Nuggets From Antoinette Klatzky's Call
ServiceSpace
--Preeta Bansal
9 minute read
Dec 12, 2020

 

Last Saturday, we had the privilege of hosting Awakin Call with Antoinette Klatzky.

When Antoinette Klatzky took a part-time job as a recent college graduate in a retail clothing store, she might not have imagined one day working with the iconic fashion designer, Eileen Fisher, to set strategy for Fisher’s foundation on human rights and climate justice. Nor might she have envisioned that her work with Fisher would lead her to help prepare changemakers around the globe for broader awareness-based systems change. But that’s what Klatzky has done. As the Executive Director of the Eileen Fisher Leadership Institute, she facilitates empowerment workshops for young women – having previously helped diversify the company’s supply chain for social justice. And as a co-creator with the Presencing Institute, led by Otto Scharmer of MIT, she co-anchors a worldwide community of nearly 13,000 participants engaging in shared inquiry: how can we be of transformational service in our modern moment of intersecting crises?

Below are some of the nuggets from the call that stood out for me:

Daughter of consciously single parent and mixed heritage: Having been born to a consciously single parent who chose at age 40 to have a child in a multi-cultural pairing, Antoinette carried the “legacy of being an oddball.” Antoinette’s mother was Jewish and her father (who was not an active part of her upbringing) was Indian who came to the US in late 70s/early 80s. She went to a Jewish day school, because her “mother wanted this kind of upbringing” where Antoinette would receive love and support through a community" -- since she had a small family. Antoinette gained a lot of understanding of community, and of “tikkun olam,” a Hebrew expression for “taking care of world.” At the same time, Antoinette “felt a sense of disconnect because I did not have married parents, both of which are not Jewish – this was not traditional in this Jewish day school. To carry this kind of multi-identity … is very much a part of me and how I connect and relate to people in the world.”

Tikkun Olam: Antoinette recalls learning early on in her life Viktor Frankl’s expression, “the meaning of life is to give life meaning.” Having gratitude for gift of life and turning that back to earth, so then how then can I serve?

Adult orientation v. peer orientation: “Because my mom was a single mom, I had a close relationship with her as a young child. She didn’t talk to me as a child, but as a human being – she didn’t try to hide things or shelter things to me. She would talk to me about what was going on in her life, such as when she was having challenges, we would have conversations about those. She would explain that to me. My mother is 40 years older, and her mother was 40 years older.” Antoinette’s relationship with the older adult figure in her life thus involved “a big generational difference. That infused an element of wisdom also – that made me more able to connect with adults at the school community. Adults would understand me, so I would speak to adults at school.” Many young people begin to organize around peers rather than adults. “In my school, we had higher ratio of adults to kids. As someone wo didn’t have my father around or close extended family around, it wasn’t like we had a close-knit home community. So there was something about school that knew that -- school psychologists and teachers provided support, took me to dinner, etc. My mom set up that support system because she knew I needed it – it made me comfortable with people of all ages, and with intergenerational wisdom.” “There’s a need for a village, not just bonds among young people.”

Her mom’s wisdom practices: “We went to temple together. She encouraged imagination, visualization, journaling, singing. She gave me visualizations before bed to help de-stress. When I got older, we started doing yoga at the same time. She had a sense of openness and listening and being ready to hear something that wasn’t in her world view – listening to new data (disconfirming data). She would look for that in me as well – allowed me to individuate also.” And yet she laid down firm boundaries when needed (eg, must go to college): “Those limits and boundaries also helped me grow.”

Formative educational experiences – Her connection to a geography professor “reshaped my learning path. As a freshman, I went and talked to him – he invited me on trip for upperclassmen, involving a service learning experience in Nicaragua.” She was involved in helping build a health clinic. “The way we learned on that trip shifted my trajectory – we had to keep 2 different journals (one was what are we experiencing, another was academic). The experiential way of learning and reflection was important. That way of learning shifted something for me.” She then found a program where she could go to a number of countries for a few months, living with local communities, and learning about globalization. She came to understand supply chains. While in Tanzania, she realized that before she could be truly be of service to the world, she needed to back to her own community, and be rooted in her own experiences.

Getting past “analysis paralysis” and grounding herself in her experiences as a young woman: When she returned back home, she went through a period of “analysis paralysis” in trying to figure out her next move. But she was offered a role at the YWCA (where she had taught swimming lessons as a teen) to take on a community organizing/social justice role. She thought the opportunity would mirror what she had just experienced – “going to community members and then seeing how we could address needs.” She also appreciated the opportunity to be part of a women’s organization. In college, she had experienced sexual assault – she thought that needed healing in the world. In Tanzania, she had stayed in a community that practiced female genital mutilation, and she connected with a young woman making an honorable choice between carrying on the traditions of her family and wanting to be who she wanted to be. “How do you make that choice?” Around that time, the book Half the Sky was published, and the “girl effect” video was circulating. She wanted to be part of an organization in her local community working on such things – like the YWCA. She was aware of the microaggressions that women and people of color experience, being in a woman’s body anywhere in the world.

Working with Eileen Fisher: Eileen wanted her 16-year-old daughter to have leadership experiences like the kind she saw at Girls Inc. and so asked Antoinette to help create a leadership institute for young women. “Eileen describes herself as an uncomfortable person – she needed to make comfortable clothes. For women, how do we feel comfortable in our bodies? Clothes have always allowed women to do that. True for Eileen in every sense – how she sees problems as possibility. So much in who she is and the company she has created ... is a set of leadership practices – nurturing growth in yourself and others, with kindness and joy.” Eileen was drawn to leadership practices and design concepts like those she had experienced in community with artists -- creativity, confidence and connection. Methodologies included The Circle Way, Gordon Neufeld’s work, Theory U (by the Presencing Institute – which involves “moving through a journey and moving through an arc of experience, letting go to what’s no longer needed; tuning into source, the source of creativity, a place of deep presence; moving to crystallizing and shifting our action going forward based on an emerging future.” She created a peer learning experience that allows young women to feel “more connected to self, each other, community, and land” – allowing them to “tune into deeper sources of knowing.”

Role of embodiment practices: There’s a “tension between articulation of the ideal and the lived experience of the practical …. I don’t know that I would survive without yoga practice – everyone around me feels better too …. Embodied practice moves it out of the mind; moves emotion through; yoga means union – connection of mind and body and spirit. In that connection for me lives this ability to move emotions and frustration that I tend to have when current reality isn’t meeting the aspirational vision, The embodied experience allows me to integrate and tune into what is needed next; it allows me to get present, rather than focusing on past or future. I sit and begin to allow the clarity to come. The body works through what it needed to work through … something begins to move through – I get out of my own way.”

Lots of gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!

Nuggets from the Transcript






Suggested Nuggets from the Call

I've told many a yoga teacher that I don't know that I would be able to survive without a yoga practice. And it is quite clear when I do a full yoga practice that everyone around me feels better too, because it's this experience of integrating. The embodied practice moves it out of the mind, it moves the emotion through yoga.

Right now, I feel a sense that our capacity to sit with uncertainty is really crucial -- just letting it be okay that we don't know. … And then from that place, something new will come through.

For the last 10 years, I ran leadership programs for young women. And now those young women are out in the world doing incredible things. And now we just need to call on them and invite them to lead and know that they are there.

I’ve been sitting with Eileen Fisher, and we're watching the retail clothing industry just crumble. At the same time, the things that are crumbling were already starting to crumble before the pandemic hit, before this economic collapse. And the things that are needed now were already seeded.

Otto Scharmer says that collectively we're creating results that nobody wants. And I think that's still true when we keep operating from the same ways of operating that we've done before.

We need to tune into that deeper place within ourselves that knows what's needed and operating from that place. And that's not easy.

If you think about trees -- the redwoods in California, for example -- they’re standing tall and holding strength, but underneath their root systems are connected and they're holding each other up and they're sharing nutrients. … So when we think about organizational leadership, it's not just about this one organization carrying everything forward. It's really about us holding each other at our roots and nourishing each other.

How do we as human beings, living on the land, interact with each other? I think that requires listening to indigenous wisdom and voices that have a lineage of caring for the earth.

I don't think we're going to solve ecological crises, the climate crisis, with the same leadership that we've used to destroy the planet.

It's not going to be easy to transition, especially now, from this kind of “power over” mentality to a new form of “power with,” which is not new, but that's what's needed now.

I don't think that just putting women in power in the same old system is going to solve things. And at the same time, I really do believe in the power that we have as human beings to do it differently.

I think the feminine energetically lives in the world or the universe, and we can tap into it. I also believe that we sometimes grow up with a broken connection with the feminine and with the masculine.

What is good [economic] growth? … I think the ability to ask that question is an immediate inroad to having some kind of shift. Being able to ask ourselves what is good growth, and then being able to look at it from an ecosystem perspective rather than from just a constant “grow, grow, grow at whatever cost” mentality.

I think the first thing we need to do when we think about transformation literacy is start to see it together. … Really sensing into what the problems and the solutions are, and really tuning into that together. I think that is the only way that we'll get anywhere with it.

 

Posted by Preeta Bansal on Dec 12, 2020