Annahid Dashtgard's speech at Toronto book launch

There, protesters encountered a massive onslaught of police brutality through tear gas, rubber bullets, and aggressive arrests that continued straight through a 2 day period and beyond. Stats say police shot an average of one tear gas canister into mostly peaceful crowds an average of every 2min. over a 48 hour period.

I remember it being day 2 or 3, being trapped in an alleyway at one point, trying to protect younger protestors from the riot police advancing and being doused in tear gas, their batons lifted above my head, trying not to panic as I couldn’t breath and couldn’t see in the midst of all the chaos. Then, desperately, reaching the end of the alleyway and collapsing, my body starting to heave with sobs, tears from my gut… releasing not just my own sadness and rage but the overwhelming grief, anger and helplessness so many of us felt in that moment.

And here is where judy’s book comes in to offer the missing piece, which has also become my work through Anima Leadership: how do we create better models and structures in our social change work that allow us to feel supported, to support one another and to be sustainable in this work?

After that moment in Quebec city-- the culmination of all the moments I’d experienced being on the frontlines up to that point-- I was HURTING. I looked around at my friends and colleagues active in the movement across Canada and I felt overwhelmed at the brokenness and despair felt by many. As a community of change-makers we were struggling en masse with trauma.

And because we did not have the language, the skills, the tools, the structures to be able to deal with what we had faced and were facing, we lost out. I still feel anger and underneath that, sadness, that I did not receive the support I needed from my community at that time. I feel angry that I saw so many other leaders struggling on their own… isolated, burnt out, physically sick, or just despairing. And I mostly feel angry that the forces were up against—the incredible structures of power represented in state, police and economic institutions, won for the moment.

I use the anti-corporate globalization movement as an example… but I believe the trauma we experienced in the face of coming up against incredibly powerful structures is common to what many face working for change- and I’ve seen it through Anima, working across different sectors --whether in public instutiions, the environmental movement, indigenous communities, anti-poverty activism, social workesr, social entrepeneurs…. We are already moving against the current. That in itself can be hard.
And we are naming and working often with human suffering, inequity, horrors, abuse, rather than making the easier a choice to ignore or turn away. That is hard. And then often we also have our own baggage.

For all these reasons, as leaders for change we need a more solid foundation to work from. We need to build our house on the rocks of emotional awareness, empathy, purpose, self-care and fundamentally our RELATIONSHIPS to one another-- rather than the sands of urgency, matyrdom, reaction, blame and ego-driven activism. We need to re-unite our emotional and spiritual selves with our political selves.

As transformation leaders, we need to be as skilled in the inner realms as the outer, need to be as much self-aware as we are good at strategy, as compassionate as we are critical. This is not an easy path. Creating inner change can sometimes, often, be harder than creating external change. And here is where our real power lies.

Before I end, I want to finish by saying on a personal note as a fellow social change agent, a thank you to you Judy for writing this book. And “I love you”- you’ve done a lot for the left movement in Canada, and for me.