Designing for spaciousness

This past week was "retreat week" for Co-Creating Inclusion. Starting this year, we have blocked off the last week of every other month as well as the entire month of August from workshop facilitation or any external calls or meetings.

This time is essential for us to take a pause from holding space for our clients and to regroup, process, focus on our own needs, reflect, strategize, build our capacity and more. Some of us also use it for vacation time.

Our weeks are usually packed and intense. We are constantly iterating on our process, methodology and systems, which has been especially challenging with all of the shifts and changes of the past 18 months. Our team, who are all women and almost all women of color, have been stretched thin in various and varying ways, and we have been trying, every so slowly, to move to a more manageable and sustainable cadence of work.

All this to say that these retreat weeks have been a life saver. DEI burnout is very real, even without a pandemic and social, political and environmental challenges. We are all about action, and doing, and theory-in-practice but if you can never get your head above water, you can't see your way ahead to a different future.

Dreaming, imagining, and innovating require a kind of spaciousness that is hard to find in our every day lives within the systems of oppression that are so hard to transcend.

I have found that reflection time needs to be operationalized - that is, it needs to be built into the schedule and designed for, otherwise it won't happen. And I've built it in not just to retreat weeks but, for me, it's daily, even if it means getting up at between 4-5.30am depending on what I have going on. For me it's a necessity.

It's in this space that, for me, the magic happens that brings together all of the magic happening everywhere else.

For others, it might look different, but we've seen how driving employees too hard in the interests of "the work" or "the mission" or "productivity" is actually counter-productive.

Instead, how can you think about designing for varying needs for spaciousness?

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