's not about people willy-nilly speaking their opinions because that opinion needs to be in service to something within the community, and two people having a conversation that's safe between them is different from something being said in an open forum where the community knows that a member of the community would be triggered by or bothered by this expression. So there is this sense of communal holding, which means communal agreements around how we listen, how we speak, and how we use our power. Within a community where you have multiple different identities, what are our agreements on sharing power so that the voices of people who tend not to be heard get to be heard? Then, the dialogue and the both/and, that people build the capacity, that communities build the capacity to stay at the table and have meaningful dialogue. It's wholly different from "I'm going to throw my opinion across, and we're going to argue." I don't think differences of opinion harm. I think the way we navigate differences of opinion, what we think differences mean, and the moralizing of these differences, and therefore imputing certain motivations and character attributes to people because of differences of opinion—that's what's harmful. Being present with that, having the skills, learning the skills, being committed to the skills of being present with that, I think that's what's needed within community. Then, the community also needs to agree on a way to navigate when there is harm. What's your harm repair? What's your strategy? There will be times when, outside of our best intentions, somebody feels harmed or something happens within the community that feels violent, but a community that's committed to removing barriers and together holding the pain of harm, that community will have a strategy for doing that or multiple strategies. So, what's your way of inviting reconciliation? What's your way of getting on the same page? What's your way of seeing together? A restorative practice or practices for conflict navigation needs to be agreed on by communities. Again, this is not something that's given by the leader. I don't think so. I think community members, because each community will change with different identities, different people, and as the community changes, some of the practices may need to change depending on who's present. So, communal agreements on what the restorative practices are, for example, when conflict occurs. Communal agreements on what's the individual responsibility for their own self-regulation. Communal agreements on how we share power and how we give space to voices that don't tend to be heard. Communal agreement on how we're choosing to work on our meaning-making, and when we find ourselves making meaning in one particular way that leads to discord—or that leads to harm, to further marginalization, to hierarchy—how do we call ourselves in and allow others to call us on that, so that we can reframe our thought processes in ways that are more nourishing and supportive? Some of these agreements need to be explicit initially because the implicit threads that run through our society are anti-belonging. Automatically, if we put communities together, we will have people resorting to more harmful behaviors if they're not being intentional—more harmful, exclusionary, reductive, hierarchical, supremacist behaviors, especially when under pressure, especially when they feel threatened.
Becky Mollenkamp: The other thing your original answer brought up for me was about power differentials and those who have the identity that holds power and those who have more marginalized identities. Are there differences in how you go about creating spaces of belonging, especially if you want to create spaces of belonging for people of all identities, not just a sort of affinity group? If you are a white-bodied person trying to create a space that allows for belonging for someone of the global majority, or vice versa, are there differences in how you approach belonging when you are a person holding that power identity, that identity that is historically oppressing, versus if you are somebody holding a marginalized identity?
Faith Clarke: Yes, there are differences, but I'll just put that within the context that all of us have power/privilege identities and all of us have marginalized identities. The balance is likely different, and if you have a dominant privileged identity based on our society right now—in the US, we're talking about whiteness, heteronormativity, maleness, English-speaking, maybe neurotypical—these are the big ones. Even if you are, say, white, male, and an immigrant (immigrant being a marginalized identity), the way you're supported in space is different from a person who is white, female, disabled, and an immigrant. The mixture of identities matters. Through the lens of every marginalized identity we hold, we develop skills through hardship on how to see what's needed, how to navigate space, and how to build bridges. So there's a dexterity that we have through the lens of our marginalized identities that makes us, as people with dominant power identities, more effective at seeing what some of the needs could be. On the other hand, if you go through the world with the major power identities, you're more fragile. Renee Taylor says that through the lens of our power identities, through our privilege identities, we're fragile. If you're building community, the very first thing you need to know is to own your fragility. Understand where you're fragile—through the lens of those power identities. For me, that might be my neurotypicality, or my neurotypical-passing-ness, which makes me fragile in terms of my support of people who are neurovariant in different ways. If I'm building a community where all bodies feel like they can belong, then I need to be aware of my blind spots. The first place to look is through the lens of power identities. I also need to invite support, dialogue, and insight from people who understand life through the lens of marginalized identities to help me with the work of co-creating a community where everyone feels like they belong.
So far, I'm not separating it too much by power identity versus marginalized identity, just to say that everybody, every leader, every community creator, every community catalyst, has to understand themselves and their blind spots because of their dominant way of going through the world. Then, they need to answer the question, "How do I tune myself well to the needs of the people in the community around me?" I'll basically say that everybody knows their needs best. The best way to know what people need and to help people co-create communal care, communal supports, communal listening, and safety is to pay attention to what people say they need, especially through the lens of the identities people have and their lived experience in the world.
Becky Mollenkamp: To start to wrap us up, I would love it if you could share maybe just a few high-level tips of the things people should be thinking about if they are running memberships or other types of communities where they want to make sure people have that feeling of belonging. What are the things they can be thinking about, the questions they can be asking themselves, the things they can be looking for inside of their communities to make sure that they are doing a good job of creating belonging?
Faith Clarke: If you're creating a community, a mastermind, or any other kind of group where you want belonging to be an essential component, then I think the very first thing you want to do is to have a sense, with the group of people you're inviting in, what does belonging mean? What will it look like? What will it feel like? Just what is it? It is a subjective experience, and the people who are there are the ones who will be able to say what it feels like and what it looks like. I think creating belonging, because it is communal responsibility, not just the responsibility of the person who's creating it, means inviting everyone to be in this co-creation of what it looks like, how we preserve it, and how we want to be with each other. In other words, what's the culture that we want to have here? Of course, you can have some thoughts on what that will be and some basic guidelines, but I do think it's essential for communities to come together and agree on that. That way, I take responsibility for my role in protecting, caring for, and facilitating belonging for others. Too often in communities, it's somebody else's job, not my job, right? The community needs to co-create it.
Once the community has agreed on culture and what belonging should look and feel like, then the community needs to have practices that reinforce this in the normal parts of whatever the community's work is. So if belonging looks like listening in a particular way, if it feels like particular kinds of affirmations, tuning in and offering care, or whatever, then that needs to be ingrained in the normal life of the community. When we meet for a Zoom call, how do we show these elements of belonging? What are some of the ways, what are our practices, and so on. Having a repertoire of practices and ways of being that we offer up—people will naturally, also, spontaneously do their own versions of these things, but in communal spaces, it's almost like we all need permission to do the thing we said we want to do. Especially in this climate, people are cautious, not wanting to look like they are out of step with the group. So, having explicit practices that say, "Yeah, no, we are doing the thing we said we're doing. This is the way that we want to be in the world," will make that easier. So, community practices, as I said before, having clear guidelines for dealing with conflict, or when harm happens, and having some kind of accountability structure, like how we hold ourselves accountable to being this way. What's our approach to the skills needed to cultivate belonging, and then what's our way of holding ourselves individually and communally responsible for putting these practices in place? What's our community ethics? It's basically about agreeing on some of those things. When we see belonging as the nutrients for the performance of the community, in other words, whatever the goal is—whether this community is getting together to build a building or make money or whatever the external-facing goal is—when we see belonging as a way to accelerate that goal, then we set practices in place and infuse our work towards our goal with those practices. So, whatever the goal of the community is, you want to be thinking through, "What's our work, and how do principles of belonging in culture affect that?" Thinking that through together and offering people some guidelines on that is also essential.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you, Faith, so much for this. I love having conversations with you, and I love that I get to share your voice with others. Can you please finish this up by telling people where they can learn more about you and where they can connect with you?
Faith Clarke: Thanks, Becky. It was fantastic just thinking through these questions with you and answering them. I can be found on the socials—too much on the socials—but most places as Faith Clarke or Faith A. Clarke, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. My website is faithclarke.com, and by email at faith@faithclarke.com. So, I think any of those ways, people can get in touch with me. Typically, I invite people to have an initial conversation with me just so I can understand what's happening because many of the problems I solve are upstream problems. People will come to me with a downstream issue, and I want to be able to track a course back to the upstream problem, which means we usually have an initial pretty long conversation just so I can understand what the dependencies are before I then devise a solution that potential clients may or may not want. I love conversations, and at the end of the conversation, people will get something they can think about more, and maybe we can dialogue more in the future.
Becky Mollenkamp: I really am so thankful to Faith for doing this. I hope you enjoyed her melodic voice and learned a lot from her. Again, you can find how to connect with her in the show notes. I will be back again tomorrow with another episode with my business coach, Jason Zook of Wandering Aimfully.