What is this?

Overview

We are grateful to be able to share this learning deck with you.  Grateful for having had the opportunity to do this work, grateful to our students and collaborators with whom we shaped it, grateful to Lala Openi who helped bring it to life visually, and grateful to you for making time and space to engage with it.  In order to share this work publicly, we need to share a bit about how it feels to do so.  We hope this gives you a peek at who we are and how we come to this work.

“What does it mean to share this work?  It’s honestly a little like sharing a piece of my heart.  I can’t help but feel super vulnerable, a little raw.  This work has changed and shaped me in so many ways.  Reflecting on the journey, it makes me a little embarrassed about where I was when I started, gives me confidence about how far I’ve progressed, and keeps me humble about how much more I need to do for the world and myself.  It’s emotional for me to share this work because it’s more than a list of workshops and activities, it’s the relationships I’ve made along the way, the challenging realizations I’ve had, and the formation of new visions for what could be.

I hope that this work speaks to others in a deep way.  I hope sharing it invites folks who are curious and creative to come join us in building something meaningful, something that will continue to help us grow and love one another.  I fear this work will be passed off as yet another DEI framework that companies/orgs/schools half-heartedly try and abandon.  I know some of this is inevitable, and also that this work is and forever will be for those who seek justice and liberation in their hearts and communities.”

–Louie Montoya

“As I wrote my intentions for this year a few words rose to the top—ease, joy, and abundance. I deeply believe that building a world that honors people who have been historically excluded and marginalized can not be done in isolation. We need each other. We don’t have to like each other, we don’t always have to agree on tactics, but we do need each other. We need one another to create communities of trust and care. We need one another to strategize, organize, and disrupt powerful, oppressive systems. Our work came from the depths of these needs—from being burnt out, hitting the wall of white supremacy again and again, and feeling alone in championing equity within entrenched organizations.

This work is an offering to our former selves and to others who don’t yet have the language to describe the pain of being unheard and under appreciated. At their best, the tools that we have built and are building will foster ease, joy, and abundance. Ease by offering a community to support us both when activated and when we need rest. Joy as we begin to model the behaviors that deeply honor our humanity—and because there is so much release and laughter in liberatory work. Abundance as we realize we all have so much to contribute and we can join together with our knowledge, gifts, and resources to bend our futures towards justice.”
— Jess Brown

“I wonder if it would be easier to keep passion-work and work-work separate—punching a clock enough hours each week to pay the bills and then engaging in actions with the audacity and desperation to change the world ‘on my own time.’  Nevertheless, I find myself with the privilege and challenge of doing work I care about deeply as my full time job.  With that comes moments of trepidation and joy—like when it is time to publicly share work that has been close to my heart: what if it is misinterpreted, abused, or ignored?

Sharing some of my fears and hopes for what will happen as we float this particular piece of work out into the world helps me release it...

(An incomplete list of) fears: that this work will be taken out of context; that larger conclusions will be drawn than we are trying to suggest; that it will somehow ‘position’ us and the institutions we represent as experts on matters upon which we are learners; that it will be viewed as a commodity (‘intellectual property’) that can be owned, stolen, or sold.

(An incomplete list of) hopes: that this work will inspire action; that we will get to learn from those we share it with; that they will teach us what we got wrong or don’t understand yet; that it will be sampled, remixed, and taken forward; that we will look back at it in a few years and feel a mix of pride for the quantity and quality of the work we put into it, nostalgia for the time we shared as we created it, and that good kind of embarrassment you feel when you look back at something you made and realize how far you’ve come since.”

–sam seidel

How you can get involved

We’d love to hear from you as you engage with the learning deck.  That might look like:

  • Giving us feedback on our vision + past work

  • Sharing relevant work you are doing or have seen

  • Introducing us to folks doing related work

  • Investing in this work with a financial gift

  • Engaging in a professional development session grounded in our work

  • And any other ideas you have on how we might collaborate


Please write to us via this google form to connect. Looking forward to building and growing together.

Credits

Louie Montoya, Stanford d.school
Jess Brown, Stanford d.school
sam seidel, Stanford d.school