September Featured Author | Stacey Sexton
Welcome to our featured author series where we share different points of view on advancing social justice and DEI+B efforts through the ever evolving fields of multicultural organizational development, human resources, implementation science, equitable evaluation and applied research, improvement science, learning science, performance measurement, and team science.
Each month we highlight someone in this work we admire and have learned from in the past. Our hope is that you find new perspectives, ideas, and insights to inspire and challenge the way you live and work.
Stacey Sexton
Evaluator, SageFox Consulting Group
Hi, I’m Stacey Sexton. I am a queer, nonbinary, Socialist organizer, educator, facilitator and coach supporting individuals and teams working through conflict, deepening their understanding of and action toward social justice, and finding balance between being human and being a change agent. I have been wrestling with big questions in education in one form or another for 28 years and with formal methodological training for 10 years. I bring decades of experience organizing with issue-based activist organizations, unions, and left-wing political groups.
When I’m not letting my mind wander through ideas, I’m keeping myself grounded in my community through participation in local struggles, organizing, and mutual aid work. I genuinely try to get to know the people around me. I love being in nature and I find that sitting quietly among a stand of trees is the closest I can come to sensing the divine.
Why do you do the work you do?
Two of the core beliefs that animate my worldview are:
Education is one of the foundational acts of being human
Humans are hardwired to be in community with each other
I find myself drawn to education because I believe it is the most basic human activity and has been integral in our transformation as a species throughout the ages. Without the capacity and drive to teach and learn from one another we wouldn’t have the wonders both ancient and modern that are in our world. Yet, it is the second core belief that pushes me to take a hard look at how we have institutionalized this fundamental act, often to the detriment of developing and living in community with one another.
I work to rekindle our orientation toward community, enliven our sense of what education is for, and nourish each person’s relationship to their own humanity. These three threads form the fabric of social change which is my ultimate why, discovering what we are working toward and not only against.
What technique, method, tool, theory or practice would you like to highlight that is promising and/or proven for advancing social justice?
Being involved in social justice asks each of us to engage in inquiry around our own selves -- our thoughts, habits, history, assumptions. We are called to know ourselves, and in knowing ourselves we become better able to engage in struggles for justice.
Two tools/readings that I have found useful, but which may require you to rethink what your work actually is, are:
Fumbling Towards Repair: A workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators
In It Together: A Framework for Conflict Transformation in Movement-Building Groups
These tools are related but distinct.
Fumbling Towards Repair asks us as individuals to honestly assess our capabilities and capacity to be with our community in pursuing accountability processes. You do not end up with a “score” that either qualifies or disqualifies you from taking on a role like this, rather it allows you to better understand your own relationship to power, accountability, harm, and repair. It asks you to reflect on moments where you have caused harm. It helps you understand your own triggers and encourages you to get clear and get real with yourself about your limits, your boundaries and where you might not be able to effectively support an accountability process. Further, knowing these things gives you valuable information about what you yourself might seek out, support in working through, or expanding your understanding around.
In It Together was designed to be used by groups who are experiencing conflict, or who want to better prepare themselves for when (not if) conflict happens within the group. Movement building groups -- much like organizations or projects dedicated to addressing diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging within their chosen context -- can experience difficulty in acknowledging and transforming conflict. Why? Well, ridding ourselves of the muck of ages isn’t an overnight process, and even those of us who mean well and really are working toward a better society (or organization to keep it grounded) will still stumble. And we need to be ready to deal with that without allowing ourselves to crumble, or splinter, or wither away, or become disaffected and stop working for change.
I wrote earlier that using these pieces, or seeing their value in your context, might require a mental shift in how you think about what your work is. It seems to me that no matter the context in which we operate -- education, healthcare, social services, sciences and technology -- we are all really in the business of working with people in processes of mutual teaching, learning, growth, and change to achieve a common purpose. Strengthening your own ability to have healthy conflict, to address it, work through it, and to allow conflict to be a transformative, illuminating process can only help you in your work, wherever it is you are best poised to work for change.
What are some books you wish everyone would read?
One book that I have found to be timeless is Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (1984). This collection of essays and speeches is not only one of the foundational texts of Black Feminist thought, but also contains meditations on grief, death, life, eroticism, the place that art and literature have in our lives, and so many other nuggets of wisdom. It’s the kind of text that grows with you. Every time I come back to it I find something new.
The most recent re-reading of the text that I did was earlier this year for a professional development program that I’m part of. At that time I was going through a period of feeling discouragement about the state of the “organized” left, feeling the splintered nature of struggle, and the way that different struggles are often pitted against one another to prevent us from joining together. I was also getting a bit burnt out with my own work, by the painfully slow pace of progress, worrying about trying to figure out the “best” next step to take. And I was coming to my edge, my edge of energy, of patience (with myself and others), of wellness.
And then I read the printing of Audre Lorde’s 1982 address at Harvard University, “Learning from the 60s”. She reminded me that these feelings are not new, and that there is hope for working through them. The line that made me have to put the book down and gather myself reads, "Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors." It comes after perhaps the more famous line, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
I needed to hear this, needed to sit with it, internalize it (and still do). We are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors, both individually, and certainly as a collective.
What are a couple of practices, resources, and/or tools that help you live more to your values on a daily?
Part of my human experience includes living with and managing my executive function dysregulation. Because executive function disorders (including ADHD) are fundamentally dopamine production and regulation disorders, I spend a lot of time thinking about my dopamine-inducing and dopamine-consuming activities and trying to strike a balance. Three practices that help me achieve balance are:
Daily yoga and hiking: these are non negotiable in order to maintain myself, physically, emotionally, spiritually. Both of these activities enable me to (most of the time) turn my mind off and get into my own body.
Writing and journaling: my brain is a little ocean of thoughts and ideas that churns constantly. I have to externalize those thoughts, elsewise they crowd in there like the giant trash pile in the Pacific. As a bonus, externalizing my ideas makes it easier to share them with others.
Being in community: attending a protest! Or a city council meeting! Showing up is a spiritual act, and is the most basic expression of my values. I do not lead or organize most of the things I am involved in, and I don’t have to. I lead where I am suited to lead and elsewise my presence is enough.
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