Social Justice, Healing, & Organizational Development with Simon Mont, Founder of Harmonize
The Most Important Thing
Simon offers coaching, facilitation, and consulting to help people and organizations shed the skin of broken systems and move into new ways of being, leading, and working together.
He works one-on-one with folks around the relationship between awakening, healing, and social action to live more fully from our power and our joy.
You can sign up for a free consultation here.
After the George Floyd murder, Simon and I postponed the release of this episode to record a follow-up on Intstagram Live specifically geared towards white folks who want to better understand racism and white privilege.
About Simon Mont
Simon brings a decade of experience as an alternative economies lawyer, facilitator, and an organizer in a variety of communities. He’s been an organizer in Oakland, a canvasser in DC, and a school teacher in South Arkansas. He has sat in circles at San Quentin Prison and Burning Man. He has been in zip-ties and hunting tree stands and has held hands to sing and to block traffic. Nowadays, he shuttles between Boulder, Oakland, and San Francisco, cross-pollinating between the worlds of grassroots organizing, business, technology, and wealth.
Growing up, Simon’s family played a lot of board games, which meant he was always learning systems of rules, accomplishing goals, and relating that intimately affected his sense of familial connection. In a way, he’s still doing that, co-creating systems that blend rules, relationships, strategies, and purpose. He feel blessed to be able to do so with inspiring people in service of our healing and liberation.
About Harmonize
Harmonize, Simon’s consulting and coaching practice, helps leaders understand the connections between dimensions of organizational and social change, and calls on everyone to begin building the world we deserve. The company offers thought leadership to build bridges between professional communities.
Episode Overview
Simon and I went super deep in this conversation which was at times particularly challenging for me. Simon an incredible thinker who has gone a mile deep on subjects ranging from Indigenous wisdom to Teal organizations and social justice movements. IT’s clear that through his work, he has learned how to be extremely thoughtful and sometimes careful with his language, which I decided to challenge him on, because I wanted him to feel confident expressing the incredible wisdom I thought he was sharing.
We cover a ton of ground from systems change, government v. governance, extractive economics, whether and how a white man can share Indigenous wisdom, God as justice, Jewish philosophy and more.
My Favorite Quotes:
“Collectively we have false egos. For example, there’s a false ego in our society around what it means to be a man.”
“All across the country and world, there are people who are trying to reimagine what our economy looks like.”
“The Court of the Conqueror”
“I often think in terms of what people have the immediate power to ‘touch.’ Every organization that we are in can become an incubator for a different way of being in the world. A different way of thinking about power, a different way of thinking about sharing & the commons, and a different way of being in right relation with ourselves & nature.”
“Separate out government from governance. Governance is the way we come together to make decisions about what matters to us, and how we’re going to allocate resources, and how we’re going to organize ourselves to actualize ourselves & the values that we want. And government is one manifestation of our collective process of governance”
“My experience in working with Indigenous folks and hearing their forms of governance is there is a real emphasis on right relationship to land and spirit, and the interconnectedness of the world is taken as a given at all times.
“We don’t want to be in this pattern of me being this white dude talking about Indigenous wisdom”
“God is justice. God is not timeless, God is played out on the stage of history. It is not a certain state we get to through a ritualized act, it’s how we show up in our every day lives and how we manifest the love of our hearts and our awareness of greater connectedness inside our social structures. And by the way those social structures are not permanent like nature.”
“We can measure whether we know shit, by whether people’s bodies, hearts, and minds open up when you talk.”
Episode Breakdown:
00:00 – What is Collective Transformation?
8:00 – Economic Redesign
12:00 – Extractive policies – intentional or emergent?
17:00 – What is lowest hanging fruit for policy change today?
20:00 – Government vs. Governance
26:00 – Lessons on governance from Indigenous traditions
30:00 – Can a white man share Indigenous ideas & traditions?
40:00 – I asked Simon what he wanted to talk about
50:00 – Some wisdom from our native Jewish traditions
55:00 – God is justice
1:00:00 – Theory of Change – Build the Alternate Reality
1:10:00 – The story of the Shaman Samuel
Episode Links:
Simon’s Info
White Resilience Circles to Explore Racism
Other Resources & References
Reflections on Money by Andrew Murray Dunn
Sustainable Economies Law Center
In the Courts of the Conqueror
The Starfish & The Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom
Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown
Australian Indigenous Governance Institute
Fact Check: I referenced the Iroquois as an example of a “leaderless organization,” but it was the Apache who were discussed in the book the Starfish and the Spider.**
Marc’s Info:
Marc Weinstein, host of the Look Up! Podcast is a public speaker for corporations, universities, and conferences. Click here to view past talks and to book Marc
Look Up! Patreon Community
Look Up! Website
Marc's Instagram
Marc's Twitter
Look Up! On iTunes
Look Up! On Spotify
