Five Takeaways on Transforming Schools and Communities with Revolutionary Love

Revolutionary love is so much more than just a feeling, it’s about continually choosing to show up for justice, healing, and transformation, especially in hard times.

At our March community meeting, we were joined by Melissa Canlas, Ed.D., and Nicole Marie, educators and organizers with The Revolutionary Love Project, whose work centers on reimagining education as a space for belonging and collective care.

Together, through interactive discussion and powerful video clips of The Revolutionary Love Project Executive Director and founder, Valarie Kaur, we explored how love can be a radical and restorative force in schools and communities. As Valarie said, “revolutionary love is a form of sweet labor—fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life giving—a choice we make over and over again.”

Here are five key takeaways.

1. Revolutionary love draws on wonder and grief.

By choosing to approach others with wonder as opposed to defensiveness, we allow ourselves to remain open to connection even during disagreements.

It begins with wonder. Can you wonder about the person in front of you? You can say, in your mind, “You are a part of me I do not yet know.” When you do that, you open yourself to that person’s story. And that leads to that next practice: to grieve, to grieve with others, to weep with others, to share in their sorrows. That gives you information for how to fight for others.

These are the elements for what I call deep solidarity. Shallow solidarity is rooted in the logic of exchange. I show up for you, so you show up for me. But deep solidarity is rooted in love, wondering about others, grieving with others, fighting for others. Those are elements for how to practice seeing no stranger.

2. Revolutionary Love focuses on opponents, not enemies.

By tending to our own wounds and harnessing our rage, we can engage those we disagree with without losing sight of their humanity.

Notice I don’t use the word enemy. An enemy is a fixed and permanent identity. An opponent is anyone whose ideas or beliefs or actions oppose yours. It begins with tending your own wound. It begins with rage. The solution is not to suppress your rage or to let your rage explode, but to process your rage in safe containers.

And once you do, you can ask yourself, what information does my rage carry? What does it say about what’s important to me? You can choose to harness that energy for what you do in the world. I call that hardest energy “divine rage.” The aim of divine rage is not vengeance. It is to reorder the world. If you are safe enough or brave enough, you can move on to that next practice, which is to listen to our opponents. —quoted from Valarie Kaur’s TED Talk.

3. Deep listening is an act of surrender.

Listening with intent means being able to accept that you might be wrong. Even one conversation or lesson can shift how children understand justice, influence families, or empower students to take action.

You risk being changed by what you hear when you listen to your opponent. The goal is to understand them, and when you understand them, you gain information for that next practice, which is to reimagine. Reimagine an outcome that leaves no one behind, not even them, raging, listening, reimagining. These are the core practices for how to show up with love, even for your opponents. —quoted from Valarie Kaur’s TED Talk.

4. Education is a primary site for practicing revolutionary love.

Teaching is not just content delivery—it’s human connection and meaning-making.

We’re talking about education in quite a broad sense, right? Beyond the strictures of formal schooling, and instead as a process that honors the full humanity of ourselves. That the students or the people that we’re working with are a way to practice love, to nurture community and to cultivate the bravery that’s needed for these times. And so in translating these practices specifically into the field of education, we’re drawing from the lineage of educators like bell hooks… and so many others who put love, collective care, imagination, the formation of a critical consciousness, at the heart of their work.

And they ask us, invite us, to engage not only with our intellect and with our students’ intellects, but similar to the way that we started the meeting—in heart, body, spirit—engaging with the rigor of the intelligences of also our hearts and our bodies, with the community knowledges, ancestral knowledges, and the ways in which we and they are also trying to make meaning of the times that we’re in, both in and outside of our classroom.

5. Love is a practice.

It’s a choice we make repeatedly to show up for others, our opponents, and ourselves. This shifts love from something passive or emotional to something intentional and transformative.

Revolutionary love is more than a feeling, it is a form of sweet labor, something that is muscular, and rigorous, and a set of practices. So, if love is a practice, then love can be modeled, it can be practiced, it can be taught, and it can be learned.