What Is Shared Power?

One of my mentors recently gifted me a tiny, powerful book: Wolfpack by Abby Wambach, a US women’s soccer legend and coach.

At first I flipped through it, thinking, “Yeah, OK … women’s empowerment … I know all this stuff!” But I decided to read just a few pages at a time anyway - one chapter each night - because I really don’t like to miss anything. 

And because I’m about as far as one can get from an elite athlete, I wanted to know more about this international soccer champion’s views on leadership. 

And I am so glad I did. In her short book, Wambach not only affirmed my approach to stepparenting, she lifted up my deep belief that power is abundant. 

Quote from Abby Wambach’s book, Wolfpack

At Freedom Lifted, we talk a lot about shared power. 

When we commit to shared power, we make an ongoing, intentional, and concerted effort to ensure that everyone in a community, regardless of their identity:

• Has access to needed resources

• Is recognized as inherently valuable, as well as for their contributions

• Has a voice in making decisions that affect them

• Is able to make choices about their life and body

• Is physically and psychologically safe

Shared power is also concerned with eliminating dominance of any particular person or group over others. 

Dominance means people or groups with power hoard it, exercising or using that power to limit, restrict, or take away resources, voice, visibility, or safety from others, consciously or unconsciously. 

But I don’t equate power and dominance.

So much of my work boils down to helping us understand that power is not dominance. Since power has been used as a way to dominate and restrict, we’ve assumed that power is finite. And that has impacted our efforts to share power: We want to work for equity, but we see things like resources, voice, visibility, safety, and control as scarce. So, tension exists because we’re afraid of losing whatever portion of these things we may have.

It’s hard for so many of us to imagine sharing power… without losing it. 

I understand that we all have been hurt by power in very real ways. We have been hurt by those with power hoarding it. Our communities have been harmed by those using power to exploit, marginalize, erase, and attack us. 

We associate power with being dirty or bad because our bosses, our partners, our governments, and others we are supposed to trust have often betrayed us, wielding power against us. 

These experiences with power are seared into our memory.

But when we realize that power isn’t dominance, but a tool of dominance, we realize that power can — and has been — used in other ways, too. 

There are other histories of power.

There is a record of people accessing and using their power to set us free. 

There are those who have risen up and demanded that power be shared. 

There is a history of people using their power to build communities of care — spaces where we’ve intentionally worked to make sure people are seen, heard, and have what they need to survive.

If we try, many of us can access memories of the people who have used their power to make sure we had the resources we needed and the rights we deserved. They fed us, clothed us, opened doors for us, marched for us, and held us when we cried.

There have been moments when those of us with power invited others to speak, deeply listened, and took what we heard into real account. There were times when we willingly passed positional power to those who have been historically denied it.

There were the decisions people made to demand, to testify, to protect, and to defy the law under real threat because they had dreams of freedom.

People have put their resources, safety, and bodies on the line so that I could be free.

These are our models for when power is shared, not hoarded. So let’s not only remember when the powerful betrayed us, but also remember when power was used to buoy us and draw on this history of resistance and solidarity, too.

Like Abby Wambach says:

The idea that power can’t be shared is a baseless lie rooted in scarcity and motivated by fear.

But we don’t have to believe the lie: We can do our work with a spirit of abundance. There is enough power for all of us. 

Working for justice means relentlessly working for of all us to be seen, heard, resourced, and safe, regardless of how we identify.

And we must pay particular attention to those of us who have been historically and currently restricted by systems of oppression because of our identities. Work for justice and equity requires this.

So, my essential questions for you and everyone we work with:

How can you share power at home, in relationships, at work and in your community?