NAVIGATING: On Radical Grace: A Tactic to Navigating Rapidly Changing Times

By: Jeff M. Poulin

Last week, I wrote about an insane amount of things I learned by observing the arts and cultural education field during the last two years. However, there was one thing that I did not mention – it is a specific tactic that seems so relevant amidst the current set of global and political circumstances we are facing – the concept of radical grace.

In the following article, I will give you some definitions, first-hand testimony, some light complaining about our field, and the urgency for why this is important today – however, I want to start by saying this:

It is okay to find it hard to do work, especially while we live through global and socially-inflicted traumas regularly.

It is okay to prioritize the wellbeing of yourself, your family, community, teams, and others over “work.”

It is okay to not be okay.

And in order for us all – as a community of artists, educators, administrators, storytellers, researchers, activists, and beyond – to support each other, we must approach every situation with radical grace.

The Origins of the Idea

As the COVID-19 health crisis began to impact the daily lives of my community in March 2020, I observed a drastic slowdown in the productivity of my professional community. My peers began to take stock of our collective intents and purpose. Our collaborators radically extended deadlines, eliminated processes, and reformulated deliverables. My community was kinder to one another.

At the time, without really thinking about it, I named what I was witnessing: radical grace.

By definitions (thanks to Miriam-Webster Dictionary):

  • Radical: favoring extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions

  • Grace: disposition to or an act or instance of kindness, courtesy, or clemency

Thus, I have crafted a merger of these two to define radical grace as the favoring of extreme changes in existing habits and conditions to act in kindness and courtesy towards the needs of others.

We, at Creative Generation (a smaller collective at the time), made this our policy, we were going to operate under the auspices of radical grace. This meant three things to us:

  1. We would be kind to ourselves,

  2. We would be generous with each other, and 

  3. We would meet our community where they were at.

These three ideals informed our decisions, some of which were easy and some of which were hard from about March 20, 2020 to the following Spring of 2021.

Testing the Ideals

Our first big test to these ideals were immediately in April 2020 as a result of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, when we decided to close our doors and lay ourselves off. Now, it should be noted that we were a more slim operation at the time and our collective was much smaller. However, it still was a painstaking decision to inform our community that we would cease operations until things became more clear (in what we thought would be a few weeks! Ha!).

What we witnessed, though, was an outpouring of support. Generous collaborators extended their kindness and offers of support. Our readers, followers, and peers checked in to make sure we were okay.

We, as a team, checked in on each other.

Truth be told, we were okay. The governmental supports made ends meet, and we felt we achieved our responsibility to ongoing projects to ensure their funds were spent responsibly to achieve the impacts they wanted, rather than to blindly meet the objectives written in workplans without consideration of the changing world around us.

As we began to return to work in May 2020, the United States witnessed yet another act of racial violence in the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, sparking civil unrest and political response from around the country. 

Our team and collaborators needed a minute. Some folks needed time to rest and take care. Others needed time to do work and take stock.  Across the field, our colleagues and communities took the time to thoughtfully respond and extend radically grace to each other as every individual, project, and organization responded as they needed. 

Then came January 6, 2021 – a day which I will remember forever – when thousands of insurrectionists stormed the U.S. capitol attempting to overthrow the peaceful transfer of power.

At the time, over 80% of our team was based in the greater-Washington, D.C. region. I distinctly remember taking back-to-back phone calls when they were interrupted by the CNN report and footage of a Confederate flag being marched into a now-evacuated U.S. House of Representatives chamber. We gathered virtually as a team and made the decision to cease working for the day and take care of our own for the remainder of the week. One team member was only blocks from the Capitol and under lockdown and others were put under immediate curfew.

Again, we witnessed our collaborators from around the globe extend a virtuous courtesy as we worked to ensure our team was supported during a tumultuous time.

In all of these circumstances, radical grace was the key.

A “Return” to Normal

As time passed on, COVID-19 restrictions lightened (before the Delta or Omicron variants), and the peaceful transition of power was successful achieved, things began to “return to normal,” as they say.

We began to reminisce as a team about how it was so nice to operate in the period of “radical grace,” because we noticed that very firm application of deadlines, and exclusion of those who could not immediately participate as prescribed by those in power. Honestly, we felt this was problematic.

Why was it that we felt compelled to achieve profit over people? Why did others demand productivity over meaningful process? How could we overcome – what we felt to be – an overly capitalistic society?

Moreover, what changed between 2020 and 2021 to allow for us to stop extending radical grace to each other?

Well, we at Creative Generation took some time to think about this. We did not like the “return” to anything, and wanted to harness the insights we gained from our own response to the pandemics and build them into our way of working in the future. So, we got to work – in August 2021, we gathered together on the top of a mountain on Piscataway lands (now known as Western Maryland) to facilitate our ways of working into translatable values to guide the work; you can read about this process and its outcomes here. 

We created these values.  And I could not be more proud of them.

These values became our new normal.

Radical Grace Today

What you may notice is that the term “radical grace” does not actual appear in our values anywhere. Truth be told, we kind of forgot. The esoteric concepts are embedded throughout; but the words? Not so much.

Now, as I write this blog on the last day of February 2021, I am once again reminded of why we need radical grace in our day-to-day lives now more than ever. In fact, I shared some of these thoughts in a minor monologue during a panel discussion at the Beyond School Hours conference in Orlando, Florida, last week.

In the last week alone, we witnessed 

These overt acts of political violence are currently causing harm to communities around the world, both directly and indirectly. As those who work with youth, it is hard to watch these things happen, explain how they could occur, and deal with their consequences in the lives of the youth we support.

As such, it is time for us to re-up our approach with radical grace. First to ourselves, then to our communities. We cannot do the things we want to do in the world if our own cup is empty. And we cannot simply make our cup – or the cups of our people – full. It takes time. It takes healing. It takes an approach with radical grace.

So, as we enter this coming week, I challenge us all to think deeply about what we want to accomplish: are we approaching those aspirations with radical grace?