Three-year Rantiversary/43rd-Birthday Thoughts

Happy New Year! Today, I am celebrating my 43rd birthday and the 3-year anniversary of Disrupt For Good. It all began with my New Year’s Revolution/40th Birthday Manifesto. And as I think about shifts, it’s interesting to notice the shifts I’ve made myself in three years. 

In 2023, we explored a range of topics here, starting with a good old-fashioned rant about women’s rage, then moving to influence and word choice, raising disruptive kids, and even the value of staying curious, before sharing this fall my initial thoughts on some important shifts for those of us in the social service sector.  

Whether you’ve been here since day one or you’re new, thanks for joining in the conversation about how to disrupt the social services sector for good and intentionally centre our work in justice approaches. 

I want to share just a few thoughts as we all transition from 2023 to 2024. 

Book Plans
In November, I wrote that I wanted to write a Disrupt For Good book. But November turned out to be a bit of a false start. I was feeling a bit bad about it, and wondering why I just couldn’t get going, sitting by myself to write a book about essential shifts to reclaim our collective power…until a very wise person helped me realize a few weeks ago that perhaps books about reclaiming collective power aren’t meant to be written in isolation. Boop.

So, new plan. :) 

I’m going to try tackling one shift each month over the next little while, writing about it here, and inviting your thoughts and feedback. I love it when you reply to my emails. I’ll be looking for ways to involve in-person input too, maybe through our new Redwood Community Book Club here in Barrie. 

I’m also planning to stretch out of my comfort zone a bit and ask to be a guest on a few relevant podcasts to discuss these shifts and how they can help us all come together to tackle social issues collectively.

Hopefully, that will get things flowing. Stay tuned!

Word of the Year
This is my third year choosing a word of the year. Three years ago, I chose Solidarity, to help me focus as I made that intentional shift from charity to solidarity myself. 

Then I found taking a posture of solidarity in 2022 made me quite angry. How could it not? But it was leaking into the way I presented myself with decision-makers, and I was getting pushback. 

As I wrote last year, “I don’t want to let anyone off the hook. I don’t want to water down the truth. I don’t want my hard-core social justice friends to call me a bootlicker. 

And also, I want to be able to have important conversations and don’t want people to lose out on needed support and services because a politician didn’t like my word choice or tone of voice. 

Also also, I don’t want to be angry and judgy all the time.

My experiment for 2023 is to mix justice and solidarity with a dash of Grace. I’m hoping adding grace to the mix will help me be hard on issues but soft on people, and communicate in a way that lands on open ears without compromising my integrity.”

Whether it was grace or not, being intentionally soft on people and hard on systems did lead to more interesting and productive conversations this year in several arenas (2023 gave us lots of opportunities to practice!), and it is something I will be taking with me into 2024. 

When I consider the shifts I wrote about a few months ago, the one I am currently in is Problem Solving to Possibility Imagining. I wrote about this last month, sharing Shawn Ginwright’s thoughts on Problem Loving from his book The Four Pivots and his quote, “We know what we are fighting against, but what are we creating, imagining, fighting for?” 

I have added a new piece of art in my office, a beautiful linocut that includes this Angela Davis quote:

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world, and you have to do it all the time.”

So, I’m choosing Possibility as my word for 2024 to help me move from problem-loving/solving to asking, what is possible here? I’m excited to see where it takes us.