0:00:00.0 Louie Marven: Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, on understanding, responding to and preventing sexual abuse and assault. I'm Louie Marven and I'm the Training Specialist at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. On today's episode, we're joined by three guests who are going to talk with us about emergent space and the emergent space guide that they created. We're joined by Christy Croft, Prevention Education Program Manager of the North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault, and Montia Daniels and Shareen El Naga, students at the University of North Carolina who recently completed internships at NCCASA.

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0:00:50.8 LM: So thanks for being here everyone. Why don't we start by Christy. Could you tell us a bit about NCCASA's work on health equity and preventing sexual violence? 

0:01:00.7 Christy Croft: Sure. So thanks for having us. First of all, I know NCCASA does a lot of work around health equity, and we have it built into our framework that we use a social justice framework that focuses on equity and intersectional lens. I know around health equity, a lot of health equity starts with prevention, like building up places and populations who've traditionally had disproportionate impacts of illness and injury and violence to make sure their voices are heard and that their needs are met. And when you think about it, part of why their voices don't get heard in a lot of spaces is because people who have power don't elevate their voices, and they don't get them into the room and they don't listen to their leadership. So that's one part of what I've been trying to do in my violence prevention work, is to elevate incredible grassroots work that I've been seeing.

0:01:51.1 CC: I have a background in grassroots work before coming to NCCASA, and even before starting in advocacy, my beginnings were in grassroots organizing, so I get how those circles work and how I see the power in their approach, and so I've also worked in non-profits for a while, so I think, for me, part of the ways I try to build health equity in my work is by making sure that I'm an effective bridge in as many ways as I can be between non-profits and systems approaches and grassroots and organizing efforts, and so it makes sense to me, 'cause our movement started grassroots, and there's so much knowledge generated in those spaces. One of the most like ironically, dense articles I ever read in grad school was called Cartographies of Knowledge, and they said that the academy is not the only place that knowledge is generated, that knowledge is also generated on the ground and in activist spaces and organizing spaces.

0:02:51.1 CC: And so I feel like sometimes in prevention, we get so focused on the public health framework and systems, which is super important and research, which is also important, but we can't forget that the academy is not the only location for knowledge production, and how can we learn from people doing this work on the ground? And I think that ties in where emergent spaces come in is, for me, part of what I loved about creating it was that it feels a little like another piece of that bridge between those spaces.

0:03:23.0 LM: Thank you and you mentioned the term emergent space, which is what we're really focusing on today. So maybe I can move to Shareen and say what is emergent space and how did you come to this project, how did you come up with the idea to create the emergent space guide, and just tell us some things about how you created it? 

0:03:43.2 Shareen El Naga: Thank you so much, Louie. This is a great question. So emergent space essentially is a framework that we developed, and it's based on the book Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown, and our framework builds upon emergent strategies, specifically as it relates to adapting spaces to be more inclusive, productive, and emergent. And when I refer to spaces, I'm essentially referring to anywhere that a person can take up a space like a classroom, a full-time job, student task forces, even your own living room.

0:04:11.8 SN: So how it came to be is another interesting question, Montia and I were actually both Moxie scholars at UNC, and the Moxie program is for students who are interested in activism, particularly, women's activism, to be able to complete this academic and community engagement opportunity, which we received in the form of an internship with NCCASA. And so we are both placed at NCCASA, and during our time there, we were reading emergent strategy, which luckily a mentor had gifted to me at school, and that essentially inspired us so much that we brought it forth into our conversation and in our work at NCCASA, and we were met with the most supportive response from Christy, who was our mentor at the time, and still is. And they were just as excited to create something new, and at that time, too, we were actually developing our own tool kit for creating safer schools for LGBTQ+ students in North Carolina schools, which is what led us to think more about emergent strategy as it related to spaces like classrooms, and then how we could further develop the framework to approach spaces with intentions of transformative justice, decentralization and more.

0:05:19.1 SN: And more specifically, we thought about the terms safe and brave spaces, and how those spaces had, in the past, been a source of discomfort for both me and Montia, and thinking about specifically how in these spaces, we saw different forms of conflict and undue burden and emotional labor on people of color and queer folks, and just overall inefficiency. And so this led us to thinking of emergent spaces and thinking of how we could take the weaknesses we saw in safe and brave spaces to try and address transformative justice, individual responsibility, accountability, self-work, decentralization, and generative conflict management. So essentially developing emergent spaces, we saw these weaknesses as new opportunities to create alternatives, and that's what we did.

0:06:07.9 LM: That's awesome, thank you, Shareen for that. Montia, what else would you add about emergent space and how you came to this work? 

0:06:15.4 Montia Daniels: I would add that we didn't expect to come into this project and me and Shareen both didn't expect to come into this project with the lasting effect that emergent space has had on us and has had on NCCASA. We were really excited and we had a lot of great guidance from peer Christy, and also a lot of great guidance from a lot of the staff in NCCASA, and we didn't realize how much of an opportunity this would be, but emergent space like the last thing that Shareen was saying like it allows us to create alternatives and it allows us to create new opportunities, so we're really excited for it to be able to be used outside of the spaces that we particularly thought it would be used as. So we thought that it would be used mostly for university settings with me and Shareen our students and things like that, and that's where we've heard these terms of safe and brave spaces, but it was really interesting to think about how the ways that it can be used beyond emergent space, and that is our hope for this, to be able to create more possibilities for and for it to be applied in multiple different ways.

0:07:15.5 LM: Thanks. And Shareen in terms of ways that you hoped that people and groups and institutions might use the guide, are there some other ways that you're hoping to see people use it? 

0:07:32.0 SN: Definitely, so what I love particularly about this framework is that one can use it at all levels, and what I mean by that is one can use it on the individual level, like one can use emergent space, an emergent strategy to guide their everyday behavior and their everyday navigation of different spaces, as I said, whether that literally be like in your own living room or at your full-time job, and you can use it to think of okay, conflict management, how am I gonna think of this? Or self-work and accountability, doing those internal reflections, it's essentially there to create this sort of accountability too with yourself, to be doing the kind of self-work of understanding systems of power and understanding the things necessary to be able to enter a space without harming other folks or putting oneself at the center, things like that.

0:08:24.6 SN: So you can use it, like I said, on the individual level, you can use it on the interpersonal level with relationships, like I said. I'm so happy to hear like when I hear folks using emergent space, not in the traditional sense of what I might think of them to use, such as Montia, she was saying in classrooms or at work. Folks have literally been telling us that they've been using emergent space in their everyday lives and with their relationships with their kids or with their partners, they'll just take deep breaths and think okay, generative conflict rather than conflict that might be harmful.

0:08:57.3 SN: So that to me is really something that I'm happy to hear that folks are really adapting this framework to be able to use at all levels, whether that be individual level, interpersonal level, and then we can even think about how we originally wanted to apply it, which is to the community and societal level of creating these new shifts, and then thinking of how we can individually fit into a bigger piece of organizing and fit into grassroots movements, fit into creating bigger impacts of change as more connected and collaborative force.

0:09:28.3 MD: Exactly, Shareen and this guide is meant to embody all of the elements of emergent strategy and is used to create more possibilities, and it's supposed to be reimagined to fit our specific spaces and needs and things that we want it to be used for, and like Shareen was saying the university settings is where we thought of it to be really helpful and these university settings have powerful dynamics that can be difficult to navigate between professors and students, and this power dynamic is often not acknowledged in the classroom and also the power dynamics between students and administration. So I was thinking emergent space can be places where students were comfortable to speak up about the things that they are wanting to talk about in their university, things that they wanted to change, and emergent spaces are places where students feel comfortable to speak about their truths in the university without judgment or fear of being punished.

0:10:22.2 MD: So they are places where administrators can be held accountable by students. And accountability is something that we've been exploring a lot over the summer, especially if you're on internship the first thing I heard about accountability was this webinar that me and Shareen went to that was called Love with Accountability, and it was the first time I've heard about accountability in a workspace and also accountability combined with love. So accountability in an emergent space is not just acknowledging the harms in that space, but also actively doing the work to remedy those harms, and it's not just listening to what students want but putting these actual plans in place, but putting these plans in place that are led by students. And the universities have a lot of power over students and have a lot of a power to hold students accountable and the emergent space can kind of help level this playing field a little bit and allow students to hold each other accountable. And one thing in acknowledging with emergent spaces that anyone has the ability to cause harm, and we should put measures in place where students can hold each other accountable for the harms they've committed, and the universities have also called systemic [0:11:29.8] ____ people. So we want to create an alternative for students to hold each other accountable, that is other than the university, because the universities have caused harm too.

0:11:40.8 MD: And this is where emergent spaces can come in and help. And I was also thinking about how this could be used in professional work settings, and so during that webinar, Love with Accountability, it was the first time I heard about it, but it also made me think about what I want and desire in a workplace and feeling safe and feeling like my personal development and growth was being sustained throughout the workplace. And Christy mentioned to us how some of the people that their supervisors were using emergent space to ground themselves and find solutions to issues like Shareen was saying.

0:12:13.5 LM: Thank you for those examples of... Yeah, all your great hopes about how this guide can be used, it sounds really adaptable to so many different spaces, and it sounds like you're already hearing some ways that you even didn't imagine or anticipate yet. So that's really exciting. Christy, were you going to add anything to those comments? 

0:12:34.8 CC: I was. Just thinking about the fact that this originally started in thinking of how to create safer school environments for LGBTQ youth, and in North Carolina, we have a lot of rural areas, and we know that we want LGBTQ youth in those settings to feel safe from harm and their safety, their needs, their value, that all matters to their schools, and also we're aware that sometimes we have students coming into those classrooms who maybe have never... They don't realize they've ever met an LGBTQ person. And so they might not know all the right language and their heart might be in the right place, and they also might still be holding misconceptions that they've picked up from adults around them. So that was what made us create this new framework, we can't create a completely safe space for every student because we can't control what everyone else says at all times, and at the same time, we don't wanna say, "This is a brave space, toughen up, Snowflake, speak your truth no matter what," because that's not fair to people with marginalized identities.

0:13:37.6 CC: So I think what I want people to take away from what this framework is, is that it's meant to bring together the best of both of those spaces, so that it's somewhere that will be safe enough, and it's somewhere where we can be brave enough in ways that we feel comfortable, and that way it can be a space where people who maybe have different lived experience or different levels of knowledge about an issue can build a container together collaboratively of trust, so that when they have those conversations when there are missteps or mis-communications or conflicts, they can be generative conflicts that help us move through to greater understanding instead of just being counterproductive conflicts that spin us in circles. So it's sort of like we were looking for what's the framework in which real growth can occur, personal growth and community can be built, where personal growth can happen and community can be built. And that means that in these frameworks, you spend a lot more time building the container, and that's part of the work that's not the pre-work... That is the work. The work is that you build the container in the community.

0:14:49.3 LM: Thanks, Christy. Yeah, I really appreciate how the guide teases out. This is what has been meant by safe spaces and brave spaces, and how this approach of emergent space is different and here's how it's laid out is really great, how there's, these are the characteristics of it, and here's what those characteristics could look like in practice. So I thought that was a really great way of laying it out and yeah, I really encourage listeners to go dive into that. Christy, this conversation is happening in the context of how we've shifted our work in light of the pandemic. And so I just wanted to ask, are there other ways that you've had to shift or adjust your work in light of the pandemic and have any of these changes made your work more accessible? 

0:15:41.7 CC: Yes, so I'm thinking... There's so many different levels. Again, thinking of the fractal nature, which is one of the principles of Adrian Marie Brown's Emergent Strategy. For me personally, I'm working remotely now, which as someone who is a survivor of complex trauma, has given me a little bit more flexibility on some of the rougher days to match my schedule for that day and my work obligations to my ability for that day, and some days my ability is higher than average, so many days it's not, so that's been helpful and has made my work accessible. I'm also thinking about the fact that as an agency, NCCASA's shifted a lot of our training and TA to online formats, which now means that prevention at some agencies who maybe couldn't have afforded to send people to travel to an in-person training can have access to more of our training now.

0:16:32.6 CC: And then I'm thinking about how they're reaching their communities. So people in the community and survivors and people whose communities are experiencing violence and harm right now, we've had conversations in our RPE community Zoom calls for our coordinators in the state, and they've been trying to think through how do we reach people who don't even have access to the Internet? 'Cause it's a lot more complicated than just switch everything to online, and that's gotten them getting very creative about how to get printed materials, what do prevention focus printed materials even say, what is the messaging we wanna get out there, how do we help people understand that wellness is violence prevention, that how do we get that message out there in an accessible way to people who don't even have the Internet? 

0:17:20.4 CC: So that's kind of brought to light some gaps, some major gaps. And then we notice it now as a gap during the pandemic, but the fact is a lot of these gaps we're seeing now are gaps that have always been there, and so maybe that's something I'm hoping that moving forward, we'll continue that focus on where these gaps are, now that we've been made painfully aware of the gaps and the things we need to do a little differently through trying to become accessible, maybe we can continue that work moving forward, and I think that's something that our agencies will be keeping at the forefront as we move forward, our member agencies.

0:18:03.3 SN: Yeah, that's certainly a great question, and I think I can appreciate a lot of what Christy said, 'cause I think that that's certainly applicable, just like it is in the non-profit space. In the professional space, it is applicable too in the campus space, and I think that that definitely shows through because I think shifts have been in the works on my campus for a really long time, especially since I think students on our campus are particularly attuned to activism as they relate to violence prevention, equity, racial justice, but there are still so many more shifts to be had. Generally speaking, I feel that a lot of campuses have so many hierarchies and power structures that slow the process of cultural shifts, even if they are necessary. And that's why emergent spaces and emergent strategy can help actually provide an alternative in the ways we organize in order to actually decentralize a lot of this very concentrated power, such as what we see in the administration, for example.

0:19:00.0 SN: Especially for students who are marginalized, who often fail to have their voices heard and considered in these hierarchies and in the structures. But I also know too that as students, we must organize ourselves in a way that actually help to shift campus culture and move away from the institutionalization of advocacy work in activism, and rather more towards more sustainable grassroots, student-led and collaborative activism. And so I think also the pandemic, as Christy mentioned, has created these shifts and especially exposed a lot of these weaknesses, especially as they relate to accessibility and inaccessibility for folks with marginalized identities, and so I think by recognizing these weaknesses, such as in the way we did with brave and safe spaces, we can then begin to re-imagine a better way to shift and organize the way we do on campus.

0:19:50.3 MD: Exactly, Shareen. And I really love everything that you're saying about re-imagining our realities, and also the way that we organize ourselves with students. And I think a lot of the shifts that I've seen that have been happening is that people have been a lot more attuned to and looking at and making a close eye on the activism that is happening around us and also making strides towards more things we wanted. It's also changed the field of activism in a way, at UNC especially, a lot for me, going to mostly a virtual format and having a bit more people being able to be involved, 'cause you don't have to go across campus to go to that meeting, or you don't have to go across campus to an inaccessible building to go to that meeting, so being able to have more people at the table is something that I've seen a lot in activists spaces and according to health equity and safety, and violence prevention. I think that the students at UNC are realizing that we can organize ourselves even in a virtual format, and that we can still make strides and make changes and demand things from the university, even if we're not in their face.

0:20:54.6 SN: I love that Montia. I just wanted to add on to that, that one thing that we stress particularly about emergent strategy and emergent spaces is that the space is not the physical space, it is the people, it is the humanity, it is the folks who are coming together to collaborate, that create this "space." And so, just as Montia has said, this virtual shift has actually allowed us to see that that's a strength that in the virtual space we're able to decentralize and that there's no central building or space that we all have to come to, and that can oftentimes be inaccessible for a lot of folks that now we can transition into a place where folks who have access to technology, which still a lot of folks who don't, which is something that needs to be addressed, but folks that do can more easily log on and come and approach a space and contribute to a space and take responsibility over it, and that's what emergent space is all about, and so decentralizing. So thank you, Montia, for bringing up those really good and specific points, especially to our campus.

0:21:57.0 CC: I had a thought that I wanted to share too with so much of the talk around decentralizing and sharing power, I'm reminded that sometimes power is structured in a way to protect and perpetuate itself, and so systems are designed sometimes to hold that power and to continue operating the way that they have been. And I know that maybe some of the listeners on this podcast are people like me who are at a state coalition, or maybe you work at your university office or you work somewhere that you have access to some of that power. And it reminds me in the beginning of what I was talking about, about being a bridge, and I think I've learned doing this work that there are a lot of people who are doing it in a professional or a non-profit or a campus administration or faculty kind of position, who also maybe have a foot or have had a foot in some of those decentralized organizing spaces.

0:22:51.2 CC: And so to me, I feel like it's a privilege I have being in some of the spaces I am and getting to speak to some of the people I do, to be able to think, how can I build bridges here? How can I build bridges? How can I help those people who are in position similar to mine understand what's going on in grassroots movements and organizing and mutual aid, and all of these wonderful things that are happening on the ground. How can I help people in power understand how essential those things are and how they can support that work, while at the same time, helping people who are doing grassroots organizing, better understand how they can navigate some of the systems that sometimes are just really confusing and complicated. So I guess I would like to offer an invitation to anyone listening who works in a position where you have any degree of power in your campus or your community, your county, your state, to think of how you can be a bridge and help us all be stronger together through collaboration.

0:23:57.0 LM: Thanks, Christy. It sounds like you are talking about things like, stuff that you've learned from this time, and I wonder if you would share anything else about what else we can learn from this to keep as part of our work going forward, are there, for example, ways that you won't go back to doing how you were doing things before? 

0:24:25.8 CC: Yeah, there's definitely some things that I think we could keep from what we've done during the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, we started having calls every other week with our RPE, support calls for our sub-recipients, and before the pandemic, they only met once a year, maybe they'd see each other at conferences in between our annual meeting, but we started having these calls every two weeks. And because at the beginning of the pandemic, we were aware that people were overwhelmed coming into this work and that we were all just feeling, if you think back to how you felt that first month of distancing, there was a lot of fear and uncertainty. And when we think about the fact that there are a good number of trauma survivors doing this work in our field, it was hitting everybody especially hard, and we spent time at the beginning of those calls, getting to know each other and checking in and how is your health and how is your safety.

0:25:19.7 CC: We celebrated when one of our sub-recipients mentioned that he was going to be graduating with his Master's, and "What will I do with this cap and gown, at least I ordered it, but I don't have anywhere to wear it," we told him to wear it to the next support Zoom and we cheered him on, and we've given a lot more space than maybe we did before to people, to show up in their humanity as they are, and to acknowledge that we're all sometimes, some days are good, some weeks are good, but we're all acknowledging more that we're struggling because we have to. It's a global pandemic.

0:25:52.8 CC: But the reality is that we have a lot of people who were doing this work even before the pandemic, who were struggling, whether it was with disabilities or family struggles or personal things they were navigating or dealing with family, maybe as single parents or... The list goes on and on. So I think that it's made us aware that this, that we... It's not even about productivity, 'cause I don't wanna say that we do better work, but our work has more heart in it, when we acknowledge each other's humanity as we collaborate together. And so it's less about the productivity of like... We do better work once we get started because we had a debrief and then it becomes another box you check, but it's more about we've built connection and space for people to be their whole selves and feel valued and heard and seen in their work and that comes through, I think, of this emergent space booklet as an example of that.

0:26:52.4 CC: Shareen and Montia and I checked in for an hour every day, and at the beginning of that, sometimes we would start with just "How you're doing, how's school, is everything okay?" We've done that in our staff meetings at NCCASA, we've done lots of check-ins with each other, and we've had staff members who've lost people that they love to COVID, and who've had other things happened, and we're able to hold space for each other and our heart is coming through in our work. And I would love to see that continue.

0:27:23.1 CC: And I think the other thing I'd love to see continue and it's related, but again, noticing these gaps, we see these gaps now, we need to not un-see them, we need to not just let things go back and think everything's fine now, we need to be like, "Hey, those gaps, they're still there and we can't just ignore them just 'cause we're out of the pandemic," now that we know, now that it's really been laid out in front of us, what are we gonna do to make things better for all survivors, not just the ones who fit neatly into our programs and to do prevention in all communities, not just the ones that fit the language and binaries that our curriculum, that were developed 20 years ago, having their role plays, how do we really get expansive.

0:28:11.4 LM: Thanks, Christy. And Montia, I wanna pass this next question to you, what can the new ways of building community that we've developed during this pandemic, what can they teach us about emergence? 

0:28:22.5 MD: So there's been a lot of different ways that we've been taught about emergence through the shift to the virtual environment and learning more about the virtual environment. We learned that we don't have to build community in a building, we can build it anywhere. And the shift to a virtual environment has had some aspects to it that have been great and have increased in accessibility. But as Christy mentioned before, the pandemic has also made us more aware of these gaps in the systems around us, and as a student, I've seen it a lot in education and I've seen a lot of ways that emergence has been teaching us and also bettering us in the educational environment.

0:29:00.3 MD: So in a virtual environment, it can also be more accessible to people with disabilities, as someone who goes to UNC, I know a lot of the buildings aren't necessarily accessible and aren't wheelchair accessible. So a virtual environment can definitely help. I know for me, I'm also hard of hearing sometimes, so having captions at the bottom of my screen at all time really helps me a lot, and being able to understand and understand my teachers when I was doing classes online. So I've seen the ways that we can build community and show up for each other, not just in increasing accessibility, but I also realize that when it comes to accessibility, if you don't have a computer or a reliable internet access, it can be harder to function in this virtual environment.

0:29:41.0 MD: So I've seen a lot of teachers and professors accommodate to their students who need internet access, I've seen the university allow people to have funds so they can have internet access down the semester, and I've seen communities do lots of mutual aid funds and show up for each other and show up for students who need laptops and also to show up for people who feel supported. This community can be... The virtual environment can be lonely sometimes, 'cause we're all distant from each other physically. So being able to check up on each other and show up for each other by providing emotional support, providing the things that we need for each other is also really helpful and it allows us to feel like we are closer even when we're further apart from each other.

0:30:22.6 MD: And we can still build that community, even though there's a distance, by making sure that the people in our communities, the people in our circles are safe and have the things that they need, and I feel like that's a really big part of emergence and emergent spaces, is making sure that our communities, ourselves, we're doing good and that we want our communities to also do well and do great, and that's the part of de facto nature of emergent space, is making sure that we are okay, so that we can go out and help others also.

0:30:51.4 LM: Great, thank you. Thank you Montia. Shareen, is there anything that you would add about new ways of building community and how [0:31:02.2] ____ taught us about emergence? 

0:31:02.2 SN: Sure, I think Montia definitely went through most of everything I would say about building community. I think she really did a great job explaining how we've shifted into this virtual space, but that has inherently led us to re-imagine new ways of building community, especially in terms of thinking of accessibility. And one thing I will speak on, particularly on the last point that Montia brought up, which was thinking about as individuals, how do we fit into this bigger picture? I think there has been a lot of shifts, at least for me personally, and how we even think about community and think about where I personally fit, I think as a college student, it's so easy to think like, what is my career path gonna be like? What's gonna be my title? What am I gonna be doing? 

0:31:46.7 SN: And it really is easy to think that way, especially when we've been so socialized for, I don't know how many years up to college, to think that that is the path, that's the right way, that's the way to go. And rather than that being normalized, I think it's important to shift that kind of thinking into rather than thinking like that, how can I create or fulfill a role in my community. I don't think of my future profession or job as a job anymore. I think about it in terms of a community role, what kind of community role am I going to be undertaking in order to do things that are gonna serve myself, but also serve my community in a way that will be fulfilling and beneficial and impactful.

0:32:26.2 SN: And so I think with this time in the pandemic, although it has been lonely for sure, I think it's also given us a lot of time to reflect individually about our own roles in our own way in which we can fulfill a role in a community, and so I would encourage folks to continue doing that even when we're able to connect in person to take that individual space to think of how we are ourselves placing ourselves into these systems and placing ourselves in a community, and how we can therefore use that placement to create impact just like Montia said.

0:33:02.1 LM: Great, well, thanks for all of that, thank you for talking with us about emergent space and about the guide that you created, and making all these great connections for our listeners about how this framework and this way of thinking and doing can impact everyone's work as we shift based on the lessons that we're learning from the pandemic, or that we are finally, finally listening to these things that have been revealed to us about violence and health equity and safety in our communities. In closing, I just wanna ask, Christy, maybe you can start us off, what's something that our listeners can do right now to focus their work on health equity, and then what's something that they can do longer term to focus on health equity? 

0:33:51.5 CC: So I think in the short-term, just starting with the work on yourself to unpack some of your beliefs that you have about the way things are, so that you can recognize the shared humanity of all people, people of color, non-English speakers, immigrants, refugees, LGBTQ people, to include queer and trans people, substance users, people working in criminalized economies, young people, older people, these are all people who sometimes get left out of our mainstream narratives that we're talking about, and so focusing in on what their needs are and how we can address those needs in both prevention and response.

0:34:30.4 CC: And that means that feeds directly into longer term, which is thinking about your positionality and what power you have access to, and what rooms are you in that other people can't get into, and how can you help get them into those rooms with you. I was on a conference recently and someone said something from their own faith background that I found interesting, and she said, "When God opens the door, I take off the hinges," and so no matter what you believe about the ultimate nature of reality, when you get in a door, how can you get those hinges off so that more people who need to be at that table and in that room and making those decisions can get in with you, and how can you share that power with them, and also how can you uplift the work being done by impacted communities, how can you uplift and encourage and support their existing work? These are all things that I think will build equity into our practices.

0:35:27.8 LM: Great, thanks Christy. Montia, same question to you, what's something that our listeners can do right now to focus their work on health equity, I know it's something they can be a longer term also.

0:35:38.4 MD: So right now, we can't address not just who is most affected by the health equity crises but also why. The pandemic has shown who we value most and also it shows about ourself, or our societies, we value most in our societies. And I think that's really interesting 'cause we now know what people are valued most, what things are valued most, and now we can make the steps in order to change that. So we have this great potential and capacity right now to be able to have a lot of introspection and look within ourselves, and also to think about what do we want for our future, what do we want our healthcare system to look like next? What do we want... How do we want to show that we value everybody and all people and everybody's humanity? Like Christy was saying.

0:36:30.2 MD: So I think that's something that we can all do right now, is really have some introspection and think about the next steps we want to do, and organize ourselves so that we can create the communities that we want. And in the long term, I believe we can re-imagine our health and wellness systems in the place that they are now, and completely. I think that I have a lot of hope in the idea that we can change the way that we live in our societies, and we can change the way that we care for each other, and this pandemic has shown us that there are a lot of people that need help, and lots of people that have been... That are not really valued in the healthcare system, and that we can really make changes so that we can make sure that people are valued because it's a costly thing to not value somebody's life. And I think that is very, very important right now that we think about the ways that we can do that.

0:37:19.9 LM: Awesome, great thoughts, Montia. I appreciate, especially your comment about about why it's such an important question when we're talking about health equity is to understand why there has been inequity. Yeah, thanks for focusing us in that direction. How about you Shareen, what's one thing our listeners can do right now, and then also longer term to focus on health equity? 

0:37:46.3 SN: That's actually a great question, and I'm so glad that my colleagues have already touched upon this a lot, and I just wanna reiterate what they've said so far, which is just the importance of self-work, both right in the now and over the long term, and I would say that you can't know where to improve if you haven't done some of the self-work and self-reflection to see opportunities for growth, especially as they relate to systems of power and health equity.

0:38:11.7 SN: Right in this moment, you can find a PDF of a book online, you could watch documentaries, listen to a podcast, which you already are, to begin doing this continual self-work and to rethink and to re-imagine equity in our systems. And like I said, it's a long-term process. Today, maybe you're picking up a book, but who knows in a couple of years you might be leading a grassroots movement in your own community, and just like emergent strategy and emergent spaces, creating more possibilities is really at the crux of a lot of these movements and shifts, so I hope that you all can take that away from this project.

0:38:46.8 LM: Thank you, that's a great last word, focusing back on what people can take away from this project, and I just wanna thank you all for putting it out into the world, for putting this guide out into the world and... Yeah, again, Christy, Montia, Shareen, thank you for joining me today in this conversation, we invite listeners to learn more about the emergent space guide by checking out links in the show notes.

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0:39:33.0 LM: Thank you for listening to this episode of Resource On The Go. For more resources and information about preventing sexual assault, visit our website at www.nsvrc.org, you can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@nsvrc.org.