Building Unity

'Piecez' Prosserman Michael

Description

At age 16, Michael 'Piecez' Prosserman, a professional b-boy (breakdancer), completed a school project that would grow to become a hip-hop-inspired mental health charity with global reach. Through a process of continuous discovery and reflection, Prosserman and his team grew UNITY to the point where it beneefited over a quarter of a million young people. In Building Unity, Prosserman breaks down the six steps to discovering 'responsible impact' and building an organization that is growth-minded, values-based, and reflective of the needs of its community. Using stories of his own evolution, learning, and growth as a leader over 15 years, Prosserman parallels the creativity found in breakedancing with the innovation needed to build a sustainable non-profit.

Sujets

• Gestion et management

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 05 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773056067
• Langue: English

Extrait

Building Unity
Leading a Non-Profit from Spark to Succession
Michael “Piecez” Prosserman



Contents Dedication Introduction Part 1: Spark — Hip Hop + Mental Health Part 2: Build — Building the Plane While Flying It Part 3: Trust — Crews and Cyphers Part 4: Grow — Planting Seeds for the Future Part 5: Evolve — Steps to Succession Part 6: Re-Ignite — Launching Epic Tools & Resources Timeline Acknowledgements About the Author Copyright


Dedication
To my mom, Michelle; my dad, Ron; my wife, Melissa; and my dog, Olive — the pillars of my life and the foundation of my resilience.
In memory of my late therapist, Dr. Joseph Regan, who saved my life. You will be remembered forever.


Introduction
This book is about building something that didn’t exist, something that would bring about new forms of justice, something I doubted I could really build until I began to see it coming together in front of my eyes, one small piece at a time. This is not a book about failing fast or testing things quickly and moving on if they don’t work. In fact, it’s the opposite; it’s about slow, heart-wrenching, long-term growth through dedicated work and believing in something at its very core. It’s about loyalty. It’s about sticking around for something you believe in so deeply that you don’t just give up on it when it doesn’t work out the first time or even the second time. It is not about hacks or shortcuts. It is about perseverance and always learning.
The idea of making the world a better place can be problematic. Sometimes our good intentions can lead to unintended damaging results. But I believe the work we do, our words, and actions can be transformative. The journey of learning is constant with the communities we aim to serve.
For me, the process of discovery and reflection was constant. The intersection of identity, strength, and skill was the spark that turned an idea into reality. Our team at Unity “flipped” impact: learning the foundation of how to do something and then making it our own by adding our style to it. We need innovative ideas to address the world’s most pressing problems — flipping impact to match the need of the communities we serve while challenging the status quo.
This book includes flexible frameworks and stories of how we created the most responsible impact we could as a team of community-minded hip-hop artists. It acts as a window into my learning journey as a b-boy and an entrepreneur, a view to how creativity on the dance floor paralleled my progress building an organization with social purpose.
I try to use plain language and avoid buzzwords. This is not about complex theories. It’s about practice and self-reflection. Throughout my storytelling, I’ve compiled learnings, practical tools, and reflection questions to support you on your journey. Our team created something out of nothing, just as we do in hip hop. We led with our hearts and learned the hard way.
I invite you to take any of these ideas and lessons and remix them to make them yours. Flip them. To me that’s the common thread between breakin’ and entrepreneurship. Take a pre-existing idea and flip it into something new, something relevant to your story, your experience, your context.
In breakin’ there is a foundational move called the Six Step . By no coincidence, this book’s structural framework comprises the six steps we took in growing Unity, the six pillars that have been my foundation for turning ideas into community-driven impact: Spark: hip hop + mental health Build: building the plane while flying it Trust: crews and cyphers Grow: planting seeds for the future Evolve: steps to succession Re-Ignite: launching EPIC

This image captures my journey of building Unity from the ground up. It mirrors elements of my creative process on the dance floor. It is a process of discovery. After working with a wide variety of clients, I began to realize there are common threads in the journey of discovering impact. The process of building Unity was highly contextual and nuanced. The environment in which we worked was constantly changing and we needed to be responsive, so our approach could never be linear or follow a one-size-fits-all model; it was always evolving. I began to realize it was a process of discovery, reflection, and constant learning. Always challenging ourselves to do better. Ultimately, it was something we needed to do to understand. Experience was our teacher.
I’m sharing this framework not as a linear solution, but as a flexible lens through which to discover impact. There are reflection questions at the end of each chapter to give you the opportunity to reflect on your impact. Challenge yourself, push your limits, move the dial. Every action matters and there is no action too small.
While we built Unity, we were constantly discovering the way forward based on the strengths of our team, while taking the time to reflect on the impact we were having and how we could do better. This helped us discover and fill gaps, and we did our best to apply learning in real time. Reflection helped uncover barriers, challenge assumptions, and create space to address issues. Reflecting on our impact every step of the way helped us understand how we could be responsive and better serve our communities. We built the plane while flying it.
Flipping Impact
Hip hop culture is a metaphor for life, leadership, and innovation. It has some powerful and universal philosophies and lessons to pull from. I applied the values I took from hip hop to my process in building Unity from the ground up.
In hip hop, when someone does a move that inspires me, I “flip it.” To flip something is to build on someone else’s idea or innovate a common concept that has been done before. I take inspiration from what I see on the dance floor or learn from my peers and add to it from my own experiences and strengths: I flip it. Instead of starting from scratch, to flip something you first seek knowledge and then add new ideas based on your own story, creativity, personality, and context. Understanding the basics enables you to build from strengths while identifying weaknesses and filling gaps. It is a constant process of discovery through doing paired with critical reflection on how to always do better.
It’s not copying others’ ideas or recreating something that already exists in the world. It’s about innovating from the foundation of a concept rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. I acknowledge history and ideas that came before me while adding my own unique flavour and style. I work to understand the ecosystem in order to figure out where new ideas might be needed, to identify the existing ways of doing things that are no longer relevant, and then I add something new. Flipping an idea creates space to innovate.
Breakin’ is a culture that respects learning, the idea of always being a student and seeking knowledge from other members of the community. It is incredibly adaptive and nimble. Unlike in traditional education, there is no formal system to teach the foundation. Knowledge is passed down from mentors, crews, peer exchanges at practice sessions, and from elders. In breakin’, this is often referred to as “each one teach one”: dancers take what they learn and add their own unique style, flipping ideas to make them relevant to their personality and way of telling their stories — how they express themselves and speak their truth. This is in direct contrast to biting , which is highly frowned upon in breakin’. Biting is copying someone else’s unique moves exactly, and it is completely disrespectful to the originators of those moves.
Flipping is also an opportunity to transform a negative into a positive. This is done in hip hop culture, because people often find themselves in situations where they must build something out of nothing. It is about transforming or flipping these situations with a strong will and hard work and by denying the path that others set for you. It is even used in slang in hip hop. We often say words like “bad,” “ill,” “sick,” and “dope” to describe something good. We flip negative words to describe something positive.
Flipping ideas directly parallels my creation process at Unity. I learned everything I could about how to start a non-profit and then built Unity with our team, drawing on all our strengths to do so. We filled gaps constantly as we identified areas in which we needed to learn more. When we felt the pressure to grow without the right knowledge, we gathered information in any way we could. Instead of starting from scratch, we tried to learn from what was out there, flip it, and make it our own. It was a constant process of discovery and reflection, flipping what we learned into new ways of doing things, building from a foundation of non-profit sector knowledge. We flipped boards of directors, flipped fundraising, flipped leadership. The cycle continued. We learned, we flipped, we grew.
Throughout the book I will reference how we “flipped” impact, leadership, operations, and all functional areas of running an organization. How we took inspiration from mentors in areas like finance, fundraising, program development, and evaluation, and flipped what we learned to make it relevant to Unity. I’ve also created sections that highlight lessons learned through discovery and reflection. These sections are entitled “Flipping Leadership,” “Flipping Operations,” and “Flipping” any other functional area of building an organization. These lessons are a direct parallel between how we innovate and flip ideas in hip hop.
One last thing. If you’d like to dig deeper into building tangible processes around your social impact ideas, you can access tools and resources at epicleadership.ca/book