Fredericton, 2014

​

LAWG: A Lived Praxis of Commitment

​

It was the praxis of commitment. We lived and worked together. But the interesting thing was we never really talked about it. We didn’t have theological discussions. But you had these incredibly talented, solid people, who didn’t flip around and change their values. Those people were ‘lifers’! And that really strengthens an organization. If you were working with a Christian-based group, or group that had those kinds of roots, you could pretty well figure it was going to be long-term. Whereas a lot of other organizations, they often morphed and changed.

​

We had our accountability kinds of sessions. I used to love those meetings every six months or so, when we would sit down and do conjunctural analysis which makes so much sense from a kind of socialist praxis perspective, but also dovetails beautifully with the Christian notion of doing critical examination of consciousness.

​

And there were these very deep connections with so many people. Not just the number of connections, but the nature of those relationships, and how we worked in a kind of symbiotic way. So if you think about the whole as a collective, we in LAWG had certain strengths, others had certain strengths. There were times people thought LAWG was taking over but we were respectful and we knew that everybody wanted their regional autonomy. Because there was always this paranoia about central Toronto taking over. I remember from organizing many tours, having to be very respectful of regional differences, allowing organizations to do what they thought best in their regions. The whole thing was we worked with everybody’s strengths. There was no central coordination because nobody would allow that. But that was the nature of the connectedness, that created this strong web, like a spider’s web, with thin sinews, but it’s as strong as all get-out.

​

We understood that point so that we actually funded me, as LAWG staff, to go across the country several times to be physically present and just meet with the solidarity organizations – just to keep those relationships strong and emphasize we didn’t have an agenda. It was, literally, just go and work on the relationships and share what’s going with us. So knew that that was important, just to maintain relationships.

​

Part of our strengths was working with all these regional differences and strengths, and NOT trying to centralize. That forced us to have to be much more sophisticated in how we worked. They knew when to call on LAWG. And we knew when we needed others for different things. And it was this kind of bigger, loose … and it had to stay “loose” – “loose” was part of the genius of making it work.

​

Everyone was connected, like this huge extended family trying to work out who’s who, and who is connected to who, and how does that work, without imposing anything.

​

I think we had the insight that it was about relationships, and maintaining relationships. That was quintessential, to help be the glue, to keep something going, to spin the web. So much of that wasn’t just about political lines, but it was people. And you really did have to know who to trust. So it was about humans. It was about people. And maybe that’s the essence of the formation in LAWG, was that you learned to read those kinds of relationships, and knew the strengths of that and knew how to find ways to work, to connect people. To be able to move agendas forward or to come up with creative strategies. I think lots of people in LAWG embodied that. It wasn’t just about “the task”, or “the outcome”, or “the project” – it was a qualitative thing, a kind of political insight.