I have long been a connector. I love to organize, to converse, to bring people together. When I was nineteen I started a non-profit organization, connecting a community of people to help provide sustainable, safe spaces for QILT2BAG+ youth in our city. I networked and met with anyone I could, looking for collaborators. I also worked for an organization that did advocacy work for youth living in care or in custody throughout the province.
I learned from this job how important it was to find allies at all levels of a system, across different organizations. Later I took a job as the administrator and researcher for a committee made up of representatives from several different organizations. They were putting together resources, including training workshops, a website, and informative leaflets, to help educate businesses, social workers, and schools about the impacts of both homophobic bullying and domestic violence on the QILT2BAG+ community.
With each role, collaboration was a given. In a sector so strapped for resources, working together was essential. When we joined forces on various projects, we could do that much more with them.
Now, as a dharma practitioner, I see the need for this collaborative approach across our many practice communities, but I also see the need for something else. Something I’ve been calling cross-pollination. Cross-pollination is distinctively different from collaboration, as it’s not necessarily about working together on one thing, but about sharing what has been learned in one community with another. Why reinvent the wheel? Why start from scratch on offering something in one community, when another community already has a framework? Why not pass along the seeds from one community to another?
Cross-pollination is how I came to meet Laura Martin of the Zen Community of Oregon. I’m currently enrolled in the Upaya Zen Center’s Buddhist Chaplaincy training program, and one of the members of my cohort, Denise Gour, and I got to talking about the role white dharma practitioners have in anti-racist work. I shared with Denise how my approach to chaplaincy is to explore the role of the chaplain in supporting people in learning to see their complicity in oppressive systems, and also how they can challenge those systems. She told me about a six-month offering called Waking Up to Whiteness: Using the Dharma to Dismantle Oppression, that was organized at her community, and introduced me to Laura via email.
Laura is no longer involved in delivering this offering, but she put together the original curriculum using the support material available on WhiteAwake.org, and was happy to share it with me. She also sent notes on what was learned from that first offering, and provided me with more connections with others doing similar work or helping continue to offer the six-month course, soon to be in its fifth iteration!
This generosity across communities is exactly what we need, particularly when it comes to doing the necessary work of dismantling systems that continue to marginalize, oppress and dehumanize so many people. Rather than spending months planning a curriculum from scratch (Which I’ve been part of and found immensely frustrating) I now have a curriculum ready to work with, and an instant group of peers with whom I can connect for support and guidance. I’m able to use the energy I might have put into building a course to building community instead, thanks to cross-pollination.
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This blog was originally published on Medium in the Northwest Dharma blog.
Kaitlyn Hatch is a writer, artist, podcast producer, philosopher, and designer, and has been a dharma practitioner since 2008. She is queer, non-binary, and disabled, and has Métis and British ancestry. She has most often practiced with Shambhala and in the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, although she considers herself a ‘rogue practitioner.’ Her primary teacher is Pema Chödrön, and she is a graduate of the Upaya Zen Center’s Buddhist chaplaincy training program.