The Conspiracy of Community, Engagement, and Friendship
Note: This was originally published Feb. 29, 2024
The Root of Conspiracy Means “To Breathe Together”
Social impact work is animated by a desire to move beyond transactional interactions toward authentic relationships and friendship. Friendship is not a fuzzy, abstract, feel-good feeling. It is a commitment to one another and the source of power within collective impact. To help deepen my appreciation and understanding of the importance of friendship in my work, I have adopted a philosophy of conspiracy and think of friendship as an act of conspiracy. I want to encourage others to think of their relationships and friendships as an opportunity to co-conspire. When we approach fostering friendships as acts of conspiracy, we view conspiracy as essential to creating and cultivating meaningful relationships.
What do I mean by calling friendship an act of conspiracy?
Unpacking the Philosophy and Practice of Conspiracy
By conspiracy, I don’t mean lurking and working in the shadows (although, sometimes, swimming along the periphery is necessary in this work). Rather, I mean a few different yet related things. First and foremost, the word conspiracy comes from the Latin root conspirare, which means “to breathe together.” Being in a community with others and walking together in friendship requires understanding that relationships are essentially a shared commitment to “breathe together.”
Breathing together is as much a metaphor as it is a literal description. This concept is related to the Ubuntu translation of “I am because we are.” Just as our physical bodies are all made from the same stardust, we rely on the same air to survive. As the air circulates, so do our connections to one another. Being co-conspirators means working to understand the obligations and possibilities that come from breathing together. Understanding that we breathe together means we honor how we are connected and how interconnected our identities and worlds are, even when these connections remain hidden from the naked eye.
Understanding this work as the work of conspiracy also requires us to acknowledge that when one person’s air has become poisoned and toxic, the air has become toxic for everyone else. In this sense, breathing together is a way for our bodies to continually remind us of what the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Sometimes, these threats to our ability to breathe are obvious and shocking, as they were when George Floyd was murdered at the hands of Minneapolis Police while crying out, “I can’t breathe!” Other times, these threats to our ability to breathe are just as shocking, although they are more difficult to see or notice. What these threats look like may differ from place to place. In Indianapolis, these collective threats to our ability to breathe look like a housing crisis brought about by policies that manufacture evictions and criminalize poverty.
Our inability to breathe looks like the political determinants of health which have created an obscene reality where the average life expectancy for those residing in historically redlined areas of the city (typically predominately Black) is an average of 17 years fewer than residents (who are overwhelmingly white) in the over-resourced suburban community of Carmel, IN just twenty miles away. It looks and feels like the political determinants of health leading Indiana to have the fourth-highest maternal death rate in the country and one of the highest maternal death rates for Black mothers.
When we recognize that we all breathe together, these realities become just as shocking and urgent regardless of who we are and how we identify. We must work to ensure these toxic realities never become normalized. Breathing together requires us to look out for one another and to address everything that might threaten our ability to breathe. A threat to one is a threat to us all.
Conspiracy Means to Be Sneaky and Play Tricks
Secondly, we use the idea of conspiracy to remind ourselves that sometimes this work needs to be sneaky. When creating spaces and opportunities for relationships and eventual friendships to form, we may often need to “trick” people into caring for one another. This is one reason the practice of hosting and throwing parties is so important in community development work. Parties bring people together, listen to one another, and allow space for the discovery of each others’ gifts and talents.
When we invite people to a party, we rarely tell them that our motivation is to get them to care about others and allow others to care about them, to trick them into falling in love with others. Instead, we invite them to come to the party as they are. Once at the party, we can introduce them to others, foster conversations, and steer people together so that they engage in a mutual gift discovery in a way that feels organic and conversational. Parties allow us to set the stage for people to get “tricked” into forming friendships that might not otherwise happen.
Being sneaky isn’t just a good strategy for gatherings and parties. It can work for boardroom meetings as well. Once, I had the opportunity to host a high-profile meeting between a research team for the U.S. Surgeon General and two large hospitals in Indianapolis. The meeting topic was social isolation, an issue both of these hospitals have taken seriously individually but did not have the best track record with collaborating and working together.
Getting these organizations to the same table was no small feat, so to entice them, we told them, “Please send a team and meet with the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office research team. We want you to share all the ways you and your staff are working to combat social isolation.”
Then, once everyone had arrived and shared the many things each organization was doing to foster social connectedness, we were then able to ask, “These things are all great, but could they be made stronger if you were working together and sharing information with one another?” The researchers with the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office were also eager to hear their responses to this question. Their team’s presence underscored the urgency of the matter and the importance of the question. Social isolation is now a leading cause of premature death and suffering in the U.S. Tackling it will require us to breathe together. To help make that point, we had to rely on a little conspiracy to encourage two large organizations to recognize that no one entity can do this work alone.
This understanding of conspiracy is related to the trickster concept, prevalent in many indigenous cultures and belief systems. The trickster is often a protector who uses secret knowledge to create opportunities for creation and protection and knows the rules and how and when to break them. Similar to the Latin root of trick, triccare, which means “evasive or shuffle”, this take on conspiracy means to shuffle and bend the rules, to evade constraints imposed upon us, to create spaces where we can begin to learn what it means to breathe together.
Conspiracy Means Collective Power
The third way I think of conspiracy relates to breathing together, but with a different emphasis. In this form of conspiracy, it means to breathe together with others until a natural, collective rhythm begins to form, like a cadence. Cadences are powerful tools to direct and focus collective energies. Through cadences, we can lessen our individual loads but know that we are collectively contributing to something greater than the sum of its parts.
This form of conspiracy means to cultivate collective power that comes through organizing. However, this is a power-with concept of power that believes that “power becomes infinite and expands when shared with others.” Power-with forms of power create space for hope and desire and allow groups of people to work together to achieve common goals. In contrast to power-over models, in which one person or entity has power over others, power-with models emphasize breathing together as a means of power sharing and power distribution.
The world saw this form of conspiracy in the global uprising in response to the murder of George Floyd. Millions of people came together to breathe together and demand accountability, speaking in one voice and closing down cities in response to the litany of Black individuals who were unable to breathe while in police custody. This type of conspiracy plays out in several ways across communities. Still, one thing remains true throughout: when we come together, establish a cadence of energy, thought, and action — when we breathe together — we can become capable of nearly limitless possibilities.
Are You Ready to Breathe Together? Conspiracy Requires a Commitment to Others and Allowing Others to Commit to You
Today, our atmosphere is being poisoned, both literally and figuratively. It is folly to think that moving to an over-resourced geography will prevent this poisoned air from reaching us. Yet privileged retreat and selective sequestering have been the chosen means of responding to inequality for generations of Americans with the resources to do so. One of the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism is that settlers think they are somehow winning through the erasure of the other and the acquisition of land and property. This lives on today through consumerism, where those who believe they have access to resources think they can somehow buy their way to safety through the continued acquisition of additional stuff. We think by ignoring the plight of others, we will somehow be immune from the same fate.
However, the atmosphere does not respect political borders or boundaries of affluence. If it hasn’t already, this infected air will eventually surround us all. An understanding of conspiracy will allow us to intuit this reality and to appreciate how, in the words of Dr. Mindy Fullilove, “when the oppressor has his foot on the neck of the oppressed, neither are able to move.”
When I speak with people who want to become more socially and civically engaged (often nonprofit leadership, university faculty or administrators), one thing I often challenge them is if they are truly ready to take on this work. By that, I mean: “Are you really ready to breathe together?” To do the work of engagement, community organizing, and community development, we must be willing to commit to conspiracy. We must be willing to breathe together with those we have yet to meet. This work must be personal, and we must recognize that what is at stake could very well be someone’s ability to breathe.
If you come to this work to “help” communities or “save” others, we don’t need you. If you come to this work with a desire to “serve,” we don’t need you. If you want your students, board of directors, or stakeholders to learn from the vast expertise and experiences of residents, we need you to commit to breathing together, to becoming co-conspirators.
We need you to breathe with us, to think about all that this relational obligation might entail, to think about what it means to have us breathing with you and you breathing with us. We need you to understand the significance that comes from the acknowledgment that we all share the air.
Institutions and organizations do not breathe. Therefore, this commitment must be personal.
Treating this work as conspiracy allows us to embrace our commitments to others more fully and appreciate the ways others may be committed to ourselves. It allows us to see community engagement and community remembering as an opportunity to create the conditions where people can create friendships, love and appreciate one another, and become co-conspirators by breathing together.