Experienced Leader Becomes New Editor
Hello everyone!
I want you to know that I have taken on the job of editor of the Wide World Changing journal, that I am beginning to work on the next edition, and I want you all along on this amazing adventure!
Let me introduce myself. I was born here in Minnesota (on the central northern prairies of the USA) and grew up as the daughter of two raised-working-class "liberal" college professors in a small conservative town in Kentucky. I am a musician (I play oboe, recorder, and piano, and I sing). I have worked in wide world change jobs for almost thirteen years and been an unpaid part-time activist for another seven years. I have been an active member of four different unions, I have worked in the clean energy/anti-nuclear power movement and the disarmament movement, and I am now working as the lobbyist for the state chapter of a national women's organization, where my primary focus has been working on and building coalitions around economic justice, especially welfare reform. Since shortly before the Beijing Women's Conference, I have also been learning and teaching about global economic issues. With my life-partner, Michael Luft, I own and live in a duplex in an inner-city neighborhood where I have good connections with many people (especially young people) of different races and classes. I have been Co-Counseling for eighteen years and leading in RC for fifteen years. Years ago I led wide world change support groups (with both RC and wide world colleagues) but stopped due to various distresses and distractions.
I have made two important decisions around this work recently: 1) the top priority in my RC work is assisting people to think clearly and live decisively towards transforming the society, and 2) I am committing my life to replacing the capitalist system with a new system based on caring about everyone and everything, meeting people's needs, and sharing resources equally and preserving them forever. (In some ways I have been doing this for years, in some ways I am just starting to discover what it means.)
To me, Co-Counseling has always been about changing the world. Our theory has obvious implications that humans will naturally move towards setting up a society based on caring, cooperation, and intelligence, and that this goes hand-in-hand with re-emergence.
Already, people who Co-Counsel have had a huge positive effect on the world in millions of ways. Many of us are quite deliberately going about building relationships and changing policies to transform the society. We are reaching through to people's humanness to eliminate racism and classism and all other oppressions, and we are working at developing rational families, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, unions, businesses, liberation movements, environmental and economic policies, governments, and so on. Some of these stories have been told in other journals, but many of them haven't.
Now is an especially opportune time to focus on this work. People all over the world are becoming clearer that the society needs to change and are looking for leadership. There is a critical mass of people who are already starting to use the tremendous insights and tools we have in RC for moving forward. Julian Weissglass has recently taken the job of RC International Liberation Reference Person for Wide World Change and is a wonderful resource and gathering point for us to more awarely and decisively act on our dreams of having a rational society. Julian's first weekend Wide World Change Workshop was held in late May in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. It was a watershed. People moved on reclaiming their visions; made decisions to replace capitalism with a just economic system; discharged feelings about "communism"; counseled on integrity, classism, hope, and more; and made decisions and plans to carry the work forward in their Regions (more detailed reports to come).
The Wide World Changing journal will be a place for us to share our thinking, our creativity, our learning, and our successes in applying what we know to changing policies and institutions and to building the relationships, organizations, and movements and providing the decisive counseling that will transform the society. I want it to represent the broad sweep of people in RC (all backgrounds, countries, etc.) and all the different thinking and work we do. I also want it to be highly accessible (light on RC terms, with explanations of those that are used), an inspiration to people who don't know Co-Counseling, and a tool for outreach to wide world changers, in line with our goal of going public.
So write to me. Send me articles, letters, talks you've given, and your artwork about wide world changing. Think about interviewing someone else who has done significant wide world change work and could use assistance in telling the story on paper.
Some questions to think about:
• How are you applying RC theory to wide world change?
• What are your visions for how the society should be and how we will get there?
• What system or systems have you decided to change, how are you going about it, what's working, and what are you learning?
•What have you discovered about handling and contradicting the common distresses that interfere with people carrying out effective wide world change? (Isolation; urgency; despair; compromising on integrity; self-neglect; rigid, unworkable rhetoric and tactics; red-baiting; etc.)
• What are you doing to build transformative relationships - relationships that cross barriers, in which people assist each other to be their full, powerful, smart selves and take decisive action towards transforming society?
• And lastly, are you interested in helping to put together this journal? I am so excited about getting to know what everyone is thinking and doing, and at the same time I will need other people to encourage writers, collect articles, do basic editing, and translate articles.
I look forward to hearing from you and transforming the society with you!
Susal Stebbins
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA