Building Healthy & Just Futures: A Conversation w/ Kirby Broadnax

At the beginning of the year, our IofC team welcomed a new team member in the person of KIRBY BROADNAX. She came to us as a graduate student completing a 3-month practicum as part of her studies at Eastern Mennonite University’s world-renowned Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. This was certainly a reciprocal opportunity - a chance for a graduate student to work with a nonprofit in real-time on priorities of community alignment, social justice, narrative change and arts activism and for our organization to learn, listen to and implement fresh interdisciplinary perspectives from someone engaged in theory and practice.

However, we were not prepared for the abundance that Kirby offered IofC USA in such a short time. She possesses a storehouse of skillsets in facilitation and dialogue and also critical generosity, empathy, deep listening and thoughtful creativity. We are fortunate that following her graduation from EMU and move back home to her beloved Cleveland, she decided to continue with our team in a new role as Holistic Care & Community Building Consultant. In this position, she has thread new processes of listening, reflection, planning and development for our team as we strive to work together while also working remotely.

Get to know Kirby Broadnax. In the interview below, we ask her 5 questions exploring the paths that led her to this work, her time with IofC USA, what brings her radical joy and healing during these multi-pandemic times, and her dreams for building healthy & just futures.

Q: You are a facilitator and practitioner in restorative justice, trauma awareness, and conflict transformation. What journeys did you take that led you into these fields of work?

KB: In so many ways, I am still coming into these practices and definitely learning. For the first time in my life I feel like I’ve begun a journey that is more clearly aligned with who I am, the presence that I strive to embody, and the gifts and skills that I have and have been cultivating. This all feels very exciting and emergent!

Much of how I learned to communicate and engage with conflict came from my parents. My mom and dad have been the mediators and connectors in their families and in our own. For example, when my brother and I would get into it with each other, my mom would ask us both what happened, she’d help us to understand the other’s point of view, and then she’d make us apologize then hug each other! We’d always feel better after that hug. My mom didn’t have this language or framing, but a lot of how she supported my brother and I addressing conflict was from a restorative perspective - how cool that my first learnings of restorative justice came from my mom! My dad had more of the mediator/negotiator energy in how I saw him approach conflict. I feel so grateful for these early learnings.

As an elementary school teacher, I saw the opportunities for supporting my students in interacting with one another in more compassionate ways, but didn’t have many tools at that point. In my work with Cleveland Mediation Center (OH), I learned transformative mediation, conflict coaching, and the power of nonjudgmental listening. In my work with a land conservation organization, I began to connect in deeper ways with the land and environment around me, and navigated conflict within institutions and bureaucratic structures. So my work has continued to both build on itself, as well as add new and interesting layers.

Through ongoing reflection, I decided to return to school to study conflict transformation - a broad practice and field of understanding conflict at various levels, including at the root, and exploring justice - and healing-centered ways to address it. As I explored my interest in working with conflict, it became clear that I needed to also learn about trauma; conflict, harm, and trauma can be intertwined, and can impact how the other unfolds. Understanding even this helps me to think in a more comprehensive way about conflict itself and what kinds of strategies might be supportive to repairing harms.

Q: You are engaged with IofC USA through the vein of Holistic Care & Community-Building. Break that down for us: what does this entail?

KB: I engage with IofC USA through a lens of care - care for the collective team, for individual needs & experiences, and care from an organizational practice perspective.

Right now, my work is internally-focused, providing opportunities for our staff to connect with one another in different ways that build relationships, strengthen supports, and mitigate harm. I’ve designed a number of circle processes for our team, created a process for one-on-one staff conversations and reflections, offered some affinity spaces, and am continuing to plan additional processes for organizational growth! This is largely new work for me, though I’ve had my share of experiences modeling care in professional spaces and supporting organizational change in other ways. I’ve been immensely grateful for my mentors who have been offering their guidance and wisdom.

Q: We are living in a time where multiple pandemics are being called out and confronted. The most prominent of these being Covid-19 and anti-Black racism and state sponsored violence against marginalized communities. What do you make of this moment? What are your hopes and dreams for our collective futures?

KB: This moment feels like one where we are really being called to deeply acknowledge our collective wellbeing, and to do what we can with the gifts, learnings, and resources that we have to support that wellbeing. Our planet is continuing to demand that we change our extractive relationship and attempts at domination over land and non-human creatures, and each other. We must be and act differently now and moving forward.

I think about the ways we saw institutions choose (at the onset of COVID-19) to contribute to people’s wellbeing by offering months of free & reduced cost wireless internet, postponing evictions, and releasing folks from jails for example - this reveals what many of us have known all along; conditions of oppression and structural harm persist because of a lack of will and interest in changing them, not because of a lack of resources or ability to change them. So how can we - those of us interested in dismantling these harmful systems and rebuilding compassionate ones - keep the pressure on the institutions and power-brokers and demand the kind of healthy and just future that we need and want? And, in the spirit of prefigurative politics and the transformative justice movement, what can we at the individual, family, and community level do to live into that future right now? The mutual aid groups that we’ve seen popping up around the country are examples of that, as was the recent autonomous zone in Seattle. How can we live our collective liberation, even in tiny ways, every day?

This is not an easy moment. But we have so much history and wisdom among and within us to call on in this moment, as well as the ability (and responsibility) to call on one another.

Q: There's so much talk about the importance of self-care, wellness, and radical joy. What practices help to balance your own ecosystem?

KB: Honestly, this is something that I feel challenged by right now! Self-care is sometimes easier for me to celebrate and encourage than it is for me to actually do. The ways that I’ve cared for myself recently include making doctor’s appointments that I’ve needed, connecting with dear friends (virtually & from a safe physical distance), snuggling with my cat, eating dinner with my partner, and tending to my garden. On an even smaller scale, taking deep breaths or letting myself cry in moments of overwhelm, lighting incense and/or a candle to process grief or using essential oils to give myself a massage are things I might do in a moment.

I’ve come to expand how I talk about self-care to include community care also - how we show up for our community of loved ones and how we allow them to show up for us in times of need is important. In my circle that’s looked like everything from hosting meals and sharing different resources with one another to friends looking after my garden and cat when I was away from home.

Q: One thing this social-distancing time we are living in has brought out is an abundance of (often free) digital resources. What are 3 things you reading, watching or listening to right now and how do they keep you uplifted?

KB: One thing that consistently accompanies me through life is music! Right now I’ve been listening to a variety of things, but I’ve been really jazzed about the new album from Lianne LaHavas. One of my favorite ways to watch Netflix is with my partner, for whom tv is a treat -- I watch more than he does :)

We’ve caught up on the new season of Queer Eye, and are currently making our way through Little Fires Everywhere, which takes place in a town that is right next to where we live! I’m reading (embarrassingly for the first time) Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston -- whew! Stunning, stunning writing (of course); it’s spot-on, it’s funny, and is bringing me so much pleasure to read. Art is so essential; I’ve been currently seeking out art that brings me joy and inspiration, and have been loving the creative ways artists have been sharing their work virtually these days!