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PRINCIPLES TO GUIDE FAMILY ACTIVISM

My earnest involvement in family activism, even though I didn’t identify it as such, began when I was twenty-six years old. That is when I decided to consciously apply my knowledge about communication and organizing to make my family more united, nurturing, and mutually supportive, including my networks of friends and colleagues whom I also considered as family. My thought was to strengthen my immediate community so we could be more available to create positive change in our society. During these years, there was no articulated idea of family activism, just a handful of friends believing that a better world somehow begins with healthier families, so we just learned from our doing. Now, as I reflect on my activism thirty years later, I recognize that I was largely guided by five key foundational principles.

These five principles represent my basic philosophy about how to advance a world that works for all, beginning with co-powering family and friends to become part of the force of love and transformation. By no means are these principles fully inclusive of all ideas required for change and transformation, yet they provide an important beginning for those who seek to make our families, communities, and societies better for everyone. They provide an understanding of the “know why” that underlies the methods and tools imparted in this book.

PRINCIPLES THAT GUIDE
FAMILY ACTIVISM

• View everyone as family. Recognize that everyone you care for and who cares for you is family.
• Care for family. Support everyone in getting what they need for health, growth, and happiness.
• You and your family be the change. You and your family model the change you desire in the world.
• Teach positive family power. Teach love and caring to create positive family power.
• Encourage vision and transformation. Advance social transformation through vision and personal change.

View Everyone as Family

Recognize that everyone you care for and who cares for you is family.

My view of family activism is based upon several ideas of familia popular within my culture. These include the belief that everyone we care for and who cares for us is family, and that being family means “being for all our loved ones.” When we deepen our understanding of these seemingly simple concepts, we can more fully grasp the spirit and vision of family activism.

Dr. Phil McGraw, a psychologist who works with family issues on television, writes in his book Family First, “Among all words in the English language, none means more to human beings than ‘family’.” Family is often our prime reason for living and working. Family brings us joy and happiness and inspires us to grow. Words are important because they shape our thinking, and I believe we can learn tremendous lessons about being family from other meanings inherent in the word and experience of familia. For example, in my culture the word familia revolves around the central idea of “caring for everyone you love.” Your friends are your family, and your family includes your community. Just as you desire well-being and success for yourself, you desire the same for family and friends. This idea calls upon us to actively care for the well-being of each person we love through our thoughts, words, and deeds, and with responsibility, love, and respect.

When my wife and I recently decided to move in with my mother to support her quality of life, given her stroke and increasing age, I shared the news of our move with friends and neighbors. A comment from Mrs. Duffy, our new eighty-year-old neighbor, was thought-provoking. She said, “That’s what I admire about you people [meaning Latinos]. Family is special and you folks do for your family in ways that a lot of us don’t, but should.” The question came to mind, “Is the quality of being family different in my culture than in others?”

I thought about her statement for some time, and finally decided that I agree. It’s true that among the diverse cultures and societies in our world, many maintain unique best practices from which other cultures can learn valuable lessons. Perhaps my combined indigenous and Latino culture has particular gifts to impart about how to be more caring families. What if our U.S. American society decided to encourage the best practices surrounding the idea of familia? This could certainly bring us greater family and community cohesion, appreciation, and responsibility.

In English, “family” typically connotes one’s immediate and extended blood relationships and spouses. In contrast, familia in popular usage tends to have two equally significant meanings, one conveying who is family, and the other expressing significant values of being family. For us, familia includes an expanding circle of relations, beginning with those we consider to be immediate family because we are present for each other. This usually includes our core family and dear friends with whom we share commitment and support. From here our circle of familia can expand to include all our primary relatives, our larger extended family, close friends of our family, and even ancestors and our children over the next seven generations. This is why every time we say we are going to have a familia gathering, we need to clarify how much of the family we are inviting.

Familia also represents an attitude and value system that is about deeply caring for those you consider family. Within my indigenous and Latino cultures, familia is very much an attitude about connection, commitment, respect, love, and purpose. This is illustrated through the multiple connotations that are conveyed in the statement, “somos familia,” which gives further insight into the spirit of family activism. The literal translation for somos familia is “we are family,” yet when the statement is made to another, regardless of whether that person is related, the implied message is, “We are connected, and we are here to support each other’s survival and success.” In a slightly different context, when one is responding to another who has just extended thanks, the sentiment behind “somos familia” can be interpreted as, “We have enough love to share.”

Familia also connotes such values as respect and active caring. When a son or daughter leaves to visit another family member, one parent may offer the reminder, “Somos familia,” which serves as a powerful signal of values important to their family. In my family it meant, “Don’t forget to be caring and respectful.” In other words, when you arrive at your grandmother or uncle’s home, remember to extend greetings on behalf of the family and check to see if they might need any groceries or help around the house. Being familia is being available, and even proactive, in extending support to each other. Don’t wait to be asked. Observe, note needs, and extend support. This is active caring.

This active caring was prevalent in my extended family and community experience, in part because as Mexican-Americans we were, and often still are, a people struggling to survive within a society that often views and exploits us as cheap labor. Thus, many of us grew up in families where a dominant value was supporting each other to succeed, while also pursuing justice, healthy community, and social change. This is often referred to as being familia, yet for everyone who desires to create positive change beginning with family, it can be referred to simply as family activism. Family activism is living as familia, which is sharing support with our expanded circle of relationships as we encourage everyone to do their part to advance family and community well-being.

Given your particular cultural and social reality, your practice of family activism will have its unique qualities. Naturally, there are differences in the communication and meeting styles amongst people from different backgrounds and locations. The challenge for you will be to identify and value your unique style of family activism. While my activist practice is greatly influenced by my Chicano experience, my commitment is to share with you tools that will serve people of any culture who desire to nurture love within their family circles while also increasing their power to pursue positive change in their community and society. What I call the Familia Approach includes principles and tools for family activism that can be used by all people who wish to nurture the caring instinct within their children, make their family events occasions of community connection, joy, inspiration, and commitment, or who desire to cultivate within their friendship and professional networks values and practices reflective of being familia.

With the above in mind, I request that when you see the word “family” in this book you consider it to include your more expanded circle of caring relationships and the best values and practices we can associate with being family. So “family” here will mean all your friends and loved ones, the feeling of connection and love you have for them, and being mutually supportive and community responsible. Here, family or familia is about being the “beloved community” that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about. It is being family with each other as we struggle to increase justice and love in the world.

Care for Family

Support everyone in getting what they need for health, growth, and happiness.

In large part, family activism begins with taking care of your own family. Do what you have to do to ensure they have the basics for healthy living today and, to the degree possible, for tomorrow.

Twelve million families in the United States worry about their next meal. Given the wealth in this nation, this is inexcusable. We need to do more to take care of our families. Yes, parents could do more to care for children, yet, given the income and time required to raise healthy children, all of us, from relatives to friends to neighbors, need to do more than our share. Parents cannot do it alone; they and their children need our support.

As parents, we have the primary responsibility to ensure that our children receive everything they need to grow, develop, and succeed. At the most basic level, this means generating enough income to provide our children with food, clothes, and a safe home. For growing numbers of families, that requires that both parents (where there are two) work and often at more than one job. Yet our children also need love, attention, guidance, and support. From us adults, they need to know and feel that we care for them. They need us to be involved, asking essential questions about their welfare. Are they eating healthy food? Are they exercising? Are they getting good support for their learning and education? Do they have emotionally supportive relationships? Do they have a plan for their success? And then, of course, they need us to actually provide this support.

For many of us, particularly the underpaid working parents or single-parent heads of households, our family activism consists of paying the bills, coordinating everyday life, and extending the love and attention that we can. Our activism manifests by taking care of our family, for which we should feel pride. However, we should also invite our uncles, aunts, grandparents, friends, and neighbors to make their contribution. Family is “all our relations,” and when families include children or elders, it becomes part of our responsibility to extend support to them. As uncles, aunts, and friends we can do this by making quality time for the young ones, getting to know them, and nurturing their development, or occasionally providing practical assistance that may be needed.

In caring for our families, it’s also important to consider the wider community and the world the young will inherit. For those of us who have more resources, it is only fair that we contribute some effort to both ensure that our family relations are receiving necessary support, and that we learn and do our part to make our communities safer, our society more just, and our world more sustainable.

You and Your Family Be the Change

You and your family model the change you desire in the world.

This principle echoes the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi: “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” If your desire is for justice and respect in the world, then actively seek to cultivate justice and respect in all your relations. If your desire is for all people to live with health and joy, then seek to advance health and joy in all your activities. To this teaching, I would add that as you pursue the changes you desire, also consider how to care for yourself and family. This has several implications. The social change we seek is complex and full of challenges and struggles that require us to sustain a long-term commitment. Consequently, it is important to care for yourself with attention to balance, spirit, health, and humor to ensure you last the distance required.

You must balance taking care of yourself, your family, and your community commitments. This is best done by developing relationships of support within your family for the activist or service work that you do. Take time to help your parents or siblings understand the nature of your work and why you are committed to it, and ask for their help. All forms of activist work are easier when family and friends understand and respect your efforts and have the opportunity to periodically lend support, whether it is time, money, prayers, or an occasional word of appreciation.

Everyone in your family counts. To develop a society committed to ending hunger, homelessness, and joblessness requires the caring spirit, creativity, wisdom, and concerted effort of many people. We cannot afford to lose a single dedicated person, nor can we ignore the value of aiding family and friends to be more socially responsible. While some may resist participating in change, we can maintain our persistence in supporting their growth and commitment to service. If their time for growth is not at hand, the family activist pours caring attention upon others, and continues to model and work for the change we desire in the world.

Teach Positive Family Power

Teach love and caring to create positive family power.

Positive family power is love, and developing this power within our families is essential to family activism. Look for opportunities and ways to encourage love for self and others. This love includes taking caring action on behalf of others—cooking a meal for a tired parent, collecting contributions for workers on strike, or supporting the effort to end toxic dumping in the communities of the working poor. What makes it love is that we do it because we care for others, and we know our actions will add another ounce of fairness, joy, and respect in the world. As we extend our love, we also do it with mind-fulness that our actions model caring that can inspire and increase family power to achieve positive change. In this section, I would like to deepen our understanding of porvida love and family power.

About Porvida Love

Like many activists, I resisted recognizing the primary role that love has in social change work. Since I was young, I was motivated by the teachings of Jesus Christ, and as a young adult, by the quote on the poster of Che Guevara that hung on my bedroom wall: “At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that a revolutionary is motivated by deep feelings of love.” Yet, when one of the most renowned activist teachers in my community, Pablo Sanchez, suggested that I could be much more effective if I acknowledged that my work was about teaching love, I walked away disappointed and frustrated at his naivety. My thought was that our work has to be about people empowerment, and what does love have to do with that?

At that time, I was nearly thirty years old, and for half of my life I had been doing individual and community empowerment work throughout California. The word “love” had always felt too sentimental and tangential to me. I saw the appeal to love more as a ploy to direct people away from necessary social change activism. Fortunately, life provided me a number of experiences that led me to understand the profound nature of what I call porvida love—love for life and justice—and its importance in my activism.

Before discussing porvida, it’s important to understand love itself. For this purpose, it’s helpful to utilize several words from other cultures, given the dearth of English words available to fully describe the multiple facets of love. When most of us think of love, several types typically surface, such as parental love for a child, romantic love that occurs between two people, or the love that derives from friendship, which the ancient Greeks called philia. There are other profound concepts of love that our U.S. culture seems to overlook, such as agape, a Greek term meaning a love for God and humanity, or what indigenous Hawaiians call aloha, a love of life that emanates from our spirit and seeks to manifest itself in the joy of our every breath.

About the nature of agape love, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote, “Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all men. Biblical theologians would say it is the love of God working in the minds of men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. And when you come to love on this level you begin to love men not because they are likable, not because they do things that attract us, but because God loves them.…”

Agape represents our unconditional love for humanity. It says, love your neighbor as yourself and be willing to sacrifice your life for them. It is not sentimental, but a profoundly courageous and giving love. It is a love lived by caring people who desire to make the world better for all, the love that Dr. King labored to make the center of the civil rights movement. In the 1958 battle between the people of Montgomery, Alabama, and the offensive policies of segregation, the protesters stood for justice and restrained themselves from responding with violence even as police and civilians beat them or unleashed dogs on them and their brothers, sisters, and children. They drew courage from their love for community and their commitment to justice, to use the power of nonviolent action to win their battles, thereby inspiring a national movement for civil rights.

We should never forget the power of love that was demonstrated by this beloved community, supporting each other to survive as they remained dedicated to their vision for justice. Their efforts keep us mindful that our capacity for love and action is often much greater than we realize. Drawing from their example, we too can step into our courage and bring this force of love into our everyday actions. This may involve taking the risk to speak against racism or oppression of women, extending assistance to a neighbor, or simply doing the right thing despite peer pressure.

Porvida provides yet another face of love. In my circle of healers, mostly from the Latino community, we evolved the concept of porvida love to describe the profound commitment that resides within people of all cultures who seek to be fully for life, justice, and the well-being of Mother Earth. We derived porvida from the Spanish words por vida, literally meaning “for life,” which in popular usage conveys the meaning of making a commitment for the entirety of our lives. Thus, porvida love is about loving life and humanity so profoundly that we seek to make our everyday actions advance love and respect in the world.

Porvida love is a commitment to life, love, justice, and the evolution of our spirit and humanness. It is love that arises from the core of our spiritual being. It is our passion for life that deeply and fervently embraces the totality of life, including all people, life forms, our environment, and all our relations. It is our inner calling to be compassionate, caring, and in active relationship with all of life. Porvida love is idealistic, optimistic, and responsible. It is love that recognizes that we are humans in evolution, continually growing our capacity to love and to create relationships and systems that support our ability to be better people. Porvida love is about courageously seeking to evolve all that is positive.

When we feel love, our desire is to allow that energy to expand. When love resides within a family, members immediately respond to the needs of others and act to support each other in achieving success. When there is abundant love, the family has increased energy to care for others and their community.

Whether we call it agape, porvida, or spirit essence, our inherent nature is to be for life and love. Our challenge is to connect more with our loving essence, further our ability to live in a positive way, and support others in accepting and evolving their inherent goodness. Family activism is fundamentally about learning and teaching such love.

About Family Power

One of the principal goals of family activism is to develop our power, our personal and collective ability to take positive action. Many people have difficulty even talking about power, assuming that power is always negative, that it’s about control and about one person being superior to another, or that power corrupts. In fact, the core definition of power is the “ability to act,” stemming from the Latin word posse, meaning “to be able.” Power is the ability to take action to produce desired results or to accomplish what is important to us. This can be anything from fulfilling a resolution to develop yourself, supporting the success of your sibling, or organizing a local campaign to ensure healthy water.

Our families need greater power. Consider what is vital to you— the ability for loved ones to achieve personal success, family well-being, safe environments, responsive government, and knowing that your children will inherit a healthy and sustainable world. We need to develop among family and friends the personal and collective power to transform aspirations such as these into goals, and then to make them happen. This is family power, our individual and collective ability to apply ourselves to be a positive force for taking care of each other and our communities.

Developing family power begins by nurturing the self-confidence of all people within our network to accept their capacity to act and effect change on behalf of themselves and their families. In our society, there is such a dearth of positive validation that most young people and adults only manifest a fraction of their power because they don’t believe in their self-worth. Consequently, one core responsibility of family activists is to continually find ways to build the self-esteem and personal power of family and friends. We can do this in every conversation. At a family gathering, we can take note of the young, from toddlers to teenagers, and seek opportunities to interact with them and build their self-esteem. Whether it is with young people or adults, we can converse in a way that affirms, evolves, and develops their power.

Family members who believe in their personal power can then mobilize their family to care for each other in significant ways. The Gonzales family of Chicago provides an example. While recognized within their community for the various organizations and projects they initiated, they have also developed within their family culture the power for mutual support, as evidenced by a recent crisis. Upon hearing the devastating news that their cousin’s wife was diagnosed with cancer, the extended family was mobilized, and within hours, prayer circles were organized and a number of cousins had committed to support the family, which had three young children. Donna, one of the organizers, admits to having spoken to her cousin, Mark, perhaps only once over the last several years, yet she said, “When family needs you, you just step up. Sure, we all have full schedules, but what’s more important than those children getting all the love and support they need?” This is family power directed to family well-being.

Family power also exists in the commitment of a family to support each other to engage in community action. Over the years, my brother Marcos directed several community-based organizations, and then developed a new organization that has brought community, faith, and labor networks together to pass four municipal living wage ordinances and other local policies. This work has resulted in increased income for more than 5,000 families and the formation of numerous multicultural relationships that are demonstrating to our community that diverse people can join together to support progressive causes and candidates. Marcos credits his wife, family, and friends for enabling his accomplishments, along with his many activist collaborators. Since his early adulthood, his mother, brothers, and then wife and children have provided a spectrum of practical, financial, and emotional support to allow him to focus on his studies and his community activism. Our prevailing attitude is, “Supporting Marcos is supporting the community, so let’s extend the help that we can.” This is the family power of mutual support that aids community action.

Finally, there is the form of family power where family and friends directly work together to support the community. We probably all have examples of this form of power. Someone in our network decides to initiate a local project to serve our community or to run for a political office. Then we, as family or close friends, either volunteer or are drafted to get involved. Before we know it, we are taking care of each other’s children or using our various family gatherings to support action and planning on behalf of our project or campaign. This is family power directed to community action. As family activists, we teach and model love so as to develop family power.

Encourage Vision and Transformation

Advance social transformation through vision and personal change.

We each must ask ourselves about the vision we have for our ideal family, community, and world. I believe most of us desire a healthy and caring family and a society that works for everyone. But what would this actually look like? Key to actualizing such a desire is to first clarify and hold the vision, put it forth in ideas and pictures, and then work for change, keeping it in mind and making it our goal in all that we do. This process begins with oneself, then expands to include our family relationships, our culture, and the numerous institutions that comprise our social reality.

About Vision

Before we explore vision, let’s take a brief stock of our social reality. Some of us live in communities where street violence is an everyday concern, the air is contaminated, healthy food is unavailable or too expensive, and families are overworked and underpaid or struggling with unemployment. Many of us also share concerns about global warming, the poisoning of our air, soil, and water, corporate greed that is driving salaries down, and the ongoing war that is sending young men and women to death while draining our tax dollars that could be used to ensure a better life for all our families. Because all these issues and more require resolution, many of us are already working to advance safer communities, environmental protection, and peace. This is absolutely great. Now, to optimize our efforts for change, we need to approach our activism in these and other areas with our larger vision in mind. Whether our concern is protecting our environment, improving our schools, or halting violence, when we participate with our vision guiding us we are more effective in moving forward all the other related changes required to create a better world, including how we communicate and work with each other.

Every day I want as many of my activities as possible to advance my vision of a better society. For this reason, many years ago I made a list of all the ways I wanted our nation and world to improve. It included everything from clean air, water, and soil, and responsible population growth, to families knowing how to live in respect. Then I selected a couple of short phrases that captured the totality of the list that I could turn to whenever I needed focus and inspiration.

Sharif Abdullah, an internationally recognized trainer on cultural transformation, writes about creating “a world that works for all.” I love this idea. It articulates my vision simply and helps me gauge my everyday actions to ensure that I am living and working in alignment with my hopes. I also use the concepts of “a healthy society,” “a better world,” or “heaven on Earth.” My favorite is “heaven on Earth” because I believe bringing this about is within our power. I was raised in the Christian tradition, and for me the teachings of Jesus Christ advise us to make heaven happen in our lives each day. We have been blessed with all the intelligence and resources we need to make this happen for ourselves, our families, and the larger human community. I try to approach every interaction and decision with this attitude so that the outcome, however great or small, serves to achieve the vision of heaven on Earth.

Having a key phrase that captures your larger vision can provide you with inspiration to persevere and to inspire others. Develop a list of all those qualities you desire to see in our world, and then select an overall vision phrase that resonates for you. Once you identify your phrase, look around and see where the vision is already living. You might see it in the way an adult extends support to a child, in a bus system that effectively transports people where they need to go, or in the beauty of a healthy tree. While observing these images, bring to mind your vision phase, articulate your personal commitment, and feel confident that people of good will are helping to make it happen.

The work of creating change is challenging. For that reason we all need and deserve the inspiration that comes from knowing that our aspirations for society are more than just “fixing problems.” Ulti- mately, your role as a family activist will be to clarify your vision, to inspire, and to allow yourself to be inspired.

About Transformation

In this context, transformation means all change and development intended to make us more loving and caring, our society more respectful, and our world more life sustaining. Much of this book is about tools for facilitating and supporting positive change and transformation, but here I want to underscore the idea that the transformation we desire for our society begins within our families, and introduce the ways in which this can happen.

The transformation begins with our personal development and then requires our support for family change. A first step might involve honest inquiry about yourself. This means asking such questions as, “How can I be a more effective model of love and a supporter of transformative change? How can I move from being self-centered to being more caring for others, or from an attitude of pessimism to increased optimism?” Each of us has our own changes to be made, which might include being more giving rather than selfish, courageous rather than timid, or a better listener rather than a constant talker. Asking these questions and committing to examine and change our attitude or behavior is the first transformation work that needs doing. And as we work on our own transformation, we learn lessons to support similar change among our family and friends.

To advance the positive change we desire for our families, our role is to support our family members and friends in their development, and our family network as a whole in its ability to be mutually supportive. For many of us this may require both assisting our families to resolve existing dysfunctions, and the conscientious effort to encourage and support the personal growth of those close to us. First, let’s consider what transformation can look like and how it can be supported.

My grandfather demanded that his five-year-old son work like an adult and physically abused him when he couldn’t. That child became my father, who cared for his children and never physically punished us. This was a transformation. While my father demonstrated his love for his children by financially supporting us, he didn’t know how to touch or listen to us very well. Yet we learned from him, and much from our mother, particularly about love. Consequently, my brothers and I became more affectionate fathers and uncles to our children, thereby advancing the transformation.

Generation to generation transformation in which we learn to become better people is an important contributor to change, yet as family activists our desire is to speed up the process. A recent example is when my sister-in-law spoke with me regarding the childhood stories I was sharing with the children, concerned that a couple of these stories tended to diminish the image of one of my brothers. After reflecting on her comments, I acknowledged that my perspective was not the most positive, and I revised the stories to be more respectful of all my brothers. This may seem an insignificant change, yet it has led to other changes that support my evolution and my ability to be more transformative within our family.

Every improvement in attitude and practice is part of the transformation. Our responsibility is to believe that change is always doable, and to recognize that each requires its own period of time. Some transformations require years, while others occur in just moments. Our task is to learn more about transformation, so we can speed up the time required for change. This is similarly true regarding some of those major wounds, unhealthy habits, or painful patterns like addiction, exploitation, or selfishness that may exist in our families. With compassion and dedicated effort over time, and with the help of other family members, you can create the healing you desire. One purpose of this book is to provide some communication and group problem-solving tools so that more healing and transformation can be achieved within our families. Of course, there are situations where ultimately the help of a professional counselor or therapist will be required to assist the family to get on track. Yet, we can begin moving the transformation by patiently and persistently applying family activist tools and strategies.

While there are no guarantees that your efforts will result in all your family and friends becoming more caring people or activists, trust that there will be positive outcomes. By pursuing health and transformation, those around you will learn how to take better care of each other, and how to extend this caring beyond the family. Whether it is having a conversation that empowers your niece, enlisting friends to join you at a rally, or facilitating a family gathering that inspires the feeling of love, each act contributes to family well-being, heaven on Earth, and the Great Turning.

PRAXIS

• What is your vision for a healthy family? For a better society?
• What are you currently doing that is putting into practice the core principles that guide family activism? What could you be doing? State two or three activities for each item below:
  • View everyone as family.
  • Care for family.
  • You and your family be the change you desire in the world.
  • Teach positive family power.
  • Advance social transformation through vision and personal change.