‘Pause is the Pathway to Choice’: WI Event Explores Regenerative Organizing for the Labor Movement

“The first thing I'm going to do with you is breathe,” began speaker Dr. L. Toni Lewis. “As a facilitator-organizer, one of my favorite word tricks is that ‘conspire’ means to breathe together. It's an organizing tool.”

On Feb. 27, Cornell ILR’s Worker Institute (WI) hosted “Regenerative Organizing for the Labor Movement: Focus on Care.” The event introduced the Regenerative Organizing model, a pilot program that helped unions and worker organizations address the mounting stress and trauma workers face.

Home care workers, domestic workers and registered nurses gathered at ILR’s New York City office to share their experiences in the program. Alongside speakers like Lewis, president and founder of Liberation Health Strategies, the group explored the urgent need for regenerative initiatives.

“I want to pause here to briefly define regeneration,” said moderator Zoë West, senior researcher at WI and co-author of the Regenerative Organizing brief alongside Ariana Shapiro, an MS candidate at the ILR School. “The regenerative organizing model aims to foster regeneration at the individual and collective levels. The model draws the connection between individual and collective healing and between the cultivation of sustainable activism and labor movements. So, building people's collective capacities to overcome challenges and feel renewed engagement in their lives, their work and the movement.”

Arianna Schindle is WI’s director of Training and Curriculum Design and co-developer of the Regenerative Organizing program. She’s a fervent educator, organizer and healer whose own regeneration is rooted in community. “Well, why do we need regeneration?” asked Schindle. “What happens if we don't regenerate? What do our movements look like? Because we're not in a four-year campaign cycle right now–we're in a movement for our lives, for our people, for working people. And so if we cannot sustain our movements, if we cannot sustain each other, then we cannot sustain this trouble.” 

“Dr. Lewis mentioned the importance of pausing,” started speaker Alexis Francisco who is a therapist, educator and co-developer of the Regenerative Organizing program alongside Schindle. “We often say inside the regenerative model that pause is the pathway to choice. If we are ingrained in these systems, then these systems are what we automatically replicate. So, how do we pause? How do we identify those patterns in ourselves and our organizations so that we can pause them long enough to choose something different? Participants of the Regenerative Organizing program got to practice that.”

Take home healthcare workers, for example. “38% of formal home care workers have health insurance,” said moderator Ariel Avgar, ILR’s senior associate dean for Outreach and Sponsored Research and director of the Center for Applied Research on Work. “So 62% of workers whose core job is to provide care to patients do not have health insurance themselves.”

To Schindle’s point, what would happen if this workforce burned out? For Avgar, this statistic gestures towards the answer: neglecting care workers means also neglecting the patients they care for. 

Executive Director of the New York Professional Nurses Union, Eileen Toback, queued up a video. Her union participated in the pilot program. Their “regeneration project” involved nurses sharing their own stories of how their work stress and trauma impact them. On-screen, her members recounted their experiences: “I sent an email to my manager explaining that I cannot see straight. I cannot think clinically. I have to go home. I cannot work overtime anymore. I am doing a disservice to my patients because I am so burnt out.” Another nurse, forced to take a late admission after having only just stabilized two other patients, “felt that it was a threat to patient safety. I tried to express that concern but was just completely dismissed.”

“Everyone was carrying a lot of wounds,” said Toback. “I don't think I really realized that before going through the training. We were seeing the symptoms, but I couldn't really map it out… To be honest, I was thinking of regenerative organizing as something like a luxury, but now I really see it as a necessity. It's a core part of building and organizing. If you want to build power, you can't have that without being regenerated.”

In a post-training survey of the Regenerative Organizing program, respondents reported that the pilot strengthened their ability to break through reactive patterns not only in their personal lives but also within their union/organization. Participants reported feeling better able to understand triggers, recognize ‘inner managers,’ and address the roots of conflict. 

At one union, a participant described a situation where a period of tense contract negotiations with management led to a spike in conflict within the union and members lashing out at delegates. With support from the Regenerative Organizing program coach, she adapted specific training materials to explain this conflict dynamic to delegates. This allowed them to have a common language, understand what was happening, and have a roadmap to address it.

Another participant shared that the training tools “changed the way that I was interacting, and I even saw it in real-time in meetings during the week.” He noted that he became more effective in navigating relationships in organizing spaces and in communicating with both union members and management.

 “One of the regenerative and healing things about this particular moment is the fact that this group exists,” Lewis opened her arms to the audience. “This sustains me in these moments when workers are being attacked.”

The regenerative organizing model is the caesura: an active silence, a brief break in the music. It allows these care workers a moment to reflect and catch their breath. For Francisco, this is when we must “choose something that is more in line with the kind of connections that we want to build and the kind of visions that we imagine possible for our membership and workers across the globe.” 

As unions, worker centers, advocates and policymakers push for essential structural solutions, they also prepare for even greater threats. Lately, the tune has sped up towards a fever pitch. Our ears tell us the movement is about to change. What key, what tempo, what direction will we go in? “Pause is the pathway to choice,” Francisco’s words echo through the day like a chorus. 

Download the report here to learn more about the Regenerative Organizing program. Contact Arianna Schindle to bring regenerative organizing to your organization or join our spring cohort.