From Shame to Vision and Action:
Mobilizing Our Privilege for the Benefit of All

This final session on Privilege offers you an opportunity to focus on how you can have productive conversations about privilege using an NVC perspective. The core offering here is a simple conceptual framework for distinguishing between privilege: a structural system that confers unchosen benefits on some people at the expense of others, and attitude: an individual attribute.

While privilege is not usually chosen (for the most part we are born into it), we all have ample choice about how we engage with it.

What NVC in particular can offer us is a way of shifting from negative to positive ways of engaging with privilege:

• Owning privilege instead of denying it;
• Learning about the history and structural mechanisms of privilege as a way to transcend guilt and shame; and
• Opening to and inviting feedback from those who don't have the privilege instead of being defensive about it.

Ultimately, it's about making new choices around stewarding privilege for the benefit of all instead of accepting conscious — or unconscious — entitlement to personal enjoyment of its benefits.

Read about Miki Kashtan