by Hannah Sattler, Farm Coordinator and member of the Mandate Discernment Team
When I said yes to being a part of the mandate team back in the fall, I was just eager to have an opportunity to dive deeper into community. I really had no understanding of the process or the experience I was about to engage with. Sometimes, the Farm can feel like an isolated part of community, and joining the mandate team felt like an opportunity to show up and connect with folks from residential, Day Program, leadership and the Board.
While it was clear our task was to listen, understand, reflect, affirm, reframe, and present, how we wanted to carry out this task in an inclusive, cohesive, and efficient manner was not as clear to our group. We spent a lot of time talking about how to cultivate creative space that would allow people to engage with questions and topics that would then shine light on where the energy of the community was. As the winter months set the mandate process in motion, I think we did well listening, reflecting, and affirming the surfacing needs and concerns of LTH daily life. There was creative energy flowing and a desire to create a guide that would set us up for success.
We could not have anticipated the wild ride spring would bring, that would test the strength of the initial draft we created. First, in February, the L’Arche International Inquiry report was released, implicating Jean Vanier in conducting multiple manipulative and emotionally abusive relationships with adult women, and then our energy shifted; then in March, COVID-19 became a global pandemic, requiring immense changes in the way we engaged with the world and in community, and our energy shifted to include that; then George Floyd was murdered, reigniting a long-standing invitation into acknowledging and dismantling white complicity in systemic oppression, and #blacklivesmatter filled our consciousness, our media feeds, and our conversations in ways it should have always been, and the energy shifted again. When we finally took the mandate back to the community in June it was clear there was a notable shift in our community, hearts, and world: all of a sudden, the mandate we had drafted earlier felt deeply lacking.
When I brought the Mandate Discernment Team’s proposed what-we-thought-was-final draft of the mandate to the Outreach team, their reflections articulated that these national and global realities are a vital opportunity to pause and consider the gaps in our community’s capacity to live more fully into the radical and intersectional inclusivity we claim to be at the heart of LTH’s mission. I was invited into the realization that we had more work to do. In the daily grind of L’Arche life, and due to the immense privilege that is held by most people in our community, we lacked collective vision to address the need for more organizational measures to prevent abuse of power, especially to vulnerable populations represented in our community. For our team, it was increasingly apparent that we were not fully considering the intersection between racism and ableism, and we were experiencing an increased need for contingency planning for “new normals” like the pandemic.
In these moments of realization, my murky understanding of the purpose of the mandate was made clear: we are invited to communally consider not only what is happening within the current moment of L’Arche, but also L’Arche’s relationship to the current moment of the world we live in, and how we want to be a part of the change toward healing as we shape the goals of the years to come. As a result, therefore, the mandate team followed the energy of folks in community into deeper responsibility and commitment to dismantling systems of oppression. I am eager to see how this mandate sets us up for the next five years and hopeful that it will serve as a helpful tool to grow deeper, wider, and stronger, and to live more fully into our mission.
