Interdependence: Global Solidarity and Local Actions Toolkit
An Invitation and Introduction to Thinking and Skill-Building for Social Action, Locally, and Internationally
JOIN US - Interdependence is our lived experience
Hello, and welcome to Interdependence: Global Solidarity and Local Actions. We’re glad you’re here. We created this online inquiry and action toolkit, because we – the people of this beautiful, complex, fractured and unequal world – often do not understand and embrace our interdependence well enough.
What do we mean by Interdependence? Embracing the truth of interdependence calls us toward new kinds of civic, ecological, and global understanding. This understanding begins from the foundational reality of interdependence as our human-ecological condition. It asks how we operate ethically within the communities and systems of which we are part and which support us. That question, rooted in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call “to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world, to join instead of divide,” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 42) must also influence how we think about our capacities to know and to do. The lens of interdependence concretizes the global through the specificity of the local. Rather than first focusing attention on global governance structures that often seem far away and abstract, it invites learners to think from their own identities, experiences, and spaces of civic action and influence, drawing connections between those localized insights to then illuminate rooted understandings of global challenges, goals, and governance structures. It is a contribution to civic and global thinking aligned with John Cameron’s conception of “thick global citizenship” and Vanessa Andreotti’s approach to critical global citizenship, both of which invite learners and civic actors to consider their identities, assumptions, and critical roles at home rather than imagining solutions for others elsewhere around the world.
The separate modules and pages throughout the Toolkit all offer points of entry for educators and learners in an embrace of interdependence. Collectively, they are a calling-in to thinking and working with others who have dedicated themselves to building more just systems and approaches to being in community together, and an invitation to explore another way of thinking, learning, and being. These modules and pages demonstrate how exploring interdependence and behaving as an ethical and critical global citizen does not require going anywhere and can be done from anywhere.
TEACH, LEARN AND ENGAGE WITH US - Moving from Inquiry to Action
Who created these pages? Creators hail from around the world; we are educators and organizers who share a commitment to building communities that are more just, inclusive, and sustainable. Though our network and collaborations have global scope, we must acknowledge our positionality; the Toolkit emerged through collaborations among institutions and organizations largely based in the United States.
The creation of these pages highlight what can begin to happen when we work in community, with shared purpose, while recognizing the diversity of expertise, backgrounds, identities and experiences of all people - particularly those members within communities who are silenced and marginalized.
As a teaching and learning resource, the Toolkit is deliberately structured as an evolving project, but it does embody several themes. These include:
A commitment to our planet and shared humanity, better understood through the lens of interdependence.
Humility and Polyvocality.
The recognition that ideas, concepts, and opportunities for action are most tangible at interpersonal and local levels.
A commitment to participatory and public scholarship.
The pages deepen our thinking and skills in relation to those themes. The pages introduce key concepts and ask readers to engage in self-reflection and opportunities for growth in relation to those concepts. Some of the pages are more explicitly skills-oriented. The analysis across the pages ranges from our day-to-day choices and lives, to how our civic, personal, professional, and policy choices affect other people nearby and around the world.
The pages also prompt us to consider the roles of history, structural violence, ecology, local community organizations and actions, and intergovernmental organizations and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (knowledge-building). Large entities and ideas are intertwined with our individual capacities to listen well, see our own assumptions, challenge power and hold institutions accountable through cultural humility and intercultural praxis (skill-building).
Speaking of individual and institutional accountability as essential components of justice work, the co-creators of these pages have been involved with community-campus partnerships for justice, inclusion, and sustainability for many years. We therefore have several pages that examine the ways in which particular methodologies of research, partnership, and even conceptualizations of campuses – may be better designed to amplify the voices and interests of people who have been marginalized.
Wondering how to engage the Toolkit? Visit our Facilitator's Guide for inspiration and examples on how to incorporate these pages into your courses, workshops, programming, etc. The themes of and pages within the Toolkit can be woven together to create the tapestry of content you want to explore and facilitate.
EVOLVE WITH US - Co-creation, iteration and feedback
The Toolkit is evolving. It first launched in late May 2020, as the world adapted to more online learning and instruction. The pages are deliberately iterative and open to adaptation. Our interdependence and abilities to work together need to be understood and strengthened not only because of the pandemic, but also as we leverage technology to support localized, community-contextualized learning experiences that are informed by comparative and global understandings that help us meet the world’s most pressing challenges, together. We invite the development and proposal of additional pages. We would love insights and pages from your cities and regions to better help us humanize localize, and ally with strategy to respond to - global injustices. Our Philadelphia and Social Change and Activism in Europe pages provide great examples of how our interdependencies are contextualized in a particular region, with its specific history and contemporary political economy.
Because you’re here, we assume interdependence resonates with you and that you also are looking for resources, connections and ideas to build communities that are more just, inclusive, and sustainable. We share those goals, and we look forward to learning from you through the feedback forms at the bottom of each page, and hopefully in other ways as well.
In Solidarity,
The Community Based Global Learning Collaborative, a diffuse network with a home in the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship
Citation for this page: Hartman, E. & Brandauer, S. (2022). Overview: Invitation and Introduction. In E. Hartman & S. Brandauer. (Eds.). Interdependence: Global Solidarity and Local Actions. The Community-based Global Learning Collaborative. Retrieved from https://www.cbglcollab.org/intro-to-toolkit
References:
Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.