I enjoy learning the etymology of words because often it points you to the fundamental nature of a thing. The word “relate” is from the 14th century, stemming from the Latin to “bring back” or “bear back”.  As I read this in preparation for the weekly reflection, it made me think of Hakim Hasan, a Jersey City neighbor who first introduced me to Greenville back in 2015. I want to share here what I learned from Hakim.

Prior to starting Civic Parent in late 2013, my whole life was downtown - shopping, our church, parks where my kids played, etc.  When I started writing Civic Parent, however, I started venturing outside of downtown. I grew more curious about the city and wanted to learn more. I wrote, and people responded. Often there were questions. I am a social person, I was a stay-at-home mom with no full-time job, and a hunger to connect in real life to learn more about what I had been researching about in tax data.

So I had coffee with advocates and leaders who were curious about taxes, PILOTs, and budgets. I enjoy this type of relating; it's life-giving as you learn and grow the more you relate to other people.

It was also informing as to my own ignorance. I realized that community is huge, in a beautiful and complex way like a giant patchwork quilt, and each of us is just a tiny little square. No matter what we do, we are each small in relation to the whole.  I got that sense immediately when I starting talking and meeting with others. This realization was energizing; the relational versus zero-sum aspect was really exciting to me.

Gecan shares in the book, “the appetite to relate is fundamental.” He also describes - and will further expound on it in future chapters - how this idea of relating is the foundation for building civic power in community. And so this is the foundation of everything; this appetite to relate, to meet in real life, to create space for empathy and learning. If we are willing to do this, than so much is possible.

Sometimes it is difficult for those who are new to organizing to understand the point of relational meetings. It might seem like a waste of time. But a core practice of power organizing is to build relationships between leaders. Organizations that build this practice survive. Organizations that do not do this fall apart. 

When I first began learning how to do relational meetings, I was really bad at it. Perhaps it is an occupational hazard, going into professor mode: I would often end up talking about policy, or the specific details of an issue campaign. Sometimes I still do this. It doesn’t work. That is, it does not accomplish the purpose of a relational meeting, which is to get to know the other person and their self-interest, and to understand a little bit about their story and what is important to them.

And so there is a set of instructions about how to do this.These meetings have a specific purpose, and it is easy to not accomplish that purpose given that we are not really in the habit of listening to each other. Nor are we really in the habit of revealing so much about our own feelings. Ernie Cortes says the purpose is “to understand the sources of their anger, or their love, or their interest in something beyond themselves." (Mary Beth Rogers, Cold Anger, p. 60). 

When I am teaching students in my organizing class how to do these meetings, I use this video that shows a regional IAF training exercise with people practicing these meetings. It is useful to see this, but also helpful to hear Cortes reflecting on the practice, and I find it comforting when he notes that he still sometimes has meetings that are not successful, even after decades of practice.

But you can also get too worried about doing these meetings correctly. After all, the habit of relating–of actually sitting down face-to-face and talking–is what is crucial. Relating is central to our humanness, but we need to practice it!

One thing that is helpful is to think about these meetings as a kind of mutual storytelling. I have found that I tell different stories, and tell them differently, in every meeting. But there are common themes. Why is education so important to me? Because my grandmother was a teacher, because both of my parents wanted more education than they were able to get, because of barriers my children have experienced, because I am a teacher. And for each of those reasons there are several stories related to my own self-interest, that help explain why I do this work.

As Gecan says, relational meetings are key to developing the kinds of public relationships between leaders that make organizing possible. Before we can work together, we need to listen to each other, and “build the kind of public relationship that is mutual and respectful and capable of withstanding the tension that all healthy relating tends to generate over time.” (25) These relationships are built as much on our differences as they are on things that we share, and a healthy organization has leaders who can comfortably disagree with one another as they engage together in public action.

I also think these kinds of relationships are crucial not just to organizing, but to building a healthy public sphere. I will leave the final point to Gecan: “It may be that the very habit of building public relationships is part of the human constitution of a vital democracy…” (p. 31)