Hello Community,

This past winter we celebrated the launch of the Design Justice Network's Mission and Vision, as well as the Intentions of the Staff and Steering Committee (M/V/I). The energy cultivated from that experience continues to ground us. Cultivating a deeply interconnected network, advancing and embodying the DJN principles in practice, and amplifying experiences of joy throughout the network are our driving forces, as we move into a new season.

This past year we brought on new Steering Committee members Nour Arafat, Boaz Sender, Elena Silvestrini, and Marta Delatte (to learn more about them please click here). Currently, the DJN Steering Committee is an all-volunteer body that sets high-level strategy, determines the overall network structure, approves the budget, maintains information about the DJN’s structure, and reviews and approves new Local Nodes and Working Groups.

On April 29th and May 11th, 2022, we had the most recent DJN SC retreat, including the new SC members and staff. This took place virtually over two sessions. Our goal here is to give you a sense of what happened and share some of our key takeaways and next moves.

Some Highlights from our Retreat:

Our most recent retreat took place remotely over two sessions. Throughout both days, we shared facilitation responsibilities, integrating our unique perspectives and styles to guide the retreat experience. Our framework was guided by Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation by adrienne maree brown. Here we want to share back a few highlights.

Our Retreat Agenda:

Image Description: Marigold Vertical Rectangle that hold the Agenda for Day One. The top left holds the logo for the design justice network. To the right of the logo is **text that reads:** Day One: 2022 Steering Committee & Staff Retreat Date: Friday, April 29th Time: 12pm - 3pm ETMeeting Link Updated Keywords: (re)connection, stories, roles, capacity, seasonal strategies Resources: Miro Board SC Meeting Notes Jam Board Retreat Planning. Find the Agenda Flow Below.

April 29: Retreat Day One

Check-Ins & Grounding, Guidance & Insight 1:1, Design Justice Love Stories, Break, Roles & Capacity, Seasonal Plans & Strategy

May 11: Retreat Day Two

Check-Ins & Grounding, Guidance & Insight 1:1, Grounding Into Where We Are Now, Break, Decision Making

Design Justice Love Stories: We began with Design Justice Love Stories to connect the SC members.

Image Description: White Background with nine circles positioned into a circle. The center of the larger circle has text in the center that **reads: Design Justice Love Stories** highlighted in green. Each has the name of a staff and sc member. At the top of the image is a lime green word bubble **that reads:** Through visual mapping on Miro, tell us about the time you “fell in love” with design justice. As you’re remembering, notice the emergence of any sensations, questions, or qualities that become present. Creatively express these noticings and memories on your Miro board section through words, images, movements, sounds or other shapes and forms. Each circle is filled with images and writings that respond to this prompt.

“While doing the work of design justice we can often forget why we started and/or what keeps us a part of the practice, the movement, the vision. Reflecting on our Design Justice Love Stories offers space for mental time travel and to consider how our past love is informing our present (as current DJN SC members, and staff), and our future. Visually, we are also able to notice patterns and themes of memories among our team that are collectively shaping our connection/love to design justice.” — Denise Shanté, who facilitated this retreat activity

Seasonal Plans and Strategy: We then moved into the question, “What does the network need most right now? AND How do we (You) know that?” We each responded individually. We asked ourselves “How do we hope to see the Design Justice Mission, Vision, and Intentions (M/V/I) manifest over the next year?” Each of us responded to the question personally, and then we shared our responses as a team. A lot of our ideas overlapped and spoke to some of the key takeaways of the retreat, and brought out many ideas that DJN members have shared or asked for.

Image Description: White background. On the left is a marigold vertical rectangle that list the next works mission and vision. Along with the Staff and SC intentions. You can read those here. To the right of the agenda is a table with black borders that create three columns and three rows. Highlighted in pink, each of nine sections list on name of a staff or sc member. Above the chart is a maroon pink text bubble **that reads:** **How do we hope to see the M/V/I manifest over the next year?** Responses to these questions are listed on post-its in each persons section.

Key Takeaways

We know we need to develop more support and grow the Staff team.

Image Description: Screenshot of a Miro board canvas with 9 white squared titles, with multi-colored stickies on top, each sticky representing a different category. The title at the top reads: **What does the network need most right now? AND How do we (You) know that? Topics (sticky colors/choices) include:** local nodes, Membership, SC, Communications, working groups, network coordinators, finances, programming, the general public, signatories, and people who don’t know about DJN yet (and with one sticky reading: Please feel free to add your own categories!!) Each of the white boxes has the name of a Steering Committee member or staff member, as each person filled out their own individual thoughts and hopes.

On Day One, we explored our Seasonal Plan and had a Strategy Session. We reviewed all of our Stakeholders, including Local Nodes, Working Groups, Network Coordinators, Communications, Programming, Steering Committee Members, the General Public, and Members. We realized that we need to grow the Staff team to accomplish our plans and better support all stakeholders.

We are going to start seeking grants to support DJN. On Day Two, we reviewed DJN 2022 Priorities. We used prompts including: "What does the network need most right now? AND How do we (You) know that?" as well as "How do we hope to see the M/V/I manifest over the next year?" One key takeaway was that the time has come to start seeking grants to support DJN activities, improve Member benefits, and otherwise realize our Intentions.

We know we need to develop more clarity around budgeting & decision-making.

Image description: Light purple background with a Venn diagram to the left, and text to the right. Venn diagram description: An illustration of the structure of the Design Justice Network. There is a Venn Diagram with three overlapping circles, which are labelled “Steering Committee, Working Groups, and Local Nodes.” The three circles sit in the middle of another circle labelled **“Members,”** which is bordered by a dotted line. Everything sits with a final larger circle labelled **“Signatories.”** Text to the right reads: Heading: Members: How do we agree on community guidelines? What is the process for creating community guidelines? Heading: Nodes & Working Groups: What's an equitable way to give out stipends? How do we decide on proposals? Heading: SC How do we come to consensus and review staff contract? Heading: Staff: How do we onboard and transition new staff?

On Day Two, we also discussed our Decision-Making Processes, including defining different types of decisions and who makes them. We recognize that we need to develop more clarity around budgeting and decision-making, and we want to develop healthy ways for all Network Members to be part of these processes. This is a high priority for us in the coming year.

Attending to Members is a top priority.

Image description: White background with text and a screenshot of stickies to the right. This image Is a cluster of the results from the previous retreat session, that helps summarize the trends and similarities in responses to the original question (And Title of the slide) **WHAT DOES THE NETWORK NEED RIGHT NOW AND HOW DO WE KNOW THAT?. The theme considerations are written as text to the left, as bullet points:** 1. Membership / Members, 2. Network Coordinators, 3. Local Nodes, 4. Working Groups, 5. Programming, 6. Communications, 7. Steering Committee, 8. Signatories, 9. People who don’t know about DJN yet, 10. General Public.

When we synthesized our top priorities, these included a Membership Management Platform to ensure a better connection between members and Local Nodes/Working Groups, a membership directory, and the ability of members to self-manage their own memberships (including $, time). We also want to Evaluate Member Benefits, including current benefits, brainstorming and prioritizing ideas for new member benefits, consultation with members about the benefits they you want most, and more.

We developed more clarity around the roles of individual SC members, as well as about how the SC can be most useful to the entire Design Justice Network. As a lead-up to our Day One activity "Seasonal Plans & Strategy," to gain a shared understanding of roles between long-standing SC members and the new SC members, we asked each other a series of survey questions. One goal was to understand our current roles, and how we want our roles to shift in the future. We explored questions such as how long SC members thought their role should last, what skills they wanted to offer, and what felt draining. We also asked how the Steering Committee can be more useful to the entire network while being fulfilled and energized. This helped us sort out how we can better support emerging initiatives and projects.

Next moves

Synthesis and follow-up. Since the retreat, we’ve continued our commitment to biweekly meetings (twice a month), where we’ve been synthesizing the learnings and have been putting them into actionable plans and initiatives. We have also been using these meetings to follow up on the things raised during the retreat that we were not able to resolve during the sessions.
Redefined Staff Roles. We’ve made a lot of progress on redefining the staff roles in order to lessen the burden on DJN Staff while freeing up their capacity to be stewards of the network. We have been able to collectively restructure and identify gaps where new positions would be useful, such as a Communications support contract, while Network Managers Taylor and Victoria are getting acquainted with their newly defined roles.
Planning for network-wide engagement. We are in a planning process for how to organize network-wide engagement, where all Local Nodes, Working Groups, and DJN Members will be invited to help shape shared yearly goals, projects, events, member benefits, themes, and the formation of new initiatives.
Prioritizing Care. We are prioritizing care and the health of Staff, SC, and Members through quarterly pauses, capacity building, such as our search for a new Communications Coordinator, and long-term care strategies, such as our Care Circles series.

We hope that this provides some insight into the activities of the Steering Committee, and we are excited to continue to build the Design Justice Network with all of you!

Wes, Sasha, Denise Shanté, Nour, Boaz, Elena, and Marta,
The Design Justice Network Steering Committee