Thanks a Lot: Gratitude, Community, and the Systems We Accept
I give thanks weekly, sometimes even daily. I also find certain holidays to be a bit of a farce followed immediately by one of the most massively marketed days of gross consumption as a national sport; not to mention the whole colonial origin story that the textbooks conveniently sanitize. I promise, this post is a glass half full article.
All that said, I will do my best to be an optimist about both gratitude and the digital community we can lean into with the current state of both the world and the ever adapting technologies that serve us. Yes, serve us as its benevolent overlords and lordesses, not the opposite.
After all, we humans write the code, at least for now anyway. Though not nearly enough of a diverse writing committee, but we are working on it before we are written out of the history books in trying.
Gratitude Lists Are Not Enough
My obsession with both using #Tequity and the importance of community is pretty much my life's work. But lately, I need more than just gratitude lists and saying thanks for my expensive eggs and hard to find medications. Really, I swear, I have some uplifting things to say here.
This constantly nagging feeling I have that we are quickly becoming less community focused and more tribal with a capital "I" globally. This leaves me and many others I speak to more anxious than ever about how we do community care; even with a more collaborative way of leadership and developing tech with inclusion in mind at the very top of my gratitude list.
A note on terminology: the opposite of Patriarchal order is not a Matriarchy in the way most people fear it. Patriarchal organization is top down, "might makes right," and leaves little room for diversity, equity, or inclusion. A more collaborative order does prioritize those structural inadequacies AND it also does not leave out male leadership or men.
Why I Care (and Maybe You Could, Too)
I attended my undergraduate studies at a farm school. Not because I was a country mouse, far from it. I was and still am a city mouse who likes all sorts of boots, not just the ones you wear when bringing the cows in from pasture. I chose Warren Wilson College because it had such a unique focus on community and student led work crews; most all students, faculty, and support staff lived on the sprawling 1,100 acre campus and participated in maintaining the pillars of the triad: academic education, student run work crews ranging from cow pasture duties to HVAC, plumbing, and pretty much anything a campus needs to run. Add a commitment to community service hours off campus and the average student was decently exposed to circles outside their own upbringing, became fairly well educated from a liberal arts perspective, and ambidextrous af, willing to put out a yard fire with a thimble and a garden hose. True story.
In short, my three years at Wilson taught me the value of doing good work in the community and surrounding areas, returning back to campus to share meals, and being encouraged to participate in academic discussions, active political campaigns, and learning to co-pilot student led rallies and protests. Wilson taught us students the value of civic engagement and our individual value was expressed through the collective. I received my Poli Sci degree from a gun toting Libertarian, a Red Book carrying Communist, and a Wall Street Journal reading Republican.
Sharing IS Caring (and So Is SEO, LLMs, and Backlinking)
I started this blog to better share proper SEO with people who are interested in searching the web about women so that when anyone starts to Google such a phrase as "Women in..." the first five things that come up would not be related to our body parts. Please and thanks.
Also, true story: I did a quick Google check and we are doing better, ladies. Certainly there is still much work to be done but at least the less savory results are further down the list. I want the community of internet users to gleefully search about "Women in..." and find immediate SEO generated keywords like: Women in business, Women in tech, Women in leadership.
Mutual Aid Over Gratitude Performance
So what can we do now besides make gratitude lists and send thoughts and prayers? Yes, we can be kind and hold open doors, use our blinkers, and help old folks cross the street. Great ideas. Always.
AND let's activate more sharing as actual caring. Mutual Aid. In our communities, there are industry disruptors doing the seemingly impossible: building equitable sharing circles, creating real community in a digital age that keeps trying to sell us the hologram version, and showing that when we invest in each other directly, the returns are exponential.
I stay in touch with a lot of my Wilson family and we are often in conversations about how incredible our time at school was and how hard the "real world" really can be outside of that kind of intentional community. Many of us have found or created other communities but that daydream seems too easy to settle into for me. Apparently I like taking the long way.
Building the Web We Actually Want
Writing about the importance of community might seem like a very ironical and oxymoronic thing to post on the noisy and extractive internet. And yet here we are, and here you are, reading this. That counts for something.
When we use the simple tools of this version of the internet (Web 2), cloud sharing, posting, adding photos, sending emails, you can imagine the invisible threads you are stitching across the interwebs. So when we think of tools like SEO and backlink sharing, we are building our own tiny webs of information shared between each other and between our shared missions, offerings, and visions. Sometimes this information gets to people as intended and other times the algorithm has other plans.
Let's be intentional about those threads. Let's weave them towards equity, towards belonging, towards the world we actually want to live in. That is the gratitude practice I am most interested in: the one that builds something.
If you are at all curious about staying informed on the build of our shared future and how technology will direct it, I invite you to join us at Business 4 Good.
Love,
Rose
When women have everything we need, everyone flourishes.
