GV in September: a lot

Written By Genevieve Smith

September is a sad, joyful, wacky month. Seven years ago in September, my father died (boo). Three years ago this month, my husband and I got married (yay!).

Grief and joy, grief and joy. Together, always.

I'm listening to: Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah's() Ancestral Recall - I told a dear old friend that I was feeling cranky, and they sent me this. It filled a void I didn't know I had. Maybe you'll like it too?

I'm reading: Nothing! Nothing yet, anyway. I've felt a little overwhelmed, so my brain hasn't been a reading brain. That said, I've got plenty of plane time later this month, so I'm hoping to start David Bellos and Alexandre Motagu's Who Owns This Sentence? A history of copyrights and wrongs. Ownership is a bonkers concept, especially when it comes to ideas. I have such a hard time thinking through my own approach to 'intellectual property.' If y'all know of more books like this, lemme know!

UPDATES

  • I'm gearing up for FluxxCon in Denver, CO next week (Sept 23 - 26)! Let me know if you'll be there, too! Sidenote: If any of y'all are in Denver and would like to get together to yell about change, data, knowledge management, or bicycles, let me know!

  • Next month (October 16 & 17) I have the privilege of speaking at Generosity Xchange! This one is virtual! Take a peek at the agenda and register for free.

talkin' bout an emotional roadmap!

LEARNING

  • Alignment is a practice. This blog by JustOrg Design is SO. GOOD. The opening line resonates and resonates and resonates: "Organizational alignment is not the same as continuous agreement. It is not a moment, or an event, or a document, or a destination. It cannot be demanded nor enforced. Organizational alignment is a practice." This is one of those concepts that I read and think, "well, yeah, of course," but like any concept, intellectual understanding does not equal embodied understanding. This feels especially important at this moment in time - project momentum feels hard to find, let alone maintain. So - something I've been using to ground myself is this idea of re-alignment. Day by day, how might we re-align? It slows me down and it's helped to keep the fog at bay. I learned about this blog via a post by Jeanne Bell, who is worth a follow on LinkedIn!

  • I'm re-learning that having colleagues to learn with outside of client work (or even outside of deadlines and presentations and appearing professional) is a key ingredient for my emotional survival as an independent consultant. I'm feeling grateful that I made this post and now a small, loving group of incredible Measurement, Evaluation, & Learning and International Development practitioners from across the globe are getting together monthly to work through the Matriarchal Design Futures workbook together. All of our work involves facilitating a lot of group learning. We've only met once, but it already feels good to hold this learning together and more casually than how I might usually hold something like this: when there's a contract and/or professional reputation involved, my energy is different - what I expect from myself is different. This feels like a soft, gentle way to engage in learning, which is welcome at this wacky moment in time.

  • I'm keeping the bike learning going! I disassembled, cleaned, painted, and rebuilt a 1978 Olmo racing bike. I feel like the kid in Breaking Away! I even got a funny little hat to wear. The Olmo's got a mixed groupset of Campagnolo and Galli components - learning about Italian bicycle component manufacturing politics is wild. Machismo, fascism, and questionable knowledge management practices, oh my! Since this month is a big feelings-about-my-dad month, this has been a cool way to hang out with him. (He spent a good portion of his life on a bike. He also spent a good portion of his life laughing. Both of these are happy things that I also spend time doing.)

a photo of my dad getting ready for a race sometime in the 80s, next to a polaroid of me working on my Olmo

Steel is real!

QUESTION

What do you practice during times of transition? Whether it's changing seasons, changing political landscapes, life changes ... how do you keep the ground under you (or do you)?

lemme know!

Genevieve Smith

Genevieve Smith (they/she) is the Founder of GV Advisory, where they work as a Consultant and Strategic Advisor to social impact organizations looking to get in right relationship with data and organizational learning. Genevieve is known for bringing empathy, joy, and humanity to work that can not only feel lifeless and robotic, but has real potential to cause harm to communities and social justice movements.

In early 2019, after five years of working inside of organizations in the social sector, Genevieve founded GV Advisory to work across issue areas to support practitioners to not only design for their data and learning more effectively, but to do so in ways that align with organizational values, missions, and principles of equity & justice. Since then, Genevieve has supported organizations across focus areas (immigration justice, education reform, reproductive justice, health equity, international development, and trust-based philanthropy) to develop community-centric and values-aligned data and learning practices.

The ever-growing lineage of Genevieve's work includes Black feminist thought (bell hooks, the Combahee River Collective, adrienne maree brown (especially Emergent Strategy & Holding Change)), Crass (the band), time spent playing music on sidewalks and makeshift stages across the United States, histories of the archive(s) (Michel-Rolph Trulliot, Lorgia Garcia Peña), and colleagues who have become dear friends and co-conspirators.

Genevieve's favorite description of what can happen when we commit to this work together comes from a past client: "we wrote a love letter to the work and to the communities that sustain it." Genevieve loves how enlightening this work can be - we can gain clarity together while we build new ways to think, dream, and work.

When they're not working, you can find Genevieve playing music and laughing with their friends, loving on their people, bicycling around NYC, and cuddling with their cat, dog, and husband.

Genevieve wants to live in a world where we're all free - where no-one needs to rely on nonprofits and philanthropy to get what they need. But they do - so let's get to work.

https://gv-advisory.com
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