Caring in public
(I wrote this originally as a newsletter to my list just a week before the November presidential elections in the US - remember that? - and just decided it should be a blog post too. Still relevant.)
With just one week until the U.S. elections, I've been thinking a lot about caring.
I'm caring about the thousands of people suffering and dying from COVID-19 and their loved ones. I'm caring about kids in cages and separated from their parents. I'm caring about Black, brown, Indigenous people who are at continued greater risk as the highly racist and racialized election season nears its climax. I'm caring about the burning trees and animals of the North American west and all the people grieving their lands and homes. I'm caring about my kid. My parents. My partner. My friends.
In societies that have oppression in their operating systems, one of the things that is continually under assault is our ability to care about everyone continuously in the face of overwhelming violence.
To care fully means facing the injustices that are happening. To acknowledge atrocity and let our hearts break. To defy the places indifference was installed in us as children.
How do we care, on a human scale, in the face of atrocities that are so unhumanly - and inhumanely - huge? I don't know.
But I do know that many of our businesses are built on work that involves caring. We care about ourselves and our families we support. We care about our clients and customers, we care about the culture we contribute to in our fields.
Your brand is, among other things, the place your work is public. It is your love in public.
My branding question for you today is:
How can your brand be more and more an expression of and instrument of your caring?
And I don't mean the nice, soft, whitewashed, bypassing kind of caring. I mean the nurturing, transformative, fierce, raw, furious caring. The urgent kind. The civil disobedience kind, when the law is used against human rights and survival.
This is the reframe that’s needed when you worry about the “right” way to respond to violence, the proper way to position yourself in relation to social justice issues and crises. I think one of the biggest problems is our numbness: we have a crisis of caring - especially if we carry dominant identities.
How can your brand, as a method of caring in public, make change this week? This year? Always?
Let's give a sh*t. If you are in the U.S., vote, and do more than vote. And use your brand to do its work with heart, soul, mind and action aligned to make things right.
This was originally published (October 27, 2020) for the Bureau of Tactical Imagination's email subscribers. To receive our weekly free education and inspiration for your business and brand building efforts, sign up here.