Power Play: A Play-Based Approach to Nurture Equity & Belonging in Home Visitor-Family Partnership

Key Summary

• Power is having the necessary resources to decide and define reality and impose that reality on others (who/what is safe or dangerous; who/what is valuable or disposable).

• Using our power ethically is our professional responsibility.

• Shifting away from power-over domination and power denial to power-with with families is a powerful way to strengthen home visitor-familiy partnerships.

• On one hand, we have the Western model of power that says power needs to be hoarded, taken, and ranked. On the other hand, we have the decolonized model that says power needs to be shared and co-created.

• If power needs to be hoarded, taken, and ranked, it’s only logical to use tools like:

  ·       Extraction and exploitation to take power from someone else and from the land.

  ·       Control and coercion to normalize this status quo and call-out, cancel, and criminalize other ways of using power. [Control how you look, talk, walk to be professional aka proximal to white, middle class, Christian, able bodied]

  ·       Policing, punishment, and prison to protect the profits and power we’re hoarding.

• Instead of extracting from nature, indigenous communities and folks from the Global South don’t take more than what they need and they also give back to nature. There’s reciprocity in care because humans and nature relatives (animals, plants, fungi, rivers, mountains) share our well-being in the same ecosystem. In addition to reciprocity, respect is also there. Nature relatives are treated as sovereign beings with spirits/souls (animistic practices).

  • Instead of extraction, there’s regeneration. How do I give back and steward the land?

  • Instead of domination, there’s reciprocity.

  • Instead of separation between humans and nature, there’s connection. Nature isn’t resources; it’s relatives.

• Oftentimes, fear keeps us stuck in inaction. Frozen in fear, we don’t exercise our power. Our inaction can cause ruptures in our partnerships with families.

• Ambivalence (Fear of messing up, fear of causing more harm, the need to be right, and fear of getting it wrong) -> Indecision -> Inaction

• To stay anchored in our agility, in this dance of stepping up and stepping back, we must:
  1) Name our fear
  2) Ask “am I unsafe or uncomfortable?“ Use this response to guiude the next steps.
  3) See the invisible social contract in any power dynamics: Powerblindness, Myth of neutrality, and Unconscious supremacy.

• A snippet from the article I wrote for Zero to Three Journal, Queering "Ways of being": Replacing Politeness with Honesty to Create Belonging,
  “McDowell, Knudson-Martin, and Bermudez (2018) called this tendency “the myth of neutrality,” which refers to the inability of those with power to see the power imbalance between themselves and those with less power. In other words, when we ignore the power differences between ourselves and caregivers, we are powerblind (Kurzman, Ghoshal, Gibson, Key, Roos, & Wells, 2014).  When we buy into “the myth of neutrality”, we risk neutralizing our ability to act for social justice.

  Powerblindness bypasses accountability and keeps us from recognizing our full humanity: it recognizes our own good intentions and compassion but neglects to consider our power, privilege, and social location (Crenshaw, Harris, HoSang, Lipsitz, 2019). It prevents us from seeing the power imbalances in between families and ourselves and from disrupting this imbalance/hierarchy (McDowell, 2015).
  Another dynamic that powerblindness plays out is called “unconscious supremacy” (Nieto, Boyer, Goodwin, Johnson, & Smith, 2014). Those with power are conditioned by their privileges and reinforced by institutions that were built for them to believe that their worldviews are more legitimate, credible, and correct than those of people targeted by oppression. Left unchecked, this unconscious supremacy might be used unintentionally to justify our desires to offer tips and strategies before hearing a family’s full story (Gold, 2017). Additionally, the idea of “empowering” or “affirming” our clients can sometimes keep the clients in the less powerful position as passive victims of oppression (Freire, 2000; hooks, 1994).”

• To keep cultivating belonging as a team, trust is an important ingredient.

  Staci Haines, activist and author, defines trust as “intention + competency + reliability, all held within an analysis of systemic power and conditions.”

Action-Invitation

• Remember your power: What’s your SECRET SAUCE in the Home Visiting Fried Rice?

• What are your GO-TO and GROW-INTO roles in our liberation?

• Get unfrozen from fear: Am I unsafe or uncomfortable?

• Spotlight the partnership: What’s adaptive for the partnership with families right now? Then, step in or step back.

• Bye, perfectionism: bring a brick not a building.

• It’s okay to “accept and build“ brick by brick. When we “block,“ “drop,“ or “accept,“ repair.