We start our Community Design Sessions for implementing the Skid Row Action Plan the same way each time. That includes a public reading of a Land and Labor Acknowledgment as well as reading out loud our Community Agreements.
We have 38 Community Agreements and so different people take turns reading a few. As I was reading a section, I automatically switched a couple words and said Speaking Truth To Power before realizing it says Speaking Power To Truth.
From Wikipedia: In classical Greece, “speaking truth to power” was known as parrhesia. The tactic is similar to satyagraha (literally, “truth-force”) which Mahatma Gandhi used in the Indian independence movement to bring an end to the British colonial regime in India.[3] Historian Clayborne Carson attributes the popularizing of the phrase in America to civil rights organizer and peace activist Bayard Rustin, reporting that he adapted it in the early 1940s from a saying of the Prophet Muhammad.[4][5] Rustin adapted and condensed this concept as part of co-writing the pamphlet Speak Truth to Power: a Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence, published in 1955.[6]
Speaking truth to power obviously has a long and important history to it, but saying speaking power to truth at the beginning of our gatherings — that phrase really makes sense.
The Action Plan was created the second half of 2022 through many many hours of facilitated work group research and discussion. Broader community engagement took place through Ubuntu (I am because you are), a Community Input and Resource Fair with a couple hundred folks and numerous organizations participating.
The County Board of Supervisors have given the ten member Resident Advisory Committee the task of overseeing the implementation of the Action Plan. And so in the midst of so many moving parts including the recent settlement through Judge Carter of the LA Alliance lawsuit against the County, it’s very easy to see why the recommendations in the Plan need power spoken to their truth.
It’s not that the recommendations aren’t already powerful, they’re extremely powerful because they’re extremely truthful. But this isn’t about the power of the Plan; this is about the implementation of the Plan and these truths continuously need power spoken to them.
And so for the rest of 2023, Community will continue to be Designed as Power continues to speak to Truth.