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LJS is excited to profile
Jennifer Kruszewski, LJS's newest team member, in this month's issue. Jennifer joined LJS in July of 2012, taking over for Jen Pond who was going on maternity leave.
Before joining LJS, Jennifer was working as the Business Manager for a national litigation support company. Prior to focusing her career on business operations, Jennifer spent a number of years in the Early Childhood Education field. Missing the opportunity to help others learn and grow she decided to transition to a more meaningful and rewarding environment, and did just that.
Last summer, Jennifer found Nanci's job posting looking for an Office Administrator. After reading about Nanci and LJS she immediately knew this was a team she wanted to be part of and an opportunity she needed to pursue. Jennifer and Nanci immediately hit it off and so began Jennifer's work with LJS.
Jennifer started at LJS playing the role of Office Administrator handling scheduling, event logistics, materials production, social media, web updates, and travel coordination; to name a few ways you may have interacted with her.
She soon began branching out of the office when an interest in facilitation took shape for her. In November 2012, Jennifer completed the ToP Facilitation Methods Training with instructor Barbara MacKay of North Star Facilitators. In January 2013, Jennifer got a chance to co-facilitate her first Action Planning alongside Nanci and LJS Associate, Stephanie Gonzalez, at the Unid@s reconvening in Corvallis, OR.
Additionally, Jennifer has recently taken on the role of Finances Administrator for LJS. She is now also working with Nanci on creating and managing contracts, generating invoices and monitoring payments, as well as a number of other financial related activities.
When Jennifer is not busy with LJS related matters you will find her spending time with her puppy, Cora, or with friends. She loves being outdoors, playing and listening to music, going to shows, dancing, cooking and baking, and trying new restaurants.
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Pre-Conference Training - June 5 and 6, 2013:
Nanci will present a pre-conference
training You Don't Know What You Don't Know: Cross-Cultural Capacity Building for the Authentic Facilitator. This workshop is open to the public so feel free to spread the word.
Concurrent Short Workshops and FAST Talk - June 7 and 8, 2013:
Nanci will be present a concurrent short workshop What's Power Got to Do With It? Understanding the Impacts of Dominance in Group Facilitation and an 8 minute FAST Talk.
 Use LJS Promo Code:
LJSA
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Welcome to Spring! And a Happy Passover and Easter to those who celebrate these holidays of liberation and rebirth. I'm writing to you from San Juan, Puerto Rico this month. I have returned to my father's homeland and my family and community on La Isla del Encanto for some renewal and insight.
Many of you may already know that I came to live here temporarily to both work on my first book and to pursue a childhood dream of learning Bomba. Bomba is an Afro-Puerto Rican dance, drum and song tradition and cultural expression brought here by escaped and former enslaved Africans from the French-speaking Caribbean. Once again, my evenings are filled with music and dance and a deeper learning and appreciation of the preciousness of this tradition in my life. What many of you may not know is that I specifically come to Puerto Rico to gain awareness into the myriad of unacknowledged assumptions and expectations that make up my life in the US.
The first time I came to live in Puerto Rico, I was an undergrad at Yale University. In New Haven, Connecticut my days and nights were full of activity--classes, work, MEChA meetings, singing group rehearsals and performances, study groups and study breaks, talks, teas and working with other activists in the divestiture movement (this was the height of global organizing to end Apartheid in South Africa). Since Junior High School I had kept a rigorous planner (which comes as no surprise to many Millennials since this is considered the norm now, however when I was in middle school this was not the case). This level of efficiency and doing, this capacity to not only manage but drive to control my time came into stark focus--and not a little frustration. On my very first day at La Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where I had come to study for a semester, I recall waiting for the bus. As I stood at the bus stop, I reviewed the full page or two of "to dos" I had crafted for the day with such good intentions and high expectations. Within a minute or two of waiting, my impatience already piqued, I turned to a woman next to me and asked, "Cuando viene la guagua?" And instead of a specific time or expected scheduled arrival, she relaxedly answered, "Cuando viene." When it comes. When it comes?! How on earth could I possibly get through everything I had planned when I don't even know when the bus is coming? Exactly.
I come here to learn, again and again, how much I have been shaped by US values of control, efficiency and entitlement. It's not that having this training is inherently negative. I realize that some of these behaviors and attitudes have created the conditions and provided me the opportunities to be able to do work I love and touch many people's lives in profound ways. Nonetheless, I do think this perspective causes me to act unawarely. In my unawareness I collude with dominance and oppression. I miss moments to connect and learn because I think I already have the answer or know the "best" way to do something. I end up judging what is, rather than learning from it. I come here to Puerto Rico because I am asked, in a million interactions in my day, to re-examine why I think a particular experience I am having should be going another way.
Last month I presented a workshop on dominance and institutional power in Kingston, Jamaica. At one point in the presentation I was sharing about my experience as a USer living and traveling outside the US. I talked about these very patterns of control, entitlement and arrogance that I become intimately aware of while abroad. Suddenly a participant in the room, herself a Jamaican, stood up and shouted, "Yes." She then proceeded to testify what it is like to have her own relatives--nieces and nephews, born and raised in the US--exhibit these very attitudes when they come to visit her in Jamaica. Her pain and confusion were palpable. I listened, open-hearted, because I knew she was talking to me about me. Talking about a me made clueless by institutional dominance, by the rights and assumptions of my blue passport and US citizenship. And I listened. I knew I had so much to learn from her. As I have tried to learn from my father, who, even after 65 years living in the US, continues to embody all that is whole and human about his experience growing up on this island--a respect and connection to all living things, no need to rush or fill his days with things to do, a deep love of making music and dance in community, the simple joy of a nap (preferably in a hammock), good food shared with friends and family. And when I am here I can see it too. All too clearly.
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"Collaboration is about people working together effectively towards a shared and accepted set of objectives that generates solutions from a team that no individual could produce alone." Baroundi Bloor
Have you even wondered what collaboration really means? Do you have trouble effectively collaborating in partnerships? Many of us practice collaboration, but may not connect on some intricate level needed to create teamwork to achieve a desired end result.
"True collaboration seeks to keep all party's peerness as central to the endeavor. Power imbalances can skew both the practice and effectiveness of collaboration." Nanci Luna Jimenez
Visit Nanci's blog to read up on the best practices for collaboration and to share your comments.
 Subscribe to Nanci's blog feed
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