As part of Systemic Justice’s fifth anniversary celebration on 29 June, our Founder, Nani Jansen Reventlow, reflected on five years of building the organisation, the meaning of collective leadership, and why our work has always been about following the lead of the communities we serve. As Nani steps into her next chapter, we’re sharing a written version of her remarks below.
When I shared with the world about a year ago that we were in the process of starting a leadership transition at Systemic Justice, it was still very difficult to envisage this moment actually arriving.
But now it’s here, and it feels both very strange and wonderful at the same time. Strange because I still have to pinch myself a little bit that I’m actually leaving: my last, last, last official day as part of the Systemic Justice team feels like something in the distant future. And yet, time has flown by – and, in many ways, I feel similarly about the past five years, and the wonderful journey of building Systemic Justice together with our community partners, the team, our peers, and our supporters.
When I look at where we’re standing in our journey, and where we come from, it has all been collective work. In a number of recent conversations, I’ve been asked questions about leadership, what it means to be a founder, and what it means to be a feminist leader and so on. I always struggle a little with these kinds of questions – not because I don’t have an opinion – anyone who knows me knows I have plenty of opinions about plenty of things:) What I struggle with is the idea of leadership itself, and the way we so often talk about it as though it’s something that belongs to an individual rather than something that’s collective.
There are many beautiful ways this has been articulated by others. Some of you may have seen this really lovely video out there about the “first follower,” where an exuberantly dancing person is somewhere on a grassy field at a festival, making all sorts of funky moves by himself.
People are looking at him until someone joins in and starts following the initiator’s lead, busting energetic moves. And soon, other people join, and before you know it, there’s one big party going on, and everyone is dancing.
And while there is, of course, something about being that first person and, in a way, sticking your neck out – and I want to be very open that as a Black woman, doing something like that doesn’t come without risk and also, unfortunately, not without a fair deal of heartbreak and sometimes injury – there is nothing, no project, no initiative, that will ever become something bigger than the individual who started making those first moves on the dance floor, if they aren’t joined by others.
And in the case of Systemic Justice, I feel that, besides the fact that we’ve become a beautiful dancing troupe as a team, together with our partners, together with our allies and supporters, together with all of you, making those first steps onto the dance floor wasn’t, in my view, a big leap.
In many ways, it was a no-brainer. Having seen in my previous work as a lawyer and litigator, and also very much having seen that together with Jonathan McCully, our first Head of Legal, that things weren’t working in the dynamics between communities resisting systemic injustices and the lawyers and litigation organisations that they were working with, it was clear that we should be following the communities’ lead. So that dance floor that I jumped onto wasn’t empty: it was already filled with our wonderful community partners making good trouble in all sorts of ways.
This work has been, is, and will remain about following our community partners’ lead.
And it has been an honour and a privilege to stand shoulder to shoulder with you in our fight for a just world. I hope that it is seen that everything we do is about our community partners and the beautiful ways in which they are resisting, and the beautiful ways in which they are envisioning a fundamentally different way for us to live together in this society. And if I’m proud of anything, I’m tremendously proud of having followed them, looking back over the past five years through our anniversary timeline.
Besides questions about leadership, I’ve also been asked quite a few times about what’s next, and I can share that I’m so very excited about where we’re heading. We are working with amazing community partners. We have a wonderful team and a supportive Supervisory Board. We have a brilliant new Executive Director in Saranel Benjamin. I know that so many great things will continue to develop from this.
I can’t wait to see what shape it will take. In the blog post I wrote a year ago announcing this moment of transition, I said that my dream was to attend Systemic Justice’s ten-year anniversary party five years from now. So I will not consider this a goodbye.
Besides the fact that we will probably be comrades on many fronts, in many endeavours to come, I will definitely see you then, at that ten-year celebration.
And I’m really looking forward to it. So: until then. And: thank you.
