A Little Light

Civil rights attorney Jared Fishman leading the WILD Network Leadership Forum in song last week in Washington D.C.

Last week, I traveled to Washington DC, which along with Chicago is my favorite American city. I love the low skyline, grand stone buildings, and the sense of history that pervades nearly every block. Although that history is now feeling rather dark, I found it impossible not to feel uplifted as the cab from the airport crossed the Potomac and the Lincoln Memorial came into view. Its graceful bulk reminds us that slavery and the Civil War were an even darker time. And recalling that Martin Luther King delivered his epic I Have a Dream speech from the Memorial’s steps provides proof of Seamus Heaney’s observation that, while history does not repeat itself, it sometimes rhymes.

I was in DC primarily to spend time with twenty-five friends I love and admire. All are part of my core network, the 100 Coaches Women. We had gathered from around the country to support fellow member Fiona McCaulay’s inspiring WILD Network Leadership Forum, which draws hundreds of women who work in international development from around the world. We also wanted to support the WILD participants, many of whom are dealing with big cutbacks, or with lost funding from USAID.

The conference opened with a keynote from Tascha Eurich, whose new book Shatterproof argues that resilience and grit are insufficient for powering us through life’s greatest challenges, a message that felt targeted to the moment. The day closed with Fiona’s husband, the civil rights lawyer Jared Fishman, leading participants through rousing rounds of This Little Light of Mine, the gospel anthem from slavery times that was sung at the March where King gave his speech.

I figured I’d have a great trip, but hadn’t expected that spending from dawn until bedtime with people I care about would show me what I’d been missing as I seek to move forward.

As readers of this newsletter know, I’ve spent the last four months trying to chart a path through the rapid fire of government edicts, proclamations, and executive orders seeking to recast the global effort to build more inclusive cultures as part of some nefarious scheme to undermine US strength, while setting back the clock on women’s advancement in the process. Given that my own work for the last 35 years has focused on both women’s leadership and inclusion, I’ve felt a responsibility to help find a way forward.

But I’d been so caught up trying to figure things out that I’d ignored the one piece of advice I most frequently give to others: if it’s important, don’t try to do it alone. Here I had been attempting to discern a future for the work that has defined my life and which I believe has enduring importance based on my own shifting reactions to whatever onslaught the news stirred up that week. In DC, surrounded by many who were feeling a similar bewilderment, and feeling the weight of history upon us, I understood that navigating this moment will take patience, common effort, unexpected alliances, and time.

As Heather Cox Richardson noted in her Substack, Letters from an American, last week, the both the effort to reverse Jim Crow that culminated in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-sixties, as well as King’s magnificent call to arms, was the fruit of nearly 60 years of steady work by local citizens supported by legal experts and the occasional politician willing to step up. The path was often unclear, and many understood, like King, that they would not get there in their lifetime.

Passing once again by the Lincoln Memorial as I headed to the airport on my way home, this moment still felt dark. But I had a clearer sense that, acting together, we could begin to reverse this great unraveling and once again let our collective light shine.

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