ASHLAND – Susan Glisson and Charles Tucker are visiting Ashland University this week as guest speakers in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Symposium Against Indifference.
The theme of this year’s symposium is “Building Bridges Through Dialogue.” It’s exactly what Glisson and Tucker strive to do at Sustainable Equity, a consulting company they co-founded to help organizations create inclusive, trusting and humane work and social environments.
As part of their visit to the AU campus, Glisson and Tucker led a conversation about how communities deal with confederate statues, gave a lecture sharing stories of their own community building work and met with staff and students in the university’s residence life.
Their final event is a Welcome Table workshop 7:30 p.m. Wendesday, Jan. 31 in the Trustees Room at Ashland University’s Convocation Center.
Q: Your company is called Sustainable Equity. What do those words mean to you?
Glisson: We actually chose the name based on the work of my favorite civil rights scholar, Charles Payne, who wrote a book about school reform in the Chicago school system, the many efforts that were attempted and the fact that they failed. The big conclusion that he had was that reforms don’t work because they’re introduced into spaces where people don’t trust each other. That affirmed the observations we’ve been making over the last 20 years, that if you don’t take the time to create trusting relationships, then any equity effort you attempt is going to have the flaw already to fail. As soon as something happens and people don’t trust each other enough to talk it through, they walk away from the work.
Tucker: You can create equity for a moment and then it falls apart. By building foundations of trust, we’re hoping to create equity that is sustainable, that will last. The whole sustainable resources movement is looking at how we can’t continue using resources like they’ll never run out. We have to look at things that can be replaced, regenerated or rebuilt. We should look at our relationships that same way, that it’s something you have to put work into. You have to plan for the long haul to ensure they last longer than one generation or one political cycle or one news cycle.
Q: Can you share an example of how your approach has worked in real life?
Glisson: I would talk about New Orleans. We began working there in our previous affiliation with the (William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation), and the first thing we did was build support for the project before we even began. Mayor (Mitch) Landrieu had just been elected to his first term, and he gathered together various constituencies and asked whether race relations was an issue he should take on in his first term, if he should expend his political capital in that way and whether it was an issue that would resonate with other people. So the first thing we did was what we call the work before the work, to make sure this was a conversation people wanted to engage in.
Then we did public meetings to alert the community that these conversations were happening, and some of those were really painful. There was a lot of anger for decades of injustice. One meeting in Central City lasted three and a half hours and consisted of people yelling at us the whole time. For me, I consider those things sacred. I’m happy when people will tell me what they’re really feeling. Afterwards, one of the gentlemen who was the most vocal said, “I’m going to give you a chance.” He joined one of the circles that formed and then later asked if he could be trained to become a facilitator in the process, so those kinds of examples occur.
Q: What’s the difference between talk that goes nowhere and conversations that can have an impact and move an issue forward?
Glisson: In my mind, cheap talk is either sound bites or listening to convince instead of listening to understand. That’s contrasted with purposeful, intentional, vulnerable and brave conversation where you actually get past the surface level of your suspicions and stereotypes and share what you hold dear, what you value, what you love, what you’re willing to work hard for. When you are able to have those conversations, something happens scientifically. Psychologists have documented this process.
Q: What are some simple ways individuals can have more productive conversations with people who hold different views?
Tucker: The simplest thing is to listen. In America, we tend to listen with an ear to rebut. So as the other person is making their position known, we’re trying to figure out what they’re going to say and looking for where we can break in to say what we want to say. Consequently, we may lose the entire train of thought or the meaning behind that thought. Listen to what the person has to say and think about what they said before you form your response.
When someone tells you something, ask an open and honest question. Not a leading question that’s setting you up for your rebuttal, but a question you legitimately want to know the answer to and want to know what they have to say.
Also, when someone says something that causes you to have a reaction, or as they say in New Orleans, “makes you feel some kind of way,” don’t immediately react to it. Take a breath and then ask yourself, “Why did that person say this? Why do they think this? Why do they feel that way?” And then the hard question is, “Why did I react that way to it? What does my reaction tell me about me? Am I reacting to what this person said, or am I reacting to what someone else said that this reminds me of?” That sort of self-interrogation really does lead to a deeper understanding.
