There are so many good definitions of leadership out there. I guess for me it’s about creating an environment of trust for everyone to share their gifts and passions with the team. Trust means we can take risks with one another, explore ideas together, and give supportive feedback. I work at being a good listener and facilitating collaboration but also at being alert for when a decision needs to be made for the collaboration to continue. Sometimes there is no clear consensus or best path forward. So a good leader has to take that risk and make a decision because clarity is necessary or collaboration becomes confusion.
As part of my series about “individuals and organizations making an important social impact”,, I had the pleasure of interviewing Suzanne Ross.
Suzanne Ross serves as Co-Founder and CEO and guides the vision of unRival. She brings to her work her background as a Montessori educator.
Suzanne has launched programs and taught in Montessori classrooms, Sunday schools and in corporate settings. As a member of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion, she has attended and presented at the annual conferences and has served on its Board of Directors. Suzanne is the author of The Wicked Truth: When Good People Do Bad Things and her articles have appeared in the scholarly journal Contagion and online at Sojourners and Patheos. She has led post show discussions at Chicago theaters and is currently writing a play based on the life of Maria Montessori called “The Miracle of San Lorenzo”. She is also co-founder of the Raven Foundation, an online community for those seeking to connect to a nonviolent Christian theology.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I became involved in peacebuilding because I had a bad case of cognitive dissonance! Since my teens I’ve cared about making the world a more peaceful place. Over the years, as I studied the obstacles to peace, I became fascinated by the way we justify violence as something good people do for good reasons. But when I read interviews with so-called violent people — terrorists and war criminals, people like that — they said virtually the same thing: we’re good guys using violence for good reasons. The search for peace began to feel like an unsolvable riddle — if everyone used violence and claimed to be good, how would violence ever be reduced or discredited? This led me to seek out the people who were working on this problem and dedicating their lives to finding a way to build sustainable peace in which violence, no matter the reason given, is seen for what it is — a threat to the well-being of the entire community.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
How about an embarrassing mistake! When we started unRival just a year and a half ago, we were motivated by the idea of violence as an outcome of rivalry. We thought of violence not as a thing that we do or that happens to us, but as a relationship in which we lose sight of the humanity of the other which leads us to determine that their lives are expendable. Our founding question was this: Would our theory of violence fill a need or gap in the fields of conflict resolution and peacebuilding?
So we posed that question in conversations with over fifty peacebuilders around the world. The resounding answer we got was “no!”. Politely, they told us that they understood violence very well and didn’t need another theory about it. Which was a little bit embarrassing, to say the least. The good news was that they confirmed that our theory was sound — it was borne out by their experiences and they said they’d be happy to share those experiences with us.
Can you describe how you or your organization is making a significant social impact?
The peacebuilders told us that what they really needed was twofold. First, they explained that the work of nonviolence is not easy and should not be romanticized. It is exhausting and isolating. Many felt marginalized by their own communities because rather than taking sides in a conflict, they were seeking solutions. They explained that they were accused of being traitors and in one case of receiving death threats. They longed for connection to other peacebuilders who would understand what they were going through and who could help them navigate the difficulties they faced.
So, first they longed for communities of support and learning. Second, they asked us to help them tell the story of nonviolence to a disbelieving world. Too often they are dismissed as naïve or unrealistic because they embrace nonviolent solutions to problems. Could we help them by telling stories of the efficacy of nonviolence so that their commitment comes across as what it is: rooted in reality yet imagining a better future for their communities? That is how we discovered our mission to connect, accompany and amplify the work of nonviolent peacebuilders.
Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
I can tell you about Andrew, an American who has been living in Ethiopia and working for healing between rival ethnic groups there for over a decade. As you may well be aware, Ethiopia is descending into civil war in large part because of the ambitions of the Ethiopian president, Abiy Ahmed Ali, who is ironically also the recipient of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize (there’s that cognitive dissonance again!). Andrew has watched helplessly as the opportunistic stoking of fear and hate has reversed many of the gains he and his fellow peacebuilders have made. Andrew and his wife, a native of Ethiopia, no longer feel safe there and have moved back to the US where Andrew continues to receive death threats for his commitment to dialogue across the political and ethnic divide.
In November, Andrew was part of a gathering of peacebuilders hosted by unRival. We invited 9 others like Andrew, people committed to nonviolence despite challenges and obstacles they have faced, to share their stories with one another. Finding a community of support was life-giving for him. Andrew told us that he felt his body relax and his spirit lift simply by being in a place where he did not have to justify his commitment to nonviolence. The experience eased the loneliness he had been feeling and renewed his strength. Many others in the room told us the same thing. Their reactions have encouraged us that we have something unique and beautiful to offer in the field — not another theory, but experiences of support and belonging that are so needed for this good work to continue.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
There are 3 questions I’d like people to be asking:
Question violence. When violence, exclusion, or punishment are proposed as solutions to a problem, boldly ask for evidence of its efficacy. We are not shy about demanding proof of nonviolence — can we switch that around? For example, could we boldly ask if drone bombing makes any situation better or worse? We should demand to know who will suffer because of it. Reducing the lethality of our violence or taking steps to minimize the “collateral damage” are violence management techniques. We need to get out of the business of managing our violence and into the business of finding alternative, nonviolent ways to solve our problems.
Question rivalry. When we feel as if we need to defeat another at any cost, we need to question our desires. Why do we want this prize — the promotion, the client, the political office, the lover — so desperately? Do I want it because my rival wants it? What if s/he stepped away from the rivalry and just handed me the prize? Would I feel triumphant or let down? It’s good to think about the phenomenon of buyer’s remorse in this context. Sometimes we invest the prize with too much value, as if it is the key to our well-being, and then when we get it, we find that we were mistaken. Winning is not all it’s cracked it up to be!
Question “us vs. them” narratives. When you are told that others are obstacles to peace who must be destroyed, don’t believe it! There is real evil in the world, but it is not what you think. It is the justification of violence in the name of my peace and my security at the expense of yours. We can achieve a pale imitation of peace that way, but it is a peace purchased at the price of the life and well-being of others. It is an unjust peace. At unRival, we network with people pursuing justpeace, who are building communities of belonging for everyone, communities that welcome diversity and solve conflicts nonviolently.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
There are so many good definitions of leadership out there. I guess for me it’s about creating an environment of trust for everyone to share their gifts and passions with the team. Trust means we can take risks with one another, explore ideas together, and give supportive feedback. I work at being a good listener and facilitating collaboration but also at being alert for when a decision needs to be made for the collaboration to continue. Sometimes there is no clear consensus or best path forward. So a good leader has to take that risk and make a decision because clarity is necessary or collaboration becomes confusion.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
If I could inspire a movement, it would not be one of my own making. Instead, I would invite people to join the peace movement that Dr. Maria Montessori launched over a century ago. Most people are aware of Montessori preschools but don’t know anything at all about the person who inspired a revolution in education, pioneering a path to a more peaceful human being.
Montessori became convinced that the child of temper tantrums and distracted attention is not normal. Tantrums and disobedience are the only language a young child has to express the panic and suffering of his soul when normal development has been obstructed. It led her to the remarkable conclusion that adult behavior such as rivalry, violence, hatred, and war were similarly abnormal. She became convinced that violence is inimical to human life. I believe she was right — peaceful, nonrivalrous teaching and parenting will allow children to become more peaceful adults.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My grandma’s house was a place of welcome for her family — and it was a huge family! She was the oldest daughter of 14 children and her door was always open, her table filled with food — her love language. She didn’t talk about what she was doing, she just did it. My grandma didn’t get past the 5th grade but she knew how to find joy and love by decentering herself and serving others. Perhaps the saying I can offer is from a poem that was popular at the beginning of the 20th century. My guess is that my grandma may have had to memorize it when she was in school. It’s by Sam Walter Foss (1858–1911) and the line you may recognize is “Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.” Here is the last stanza: http://www.housebythesideoftheroad.com/a-poem
Let me live in my house by the side of the road,
Where the race of men go by –
They are good, they are bad, they are weak, they are strong,
Wise, foolish — so am I.
Then why should I sit in the scorner’s seat,
Or hurl the cynic’s ban?
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
One of the peacebuilders we have gotten to know well is a priest from South Africa who helps run an annual festival called “The Feast of the Clowns”. It’s a celebration to empower local people to take the initiative and create the changes they want for their community. Our priest friend showed us a picture from the festival of a person carrying a sign that said, “I’d rather be excluded because of who I include than included for who I exclude.” I want to meet her and hear her story. And I’d like to meet anyone else who is trying to live that way in their communities, even when they suffer exclusion for it. But we won’t find them on Twitter or Instagram! We find them by word of mouth and serendipity — at least that’s how it has happened for us so far. If you’d like to meet people like that, too, we will do the leg work for you so you can find them at unRival!
How can our readers follow you on social media?
You can follow my work at unRival on Instagram@unrival.network, facebook.com/unrival.network and Twitter@unrivalnetwork.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
Social Impact Heroes: Why & How Suzanne Ross of unRival Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.