July 2025: Finding Our Purpose

An extreme heat wave is sweeping the nation, I.C.E. agents continue to raid communities tearing families apart, public lands are in jeopardy, and the U.S. may just be on the brink of WWIII.  Does anyone else feel OVERWHELMED?

Perhaps our June reflections on giving grace to ourselves and others are helping us remember that no one can do everything that’s needed to fix our troubled society. Which leads us to this month’s prompt, which is the next Element of Anti-racism Practice: Finding Our Purpose.

In a recent conversation, a member of the CWC community shared a way to combat the feeling of overwhelm. She’d learned of it while attending a Black Lives Matter community meeting over a decade ago where the organizers’ Call to Action was for attendees to understand and work within their circle of influence in their antiracism efforts. And so we thought that this tool might be a great prompt as we explore the concept of finding our purpose/usefulness.

We’ll use this video clip, titled “How to Not Get Overwhelmed by the World - 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey,” to jumpstart a reflection on our spheres of influence. We’ll also use Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Ecosystem Map, which we’ve discussed before, for additional inspiration. With these two concepts to stir our curiosity, we'll use the following questions to help focus our discussions:

1. What are my strengths? Where and/or with whom do I have influence?

2. How does this awareness translate into an effective antiracism practice?

3. Why do I care about racial justice? What’s in it for me?

4. How might I catch myself before falling into the trap of white saviorism?

Two of the most important words in the CWC preamble are so that. We move towards antiracism so that we can be useful in dismantling a culture that favors some and oppresses others. May the July conversations ignite meaningful insights so that we too can find and embrace our purpose in antiracism!

And if this prompt isn’t inspiring you, come for the community. You’ll be missed if you don’t ☺️

"The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change the world." — James Baldwin, author and civil rights activist

“Every crisis, actual or impending, needs to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society. Going beyond protest organizing, visionary organizing begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.”― Grace Lee Boggs, social activist and feminist