Leading with love and justice

A love letter to the UPEACE Class of 2024 Strategic Nonviolent Resistance class

Dear Enchantable readers,

As we close the 2023-24 academic year, I have so many pieces I want to share with you- an end-of-year ritual and piece about learning altars among them. Today’s offering is the love letter I wrote to my nonviolence class on the last day of class of the academic year. It’s about leadership and going forth.

Love letters are part of my pedagogical practice, and I offer this as an example (you can find others under the Essays tab of Enchantable on Substack). You can listen to me read the letter here:

Dear UPEACE Class of 2024 Strategic Nonviolent Resistance class,

Today is your last day of class at the UN-mandated University for Peace. While yes, UPMUNC and graduation projects still await you (and final projects and critical seminar portfolios and…), you are about to embark on the next stage of your journey as peace leaders.

Yes, as peace leaders.

Because people will turn to you. I imagine they already are turning to you. If they know you have come here to study and learn, if they know you have a masters in peace, when things get tough, you are the person they will turn to. When there is conflict, they will ask for your help.

Are you ready?
Are you prepared? 

Nothing can fully prepare you. Study can only do so much, take you so far. This is the art of praxis, the cycle of theory, reflection, and action¹. You have been deeply immersed in study and reflection, and now it is time to take what you’ve learned out into the world and apply it, not just in your jobs but in your lives and your families and your hearts and your communities. It is time to move in the cycle, into action. Into love-in-action.

It’s time to move.

This is the work of your lifetime. It is so much more than whatever job you secure after graduation. This is your life’s work. Your vocation. Your calling. You were called here, and now you are being called forth.

Into what - that will look different for each of you. And how beautiful is that? Like Deepa Iyer’s social change ecosystem map says, we need weavers and healers and guides and front line responders and growers and experimenters and DISRUPTORS and resistors and visionaries. 

We need all of us.

It’s your time to step up now. It’s your time to claim space as a peace leader in the world, to use your voice, and I beg you, I urge you to claim this space. The world needs you to claim this space, to be the critical, loving, justice-oriented peace leader-healers² the world needs right now.

You might feel unsure, unsteady. You might feel afraid. You might feel vastly unprepared, and you are, for nothing can fully prepare you for what you are about to do. 

But please don’t let that stop you. The people enacting violence in the world are sure. They are not doubting their ideas or ways. They are acting from places of fear and hatred and greed, and we so desperately need people who are confident in themselves and in other ways, confident that there are other ways of being and living together. Who are confident in love, and care, and nonviolence, in love-in-action and community.

Confident doesn’t have to mean sure, or dogmatic, or that you have the answers. But confident that worlds beyond violence and war are possible. Confident enough to try to live our way towards them even if we can’t fully see them. To engage in prefigurative politics and moral imagination.

To have had the chance to study here at this time is an immense privilege. As we talked about on the first day of class, there are no universities left in Gaza. During this year, while Gaza has been bombed over and over, we have been here, studying peace.

What do we do with that? What is your responsibility? 

I can’t fully answer that question for you, as it will look different for each one of you depending on your position and location and talents and gifts, your place in the world and the communities you are connected with. But each one of you has a responsibility to take this work forward now in the ways you can, and we need you to claim that responsibility and step into it fully. To leave here and create worlds where war and genocide are not possible. Other worlds are possible.

UPEACE is now a part of your lineage, and it is now time for you to carry it forward.

At the beginning of the year when I first met you, your first encounter with me was my foundations class love letter to you, entitled We have to talk about love. Quoting myself:

Because if we want to talk about educating for peace and nonviolence, we have to talk about love. After all, one way of describing nonviolence is love-in-action…Education is fundamentally about love: a love of learning, a love of life, and love for the world, and hopefully a love for each other that can transcend our differences and embrace our shared desires for happiness, living well, for a better world.

For these past 3 weeks, which might have felt like both three minutes and three months, we have been studying love-in-action. We have been studying beloved community in all its complexities. We have been attempting to enact beloved learning community together, and I think we have done a pretty darn good job.

To lead doesn’t mean you have to be out front, or on your own, or at the top. To me, to be a peace leader is to set an example with your life, to model through your actions and relationships, to always be deeply self-reflective and compassionate. To be courageous. To upend these dominating models of top-down hierarchical leadership towards something more collective and collaborative. To call each other into this work. What would you add?

The past two months have been some of the most challenging for me in recent memory, personally and professionally- but not professionally because of you. In fact you have held me through my grief and rage, while confronting challenges and loss, and for that I am deeply grateful.

I am ending this class and this academic year with my heart filled - filled with immense grief, and rage, and hope, and love. And I hope if you are taking anything from our time together, it might be this: that we can make space for it all. For holding it all. And that we don’t have to hold it alone, and when we hold it together, it is lighter. Because this work is messy and heavy and hard and imperfect and beautiful. And we don’t need to have the answers. That we can’t always plan, but we can prepare. And that all of it, everything, all of us, are connected. Beyond connected. We inter-are, and we will continue to be woven together as you disperse into your different locations in the world.

So go forth. It is time for you to go forth.
Take the time to pause and celebrate these accomplishments of what you have done and made here this year. Celebrate the completion of this cycle, and the turning of the next. 

As we do each day here in this class, breathe in, and take with you what is most important to take.
Breathe out, and leave what you don’t want to carry - the forest will compost it for you.

Then get our there and lead with love and justice. We need you.
I love you.

Thank you.

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We ended class with an hour of sharing music and songs and poems and a dance party. You can find our class playlist here.

I’m tired. This year has taken a lot out of me. I have given a lot, but it has taken a lot and taken a toll³, and I feel a deep need to go into receiving mode now. While graduation and grading await me, they can wait for now as I try to rest, reclaim, replenish.

With love and care,

Stephanie

1. Paulo Freire

2. The concept of justice-grounded leadership comes Huskic, Noto, & Williams (2024) in their chapter in Disrupting Hierarchy in Higher Education, which I highly recommend. Full citation: Huskic, H., Noto, C. M., & Williams, H. M. A. (2024). We are the ones we’ve been waiting for: Justice-grounded leadership. In H. M. A. Williams, H. Huskic, & C. M. Noto (Eds.), Disrupting Hierarchy in Education: Students and Teachers Collaborating for Social Change. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. pp. 195-203.

3. I feel a future post brewing about this.