Feminine Leadership Rising

“Make your home where your spirit live” (Armah, 2002)

Today is the last day as the Homelessness Policy Director for the City of Los Angeles. Led by spirit and latent ambition, I have accepted a leadership role in a smaller, but adjoining city to help convene city leaders and residents around the issue of homelessness.

This move came from a spiritual place. It was a calling from deep within my own path toward destiny and was first presented during my annual “dafa” divination reading in the Ifa tradition. Within the Odu Oshe Meji – my spiritual guides informed me to accept new opportunities. But even when told from a spiritual source, there were many emotional and material considerations before stepping out on faith.

Over the last year I faced head-on the presence of Western patriarchal approaches to homelessness that severely conflicted with my evolving feminine approach. These approaches were not new, but suddenly came into focus with new perspective. To me, homelessness is a symptom of deep social ruptures going back to the process of colonialization and industrialization when Western culture began to silo and compartmentalize aspects of nature disagreeable to the imagined communities drawn up in the minds of a few with power. People living with mental illness, varying degrees of physical abilities, and persons with non-white skin or who did not believe in a Christian God- were banished from society as the emergence of institutions came into being to continue the marginalization of such populations such as the rise in the prison industrial complex.

Homelessness is not a thing to be counted and measured. It is a psychological condition that reflects imbalance of place and power among human relationships. Yet the objectification and dehumanization is how many in the homelessness services field approach solving homelessness – unless they see it as charity – an intractable issue. A Western patriarchal perspective informs homelessness as a public nuisance performed by nonconforming groups of people choosing to live a life out in the margins to disrupt the dominant Utopian views created by Enlightened European men. A Western approach to homelessness neglects cultural complicity in the creation of inequitable societies and the preservations of systems of oppression that continue to be reproduced in each succeeding generation.

As a woman and a not only a woman of color, but a woman with historical inter-generational memory of my African and Native American and Irish ancestors who somehow survived the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the institution of slavery, genocide, and indentured servitude, it pained me physically, emotionally, and spiritually to sit in conversations where humans and the human story were reduced to numbers detached from insight into the soul behind the numbers. While my pain was conscious, I know this detached talk impacted all in the room.

In reawakening the goddess consciousness – Starhawk states – “women are not encouraged to explore their own strength and realizations; they are taught to submit to male authority, to identify masculine perceptions as their spiritual ideals, to deny their bodies and sexuality, to fit their insights into a male mold” (Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess).

In a moment of alignment where my spiritual growth, my academic studies, and my professional work all collided, instead of submission or rebelling in anger- I found a profound appreciation within the situation. I accepted what I first thought were nemesis as teachers. And I have come to thank them for teaching me the language, feel, and energy of the patriarchy. For they pushed me into such a place that my own internal feminine spiritual warrior had no space but to step out of hiding into being. Within this performance and awakening- I began to find peace, joy, and a new creative flow. My current job opportunity emerged during this cycle of acceptance. I began re-evaluating my network and connecting effortlessly with like-spirited allies. Thus while I am moving on to a new position of leadership, I have the opportunity to step deeper into my own power as a feminine-style leader. I am manifesting the me I want to be and the environment to support such growth. What a beautiful place…

Re-energized, I look forward to learning, sharing, co-producing feminine style approaches to the phenomenon on homelessness that focus on collaboration, relationship building, creativity, and inclusion of the voices from the margins. Through an emergent “tribe” of spirited like people- I look forward to creating new metrics and outcomes that quantify edges of the issue, while reflecting movement of the needle of our own social attitudes and behaviors as they rise to a new consciousness of human relations.