20. Building Belonging with Brian Stout

Embodying change: Transforming power, culture and well-being in aid organisations

Melissa and Brian Stout of Building Belonging discuss how transformation happens – for individuals, groups, societies and the planet. This includes inviting others to co-create compelling visions, holding space in containers with maximal diversity, stepping into our power and agency, and embodying the change we want with accountability, compassion, grace and challenge.

Brian Stout is the source for the emergent collaborative that has become Building Belonging. Drawn to mediation and social justice, he worked for anti-genocide civics organization Facing History and Ourselves in Boston. He pursued an MA in International Relations & Conflict Management at Johns Hopkins SAIS, before joining the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he focused on conflict management and mitigation in East Africa, and the Middle East during the Arab Spring. After a detail to help launch the USAID Mission in Myanmar in 2012/2013, he joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle. As the social movements he’d been looking for began to emerge (Occupy, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock) he left in 2016 to explore the many tributaries that would ultimately become the source for Building Belonging.

To learn more, check out:

Building Belonging

• website: https://www.buildingbelonging.us/
• medium: https://medium.com/@buildingbelonging
• YouTube channel with conversations on transformation: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRrui9FZqM43NPfB5TFp0Ag

Thought leaders mentioned in this episode:

• Mia Mingus’ on accountability: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/dreaming-accountability-dreaming-a-returning-to-ourselves-and-each-other/
• Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy http://adriennemareebrown.net/tag/emergent-strategy/
• Donella Meadow’s work on finding places to intervene in a system: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
• Shanelle Matthews on storytelling and persuasion for social good https://helloshanelle.com/
• Brené Brown’s podcast episode on feedback: https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-with-barrett-guillen-on-the-hardest-feedback-ive-ever-received-part-1-of-2/
• AnaLouise Keating on Post-Oppositional Politics of Change https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=78atf8nh9780252037849
• Teju Cole on the White-Savior Industrial Complex: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/
• Conflict Transformation and Belonging: https://medium.com/building-belonging/reflections-conflict-transformation-belonging-7ffabcd6d0c9
• Brian Stout’s newsletter: https://citizenstout.substack.com/

***We would like to give a special thanks to the Initiative’s supporters: the CHS Alliance members, the Government of Luxembourg, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (DFCO) and the Netherlands. And thanks to Ziada Abeid for editing the show.***