FOP Leader Handbook

It’s a requirement that all FOP trips have at least one conversation focused on issues surrounding diversity, inclusion, and allyship. Hopefully, you will find ways to incorporate elements of this larger discussion into smaller moments on the trail and during other activities.

If one of our program’s goals is for FOPpers to get to know each other as individuals, we should be making it equally possible for every member to be known. Some people hold identities that are more vulnerable and more difficult to fully express because of how their identities have been historically marginalized in society. Conversations about diversity can provide the framework to allow those students to be known in those aspects that set them apart. Even with a group that seems homogeneous, these conversations can help them think through their own journeys in the world in ways that they might not always get the chance to explore in depth. It’s one way that they can deepen their knowledge of themselves, too.

Also, taking a step back, FOP is an organization that has the ability to deeply affect many first-years before they even begin classes. We have the power to create the campus culture that we want to be part of.

As facilitator, try not to allow your conversation to be derailed into one about how “we all come from different places but we’re all equally valid.” Don’t let it be dominated by trite mottos about how “everyone’s diverse in their own way.” Lean into the conversation about the inequalities, the harder stuff.

Knowing that these kinds of conversations can be particularly difficult, we have included here some tips and thoughts about how you might frame them. We hope that you will seek to lean in to the discomfort that comes from having difficult conversations around equity, diversity, and inclusion, as leaders have previous generations have tried to.

Conversation Norms

Just like how FOP leaders set expectations at the beginning of the trip with activities like the Full Value Contract, it is important for leaders to set norms for conversations. Here are a few norms to think about setting for your FOPpers during processing, especially related to diversity and inclusion:

• Take space, make space
  • Be mindful of the identity you may hold and help to create an environment for everyone to contribute. Speak up when you have something to share, but also create an environment for others to share. This can mean letting others speak even if you don’t get to share your view and being aware of the impact you are having on others’ ability to contribute.
• Assume best intentions, but acknowledge impact
  • If someone says or does something that is hurtful or inappropriate, tell them in a respectful way trusting that they did not mean harm
• Be fully present, practice active listening
  • Validate emotions and personal anecdotes, especially if you don’t fully understand them. Leave pauses after other people speak so they know what they heard.
• Confidentiality
  • If someone shares an experience that gives you perspective, take it with you. Be sure to respect the privacy and feelings of the person who shared. (This extends to many conversations on FOP where participants bring up personal experiences.)
• Speak from the “I” perspective
• Promote self-care, especially for those who are sharing a lot of themselves

Calling Out

As the likely facilitator of many of these discussions, it may sometimes fall upon you to call someone out for a comment, question, attitude, or action that you notice. Awesome! Calling out is a good thing - besides being necessary on individual levels, it also pushes the group’s conversations to go deeper and gives people a chance to revisit and revise some of their harmful assumptions. Hopefully, you’ll be able to norm it in your group, and not have it seem like something unusual or confrontational, definitely not something that would end up requiring VOMPing. Here are some ways to help:

• Have you and your co-leader(s) casually call each other out and handle it gracefully during one of the first days. (It doesn’t have to be convincingly realistic to do its job!) That exchange could go something like:
  • Co A: So last spring, Casey’s parents came to visit and brought their dog!”
  • Co B: Amazing!! What kind of dog does she have?
  • Co A: Oh, their PGP’s, or personal gender pronouns, are actually they/them/their, but yes, they have a labradoodle, and it’s the cutest.
• Use the “Ouch” / “I’m sorry” framework
  • Basically, you agree to the following rules:
    • if someone wants to call someone else out, they just say “ouch”
    • the person who is being called out immediately pauses and says “I’m sorry”
    • then the person who said “ouch” can either choose to talk about it more or just move on
    • there’s no pressure to explain the “ouch” in the heat of the moment
  • You can discuss with your cos whether the “ouch” has to be something personal or not, or if you want another word for less personal “ouches”
  • This can help ease the barrier of anxiety for people who want to speak up when they see something harmful/hurtful/appropriative/not good but who may not feel comfortable interjecting without a framework
  • It can also keep conversations moving along instead of getting bogged down
  • It puts the power in the person who has gotten the “ouch”
• Call it “calling in” instead of “calling out”
  • You can introduce this idea as part of your norms. It goes along with the idea that you are all assuming best intentions of each other, and as a result, naming people’s mistakes doesn’t have to be a matter of portraying them as ‘other.’ It can take the sting out of being ‘called out.’ Good quote from Ngọc Loan Trần:
  • “I picture ‘calling in’ as a practice of pulling folks back in who have strayed from us. It means extending to ourselves the reality that we will and do fuck up, we stray, and there will always be a chance for us to return. Calling in as a practice of loving each other enough to allow each other to make mistakes, a practice of loving ourselves enough to know that what we’re trying to do here is a radical unlearning of everything we have been configured to believe is normal.”

Apologies

Apologies are not scary! They’re really important and inevitable. When done well, they can allow people to feel comfortable leaning into difficult or uncomfortable discussions.

• Here is what some bad apologies might sound like:
  • I’m sorry that/if you were offended…
    • This one is a microaggression, because it implies that the hurt was not necessarily legitimate and that the burden is on the other person to handle their own emotions. It demonstrates an attitude of being closed to further discussion and learning.
  • I meant / I didn’t mean…
    • This shifts the conversation to being about someone’s intentions, when the more meaningful conversation is about the content of what was done or said and what might be problematic about those actions or words in themselves. Of course, it may be frustating to feel like you’re being misinterpreted, and that could lead to some tension. One way to deal with that tension could be to stress that the reason we don’t find this type of apology valuable is because we already take for granted that everyone has the best intentions, and that when one person is being called out, a lot of others may be able to recognize that they could have made the same mistake and equally have something valuable to learn.
• Here are the three parts of a good apology:
  • Validate emotions
    • This can be done implicitly, with body language, or explicitly, with words like, “First off, I wanna validate your emotions”
    • The level of emotion that someone may feel in response to something you said or did can feel really different to the level of seriousness with which you spoke/acted, but that’s not the point. Either way, someone else was hurt, and that hurt may carry a lot of baggage underneath the surface.
  • Acknowledge responsibility
    • Use the words that the other person used/ might have used to describe your words/ action. If they called it insensitive, acknowledge that it was. Period. Not “insensitive to you,” “insensitive to some people,” “insensitive in some aspects.” Insensitive.
  • Make a commitment to doing better
  • Or ask a question:
    • Would you be willing to teach me more about the assumptions that underlie what I just said/did?
    • Would you help me understand how I can avoid this in the future?
• Altogether, here are a few examples of good apologies (although it always depends on the situation):
  • Hey, I’m really sorry for what I said. I see now that it was really hurtful and marginalizing of the experiences of people who deal with mental health issues every day. I’ll definitely make sure to avoid using those kinds of phrases in the future, and I’ll call my friends out on it too. Thank you so much for helping me realize this.
  • Wow, I know it might not have been easy for you to bring up but I see now that calling our FOP leaders ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ makes a lot of assumptions about gender roles and stereotyping. I’m definitely going to be thinking a lot harder about how I just make these kinds of binary assumptions all the time. Would you be okay with helping me by continuing to call me out whenever you notice me doing that again?
  • Hey, I just wanted you to know that I really really regret what I said last night. I shouldn’t have pushed for specific examples of how dating preferences can be a facade for racism. It was unfair for you to have to share a personal story just to get me to see the point and shut up. I should have just made space for you to express your opinion and asked you for more details at a better time. I know you must be feeling hurt and maybe attacked - is there anything I could do to help make up for it? Would you be comfortable with me bringing it up again tonight and apologizing in front of everyone?

Framing Tools / Anchors

There are times when it may feel impossible to bring up these discussions organically, and you need a way to explicitly bring up this discussion or at least bring it to the forefront of people’s minds. Here are some ways to do that:

• Read a quote from the “Readings” part of the Handbook (the diversity section) for everyone to ponder independently, or do some writing about.
• Read a quote from that section (or one of your own!) and share or have others share how it sheds new light on your/their own experiences, or what you/they might have overlooked about an aspect of your/their privilege.
• Say, “I benefit from the structures of privilege in X ways and I shouldn’t be at the center of this conversation. But I do think it’s incredibly important that this conversation happens, and here’s why. (Or here’s how these things affect my life or how I am implicitly part of the problem)”
• Pre-existing FOP activities can lead to discussions about these topics too, if FOPpers are willing to lean into the more uncomfortable differences between them, and if you prompt them to examine them in more depth. Some good examples are: circle of self, five-minute autobiographies, and hot seat. However, this may not work if you have a relatively homogenous group of FOPpers, and also may put undue pressure on those who consider themselves to be minorities to share their vulnerabilities while others don’t have to take the same level of emotional risk.
• Fear in a Hat: You can always plant questions like:
  • How diverse is Harvard?
  • Do you respond to something racist someone says if they’re foreign? Or if you’ve just met them and they’re in your entryway?
  • I’m afraid people will laugh when I tell them about my PGPs. (personal gender pronouns)
• Included-Excluded: Have everyone share at the end of the day one time they’ve felt included and one time they’ve felt excluded in their lives.
  • Variation: Have everyone share one time they felt included and one time they felt excluded that day. You could do it in addition to or instead of rose-bud-thorn, as a way of recapping the day.
• Variations on the M&M activity: You can assign questions related to inclusion, privilege and diversity to each of the M&M colors. Here are a few:
  • What’s one personal experience that comes to mind when you think about ‘injustice’?
  • What’s one aspect of your identity that you never think about?
  • Describe a time when you accidentally or on purpose excluded someone else.
  • Describe a time when you stayed silent about something.
  • Have you ever purposely changed the way you talked or behaved to fit in?
  • Have you ever accidentally found yourself behaving really differently from ‘normal’ you?
  • Describe a time when you felt that you weren’t being heard.
  • What’s one aspect of your identity that makes you feel insecure?
  • How often do you think about ‘oppression’?
  • What’s the space in which you can feel most authentically known?
• Go around in a circle and ask each person to try to come up with one privilege in their lives that they think they’ve had that most other people in the group have not had. (This may be difficult - you need mature FOPpers for this one.)
• Use the important words listed in a section below (or use your own that you come up with) and do an activity where you write down each of the words on a piece of paper and have everyone take a few moments to silently walk around and write down their reactions to, thoughts about, or possible definitions of each of the words. Then allow time to discuss different perspectives on these ideas, and (perhaps also provide time for solo reflection afterwards).

Decentering

Most spaces in our culture are clearly centered around the experiences of a few privileged identities. It is important to think about decentering those people.

• Relinquish the idea that everyone’s opinion on issues of marginalization is equally valid. Those who have faced it less, or in different areas, may never be able to truly feel the weight of the marginalization. They can only listen to and learn from those who have direct knowledge.
• Intersectionality is key - an individual who lives at the intersection of several different marginalized identities has experiences fundamentally different from individuals who inhabit only some of those identities. No one has authority to speak for others’ lives.
• Those who are normally at the center of most conversations might find it disturbing to no longer be able to contribute as much as they are accustomed to. That’s okay. Teaching your more privileged FOPpers to step back from the center is valuable for them and for the other FOPpers.

Some Online Resources

Please see this google doc for a living resource bank of EDI resources, outdoor-specific and otherwise. Note that it is focused on race, but touches on other identities.