We Got This: What Rebuilding Really Requires

When institutions are strained and communities are carrying harm, the temptation is familiar. We look for the plan. The framework. The answer that will organize the mess and move us forward. But this month’s CHOIR Conversation began somewhere else, in a place both simpler and harder to sustain. As Alia named at the start, “But rebuilding often begins in the ordinary. How we listen, how we respond, how we repair, how we practice dignity and joy with one another.” That line gave the conversation its center. Rebuilding, in this frame, is not abstract. It is relational. It is lived.

That grounding matters because so much of organizational life trains us away from it. We are often taught to start with scale, with systems, with strategic response. Those things matter. Still, this conversation kept returning to a sharper truth. If rebuilding forgets the people inside the process, it loses its way. When Alia asked what gets missed when rebuilding is treated only as a large-scale effort, Cornelius Minor answered plainly: “we miss the people, we miss the community.” He went on to name what so many of us have felt in our bodies. When institutions come first, they can “crush the humans within it or crushes the spirits of the humans within it.” That is a hard sentence. It is also an honest one.

What Cornelius offered throughout the hour was not a polished theory detached from practice. It was practice itself. He kept bringing the conversation back to process, to the next faithful step, to what can be tended now. He spoke about lying on the floor during a hard season, about stillness, about quiet, about the need to honor what the body requires. Then he widened that lesson outward. If we are trying to rebuild institutionally, maybe the place to begin is by finding “those spaces within our institutions that are still” and “those spaces within our institutions that are quiet.” Often, he said, “those spaces are people.” That shift is everything. Suddenly the question is no longer only what strategy will save us. It is also who is a source of steadiness, who helps us remember ourselves, and what becomes possible when we treat one another as part of the way forward.

ananda held that human-centered thread with care. She named the many layers of dehumanization shaping this moment, across schools, nonprofits, queer communities, immigrant communities, and public life more broadly. Her question was not theoretical. What does it mean to center humanity while so many people are being told they do not matter? Cornelius answered by naming presence. “I can only be where my feet are right now.” He talked about the tension between a realm of concern and a realm of influence, and about investing deeply in what can actually be touched. In his case, that is often the twenty-eight students in front of him. The point was not to shrink the world. It was to refuse helplessness. Rebuilding starts somewhere. Often it starts in the room we are already in.

That same clarity shaped one of the strongest parts of the conversation: what it means to listen for rebuild. Alia asked a question many organizations need to sit with much longer. What does it mean to listen in a way that helps rebuild trust for the future, instead of simply gathering information? Cornelius did not romanticize listening. He named how often it becomes extraction. “In the 21st century, listening has become voyeuristic.” People hear stories, absorb pain, and return unchanged. Against that pattern, he offered a different practice, what he called “three dimensional listening.” First there is the message itself. Then comes the pause, the processing, the affirmation. After that comes action. “I commit to doing something.” That sequence matters because it turns listening from performance into relationship. It asks us not only to hear, but to be altered.

From there, the conversation moved into visibility. How do we rebuild trust and connection when so much of what matters in community goes unnamed? Cornelius spoke about asking students at the end of class what supported them as learners and what did not. He spoke about rendering visible what was already happening but easy to miss. “The simple act of rendering, these things were already happening in the classroom, but they were invisible.” He also spoke about ritual, especially the importance of noticing when ritual breaks. If someone who is usually expressive becomes quiet, if a pattern shifts, if the body tells a story before the mouth does, that is information. That is part of the work. “Really the work of repair I’ve always believed is in the small interpersonal details.” There is a whole organizational ethic inside that sentence. It asks us to pay attention to gesture, absence, energy, timing, and the signals people send before they can name what is wrong.

The conversation did not stop at harm. It turned, as it needed to, toward joy. ananda connected this part of the dialogue to the Joy Doctrine and made clear that joy and justice are not separate conversations. Cornelius met that opening with language that stayed with the room. “I think about joy, like scientists think about the sun.” Then he took it further: “for our souls and our spirits and our energies, joy is the battery.” This was not a shallow defense of happiness. It was a serious claim about fuel, stamina, and life force. Joy, in his telling, is what helps us keep going, connect more deeply, and find energy in a hard season. Sometimes joy is stillness in a chair. Sometimes it is watching students dance in the cafeteria. Sometimes it is the small thing that gives enough charge to return to the work.

That thread deepened when the conversation turned to ancestry and remembering. ananda named a past conversation with Cornelius during a difficult professional loss and asked him to speak to the ancestral power inside the phrase we got this. His answer brought the room back to lineage. He recalled an aunt telling him, “Do you think you’re the first one of us to ever endure something difficult?” and then reminding him that he came from “a long line of grandmothers and great grandmothers who have made art of difficult things.” He named the work of this moment as remembering, then practicing that remembering in community. This hard thing has been done before. Not in the same form, not with the same details, but with enough continuity that we do not begin empty-handed.

That is part of why one of the strongest lines of the conversation landed with so much force: “destruction is not an event. It is part of a process.” Cornelius did not say that lightly. He mourned loss, named the seriousness of this political moment, and refused false comfort. But he also insisted that we learn while we are inside the moment. “Learning is the antidote to empire.” That line was not separate from the earlier parts of the conversation. It was of a piece with them. To notice. To document. To study what gives life. To remember. To resist dehumanization by staying teachable and connected. That, too, is rebuilding.

Near the end, Alia asked about becoming, about how practitioners build the muscle to notice, respond, and transform. Cornelius answered with an offering that felt both risky and necessary: “we have to be willing to make public mistakes and learn from those mistakes in public.” For anyone trying to lead, teach, organize, or rebuild with integrity, that is a demanding practice. It asks for humility. It asks for less performance and more courage. It asks us to learn in front of one another. Maybe that is one of the clearest lessons from this conversation. Rebuilding is not clean. It is not one grand solution. It is ordinary, public, human work. And still, it is work we know how to do.

If you want to stay in conversations like this and keep practicing what rebuilding can look like in real time, we invite you to join our Community of Practice. We gather each month to learn, reflect, and build toward what becomes possible when we do not try to do this work alone.