2023 has started again as another shocking year in the United States, with 39 mass shootings during the first month of the year. If this is a new precedence for the rest of the year, we should all prepare to buckle up for a rough ride for the next 11 months. Since 2020 there has been a feeling of civil unrest, hostility, sadness, and revolution. The constant stress of social uncertainty has pushed everyday citizens to take up a cross of activism for what they believe and stand for. Each day proves that all the sidelines are gone and that individuals must take personal responsibility for their societal roles.

On the positive side, it has woken up the world to realize how interconnected we all are in a time where the word responsibility is being avoided at all costs. People now know they have more power than they think and more control than they imagined before. This new awakening has motivated people to fight for change for themselves, others, society, and the environment.

Becoming a changemaker is now a role that many are choosing. To understand this shift in society, I reached out to Sandhya Jha, who is an anti-oppression consultant, author, speaker, teacher, founder, and former executive director of the Oakland Peace Center, which is a collective of 40 organizations working to create equity, access, and dignity to create peace in Oakland and the Bay area.

Ms. Jha knows what it takes to create change within yourself, your community, and society. I had an intriguing conversation with her where she shared some insight she had gained through the years.

My Interview with Sandhya Jha

What Does It Take to Become a Changemaker?

“My third book was about transforming communities and how people heal their neighborhoods. It is a collection of stories from folks I've worked with or learned from over 25 years of organizing. It is how regular folks come together and orient themselves toward what they want their community to be. Not just what's wrong with it but what they imagine it could be and what resources they have to make that possible, that magical things can happen.

We have been conditioned to look for a superhero, and the superhero's story is a lie. Most of the best, most interesting, and sometimes the worst history is only possible because a group of people gathered to make something happen.

It's a numbers game rather than a superhero game. When you find other people that care about the same thing that you do, survey the resources and tools you have, and get to know the people who know people, these gifts that we have in our communities tend to get overlooked. The other important thing is that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Part of why I wrote Transforming Communities was because there are great models out there. Here's how to have a one-to-one conversation with your neighbors. Bring together people to analyze what the assets in your community are so that you can build an effective campaign together.

Here are the ways to ensure that the people impacted by injustice are at the center of your justice work. There are solid models that are made for regular people, not people with fancy degrees, not people with tons of power and privilege that can be replicated easily. For me, it's about listening to the people around you, getting a sense of what they care about, and getting together using some of the models that already exist in the world, like asset-based community development and community organizing strategy of one-to-one and small group conversations. Many basic restorative justice practices can be used in local communities to make a big difference.”

What Is An Anti-Oppressive Community?

“Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. often talked about a thing that he called beloved community. A professor named Royce coined the term, but Dr. King popularized it. Whenever people ask me what beloved community means, I describe it as a place where everyone's needs are met and everyone's gifts are honored. When I say everyone, I mean people. I mean plants, I mean animals. I mean the water and the land itself. Those needs are met. Those gifts are honored. That may still seem very abstract, but how we can concretely contribute to that when we change things in our workplace so that we're not just saying we're committed to diversity. We're establishing practices and policies that examine our hiring and interview processes to ensure no implicit bias in them.

There are a bunch of ways to do that. We are intentionally building practices within our workplaces where we learn how to engage each other across differences of opinion in ways that are respectful of culturally different ways of navigating conflict. We generally live in workplaces, no matter how diverse, that are driven by the conflict resolution style of the dominant culture, what we sometimes call white culture. When we start to do things like intentionally carve out time to honor the gifts of diverse communities, it makes a difference. There's a book I read recently by Leah Lakshmi Peeps about disability justice. One of the things they said in that book that has stuck with me is we often think about including people with disabilities as what are their access needs.

What do we have to do to change the physical landscape? But we still approach it as if it's a burden. The book discusses its importance in social justice movement spaces and applies it to workspaces. How do we shift our attitudes to recognize the time we spend driving someone with a disability to a march as added value for us? The people doing the driving acknowledge the gifts we receive when we prioritize including people with disabilities. That's true for all of the inclusion practices. We approach them as if it is a good thing to do. It makes us better people, and it is the right thing to do, but we tend to approach them as a burden instead of thinking, how does the act enrich me? That's a significant cultural shift we can make organizationally and individually. That's one of the things I like to imagine for the kind of community I want to inhabit.”

What Is This Decade Teaching Us?

“It's teaching us what's important. There is an active campaign by the folks who want to make money to discourage us from leaning into that too heavily. But it's about perspective-taking. It's about people saying, is this worth it? Is this pouring out of my blood, sweat, and tears for a corporation that does not value me? Is it worth it? Are there other ways I could put food on the table? It's asking: Do I need all of this stuff, or could I reprioritize so I'm investing in others? It's about people saying I feel disconnected from the land and want to figure out how to reconnect to it. It's about people prioritizing relationships or their emotional and mental health.

There's a song by Toshi Regan called, a New World Coming, and it casts this beautiful vision of what the world could be like; the chorus is, “There's a new world coming. Where are you going to be standing when it comes?”

There is a growing awareness among many folks that this is a moment for change, and what matters to us?

How are we going to make sure that that gets prioritized? That's exciting. Occupy was a precursor. The youth-led eco-justice movement, people like Greta Thunberg, and the water protectors among the indigenous leaders, elders, and youth at the Dakota Pipeline and Line Three in Minnesota. Those are all indicators of those shifts, and they're exciting.”

How Has Racism and Oppression Changed?

“In some ways, it hasn't. There has been an insidious creep. On the one hand, many of us have narratives about how the world has improved, things have improved, and things are less dangerous. If you go back and look at Martin Luther King's, I have a Dream speech, one of the most beloved speeches by people across the political spectrum. You know, the part we focus on is the very end. I have a dream that one day, my children will not be judged on their skin color but on their character's content. But in that speech, he's talking about job hiring and wealth inequities between black and white folks. He's talking about police brutality. He names it explicitly.

He talks about the lack of reparations. He says this country owes a check, has a debt, a financial debt to the black community, and is overdue. So all of those things continue to be real issues in our community. One of the things that we often call the Civil Rights Movement, but the people involved in it, called it the US Freedom Movement; what a lot of those folks were working on, in particular, was voting rights. The fact of the matter is the Supreme Court did not reinstate the Voting Rights Act of 1964 when they had the opportunity to about five years ago, maybe eight years ago. They have not enthusiastically supported North Carolina and Texas campaigns to advocate for protecting black and Latino voting rights.

And I think most of us know about the increase in anti-Asian violence. When we talk about police brutality and when we talk about wealth inequity, indigenous people continue to experience vast differences in their access and their opportunities and in the likelihood of experiencing harm. It's interesting because, on the one hand, we talk about how much better things have gotten. And on the other hand, many of the things that people were fighting for during the US Freedom movement are still issues today. I think items have been removed a little at a time. I often use that analogy of a frog boiling in a pot of water. If you put him in boiling water, he jumps out. But if you warm the temperature a little at a time, he doesn't. While scientifically, that's not true; it's a good metaphor for the situation we find ourselves in, where we have a growing tolerance for removing rights when they happen a little bit at a time. The landscape in which we're doing this work is in some ways different, and in many ways, has reverted to not all that different than what our forefathers, foremothers, and ancestors were fighting for over 50, or 60 years ago.”

How Is Faith Tied to Changemaking?

“It's funny because sometimes people dismiss faith, even though we know the US freedom movement happened in black churches. Some allies were there, black Jewish people and also white Jewish people who were allies. And there were the people who died during Freedom Summer, namely the Reverend James Reeb, who was a Unitarian minister. Our spiritual people, at their best, have a sense of what really matters in the world and what it is worth taking risks to do. I think for me the beauty of spirituality for people who recognize the world needs to be different is that most of our faith traditions across all of their diversity are aware of the fact that the world is not as it could be and that it will take all of us working together to make it a more healed and healthier world.

Something about spirituality reminds us that we're participating in something bigger than us, and it is true. Whether for us, that bigger thing is a cosmic force, whether it's the universe, whether it is a specific deity. There is something powerful about knowing that we are a part of something big and important. Spirituality offers us spaces to decompress, areas where we connect with the community that can empower and equip us to do the work we're called to do. In the same way, engaging our ancestors is essential because it restores our souls and energy for hard work. Spirituality does the same thing. It reminds us of what's possible, and it also reminds us of who we are. Those are tremendous gifts that spirituality can contribute to change-making.”

What Reason Do You Believe is the Biggest Wound Most People Need to Heal?

“I honestly think it's the wound of exploitation; it’s a wound that's externally created. I'm passionate about this one right now. I work with a lot of folks from a lot of different backgrounds. I'm working with people from all sorts of racial backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, people from the disability community, poor people, and middle-class people. The pandemic kind of broke open my observation of how exhausted we all are. I think the root cause isn't a lack of self-care. It's the fact that we live in a society that it turns out could function just as well if people worked four hours a day on average, but where we must work 10 and 12 hours a day because the people with all of the power want to make sure that we know who we need to rely on to survive.

That means our labor's being exploited, not even for greater production, to keep us tired. Some of the most exciting work I've seen recently in anti-racism spaces is about how rest is resistance. We live in a society that's oriented around an extraction economy. I learned that term from an organization called Movement Generation. What they mean by that is we live in a society that's trying to extract resources from the earth, from other countries through militarism, and from people like us through our labor. We live in this extraction economy where everything is being pulled out of the earth, out of us, out of other countries. We are all longing for what they call a generative or living economy where the earth is cared for, where the people are cared for, and where our labor is valued and honored instead of exploited.

It means we're only working as much as we need to maintain a healthy, thriving existence, which is considerably less work than we currently must do to keep a roof over our heads to pay medical bills.

In some ways, I think this is the most significant wound, creating so many other injuries. I got to be honest, and it is weird to say this, but after an adult lifetime of being low-income, working in the non-profit world, and working in community organizing, I am middle class for the first time in my adult life and a lot of other problems I dealt with loneliness, isolation, depression when I was poor, when I was struggling, when I was trying to patch together three or four jobs to stay housed, a lot of those problems went away once I had enough money. We underestimate how many challenges we face are caused by a lack of economic security. I think that the healing of that would create space for a lot of other healing, less domestic violence, less addiction. All sorts of things get addressed as people become more economically secure.”

Do You Believe We Are in Some Form of Spiritual Warfare Right Now?

“I was raised in an interfaith household; I am a Christian minister, and something that many people are surprised to hear because I am well known to be a very progressive minister. My favorite book in the Bible is the Book of Revelation. It is one of the most misunderstood books in the Bible. It was intended as a word of encouragement to people harmed by an oppressive empire. A couple of folks in the church fought hard to keep it in the Bible because they knew there would be oppressive empires in the future. That people were going to need words of encouragement. When we think about times of trial, the Book of Revelation comes up in those conversations because it is there to say, don't worry. We know how awful it is. But in the end, good will win, and you'll be okay. And your struggle is not being ignored by God.

Part of what's interesting about those narratives about times of struggle depends on what community we're from; those end up showing up at different times. Now is a moment when the vast majority of the planet is facing a time of trial. What I like to think, partly just because it motivates me to keep going, is that we're in the death throws of those oppressive empires. When something is in its death throws, it lashes out, it does harm. Some people may have had a beloved pet that, when dying, behaved in ways it had never acted in before, biting when it usually wouldn't. The same thing is true for empires. We're living at the end of a brutal, oppressive, extractive empire.

Things like watching those guys march in Virginia carrying tiki torches and chanting, “You will not replace us, or Jews will not replace us.”

I like to believe that because we are doing the work we're doing, those are death throws of the empire. We must keep encouraged to do good work to stamp out the last of those death throws and bring about the world we need. Now, regarding the climate crisis, what I just said might be a little more naive. We will have to figure out how to live well together in light of the fact that the climate will keep getting more complicated. There are opportunities for us to build community and practice equity and justice in new ways that will keep us thriving, even though corporations are much more interested in making money right now than keeping us alive for the long term.”

How can we learn to see things through other people’s eyes in America?

It's an interesting question because that was what my second book was about, helping us to get a glimpse into other people's experiences across all sorts of different racial diversity in the United States.

I think we often forget that Abram Kennedy said long before people knew that name, he said, you know, the first race constructed was white because, before the 1600s, that wasn't a thing, right? It was, you know, you were Greek, you were Norse, or you were French. So the first race that needed to be constructed for race to function the way it does today was whiteness, which erases all sorts of cultural distinctions.

It was done so that people with all the wealth, who were generally white, could keep poor white folks separated from poor people of color, going back to Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, where white indentured servants and black enslaved people came together and rose up against the plantation owners.

Here's where there is some great news. Ian Haney Lopez wrote a book called Merge Left a few years back, where he talked about research that he's done on progressive messaging; we are where we are because people have been very effective at leveraging fear. Fear is a very effective tool to use in messaging.

We are told you should be afraid of these people. These people are dangerous. These people aren't like you. They are a threat. That has worked really well for what I would call proto-fascist folks; people who want to eliminate democracy and have power dictated by a small group of people with a whole bunch of control over our lives, our bodies, and all of that. The great news that Ian Haney Lopez's research shows is most people are even more compelled by messaging that says, we see you; you are dealing with hard things. Those folks with all the power want to keep us divided, but we know that you want a world where everyone is thriving, poor folks are thriving, where people of color are thriving, where queer folks are thriving, and here's how we can do it together. That's where you plug in the policy strategy; we'd like to move forward.

Here's the way you can get involved in this campaign. That kind of messaging works because it turns out most people want to be part of decent good human beings who have each other's backs. It's interesting because you can probably tell I'm neither democrat nor republican. The Democratic messaging has consistently said, don't talk about gay people. Don't talk about black people. Don't talk about immigrants. You'll scare away the white folks. It turns out that that strategy is also driven by fear. The messaging that is most effective isn't fear driven. It isn't treating people like they are the worst parts of themselves but saying, we see you; we know the world you want. We want it too. Here's what's keeping us from achieving that and what we can do about it together.

I find that incredibly encouraging because the media so often focuses on the stories about how people are pitted against each other that we aren't given a realistic perspective of how much people try to show up for each other. You know, a great example is in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a considerable percentage was about how people were doing harm, experiencing harm, and harming each other. But the reality was 85% of the things happening on the ground were people taking care of each other, showing up for each other, trying to take each other in, and providing food when people didn't have it.

People were rescuing elders, rescuing people across racial differences. But the narratives we get from the media reinforce this narrative that we are opposed to each other and are afraid of each other when that's not true. But we sense that that's how everybody else feels because that's the only story we get.

The vast majority of us feel that way. It's just that the media doesn't make any money off of telling that story. And we've been given this version of this country that is scary, divided, that hates each other, that is trying to do each other harm, or must protect themselves from each other. So, the good news is we've got a different story. We've got a different true story, which can be fantastic building blocks for all sorts of things in our communities.”

Why Is It Important For Us to Understand Our Ancestors?

“In the anti-oppression work that I do in organizations, one of the principles I function out of is we can only understand where we're going once we have a sense of the things in the past that created our current situations. So part of it is knowing the broader history. Still, I was thinking about when we were talking about exploitation and the reality check, so many of us got during the pandemic about how we were being overworked. The fancy term is epigenetic. In our DNA, we have remnants of stories from people who came before us of how they were exploited. Part of why we recognized that condition at that moment is we had enough space to feel what's going on now and possibly have a sense that this has happened before.

It has happened to most of our ancestors. There are markers on our DNA that are left there for several generations related to the harm our ancestors have experienced; they are there to protect us, make us more aware, and make us conscious of how we might be harmed in the same ways. So, it's there to protect us. Our ancestors can be resources of so much resilience, hope, and encouragement. That led to my brand-new book, Rebels, despots, and Saints, the Ancestors Who Free Us and the Ancestors We Need to Free. The inspiration for that book came from Oakland, California's rich soil for community organizing work. Over the past ten years, I have noticed how the people I feel are engaging in this work the best and who are staying healthy while doing hard work are folks who are aware of ancestral practices, stories of ancestors, and rituals that invoke ancestors because they get to call on the power and the wisdom of the people who came before them.

They have people who came before them who faced hardships and overcame them. We can do the same thing. I also learned that we also have messy ancestors. We do have stories in our background, sometimes stories that were withheld from us of how our ancestors’ resisted injustice. We also have stories in our backgrounds that sometimes have been hidden of people who participated in injustice. All of those stories matter because the stories of the ancestors who did harm are a good reminder to us. They can be a cautionary tale. They can help us learn what we want to do differently and how we want to contribute to change, to undo their work. But we also have ancestors who faced injustices and resisted injustice. We can call on those ancestors and remember what they went through and what they did to give us inspiration, encouragement, and a sense of being held as part of that work. Facing our history also provides us with some really beautiful gifts to make us stronger for what is not always easy work but is always good work of creating change in our communities.”

About Sandhya Jha

Raised in an interracial and multi-faith family and witness to the sometimes subtle (and sometimes obvious) ways that racism and xenophobia show up in our society, it is not surprising that Sandhya’s career has been marked by work to affect public policy change (having worked in the office of Congressman Thomas C. Sawyer from Akron, Ohio), religious liberty and an alternative voice to the religious right (at The Interfaith Alliance) and around the issues of housing for all (at East Bay Housing Organizations) as well as her work to build what Dr. Martin Luther King called Beloved Community (most recently, at the Oakland Peace Center).

Sandhya provides anti-oppression, cultural humility, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion consulting and coaching for companies, higher education institutions, non-profits, and faith organizations. For many years they have been an instructor with the Emerging Leaders Program at the Leadership Institute at Allen Temple. Sandhya is also an anti-oppression trainer with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

A passionate reader and writer, Sandhya is the author of Room at the Table, the history of people of color in the Disciples of Christ, and Pre-Post-Racial America: Spiritual Stories from the Front Lines on the subject of race and spirituality in America. Pre-Post-Racial America was listed as one of the top five books on race and religion in 2015 by Publishers Weekly. Sandhya’s book Transforming Communities: How People Like You are Healing Their Neighborhoods focuses on concrete ways that regular people are creating change community-by-community in an era where positive change can feel impossible

About the Author

Annmarie Hylton-Schaub, Head Marketing Strategist and Content Developer at Project Good Work, a boutique marketing group focused on helping individuals who want to launch social impact projects, charities, and change-making initiatives. The marketing group works to develop branding, marketing strategy, and content to connect clients with the people who believe what they believe so that their project and business can thrive.

If you have a passion for an unserved community, a social justice problem, or want to change minds, contact Project Good Work at ProjectGood.Work to start your project of change today.