Back in 2015, Caitlin, Tim Merry, Tuesday Rivera, and I were travelling around the world offering a workshop called “Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics,” in which the four of us were sharing our extensions of work that we had developed emerging out of the common root of the Art of Hosting community and our practices. It was a rich experiment, and we met really interesting folks in Canada, the US and the UK. It started some longer-term partnerships and friendships, and from time to time, I ran into folks who were at those workshops.
I met one of them last week again. Dr. Nomusa Mngoma is a health researcher at Queen’s University, where I was last Monday delivering a day-long workshop on the Art of Hosting basics for the Centre for Community Engagement and Social Change. Nomusa saw the invitation and showed up. When I met her, I had a vague recollection of meeting her previously, but I couldn’t place it. We both thought for a while, and of course, it was at our Beyond the Basics retreat in Kingston in 2015, the last time I had taught in that city.
We caught up and went through the day, and as we were leaving, Nomusa handed me her business card, which wasn’t for her job at Queen’s. It was as the owner and instructor of Dansani Dance Company, a local business specializing in Latin Dance and Ballroom Dance lessons. The moment she haded me the card I had a flash of recollection.
“Wait!” I said. “Didn’t you propose this idea as a topic in the Pro Action Cafe at Beyond the Basics?”
She thought for a minute and, with delight, realized that she had indeed! “That conversation changed my life,” she said.
Wow. I love that.
Later, I was talking with my friend Michelle Searle, who brought me to Queen’s, and she wondered how Nomusa had received the invitation to our event. The workshop was open, but the invitation was only sent out through Queen’s and to a few partners. I told Michelle that Nomusa is an Adjunct Assistant Professor and Health Research Scientist. Michelle expressed delighted surprise because, although she didn’t know Dr. Mngoma in that capacity, apparently, Nomusa is famous in Kingston for leading free outdoor dance classes downtown in the summer!
Nine years from a template full of notes in a workshop to joy unleashed in a community and one happy and fulfilled human being.
Over the past 15 years I have worked with churches, faith communities and faith-based social justice movements using the Art of Hosting and participatory leadership. In many ways these organizations have been at the forefront of social and demographic changes, getting older while holding a fierce commitment to addressing issues of injustice in the world. Working with faith leaders and faith-based movements allows us to have a different conversation about participatory leadership, community work and spirit. The Art of Hosting seems to wake up the kind of collaboration that faith communities long for, even as they confront existential questions within their own organizations or in the larger world.
In November in Toronto, a very special team of us is hosting an Art of Participatory Leadership training aimed at leaders in faith based contexts and those whoa re engaged in social justice work, specifically anti-poverty and inclusion. This training, while it is directed at folks who are working in these contexts, is open and applicable to others as well, whose work needs active involvement and co-creation with the communities they serve. Non-profits and social change movement workers are welcome and will both learn and add much to the conversations we are involved in.
My co-hosts on this team are Ben Wolf and Violetta Ilkiw. Ben is an old friend who has been a community organizer, communicator, journalist and Unitarian congregational leader for years. He is currently working with Thomas Hübl and bringing trauma informed practices into his work.
Likewise I’ve known and admired Violetta’s work for years. She specializes in conflict transformation, decision-making and deep community-led change work, including working with youth-led initiatives in the philanthropic sector.
In this work we have been invited by Sam Cooper, a minister in the Toronto area who has been devoted to setting up an Anti-Poverty Commission in Mississauga, based very much on the citizen-led initiatives in Scotland (like this one). We are also invited into this work by Pablo Kim Sun who specializes in Intercultural work and inclusion and who works for the Presbyterian Church in Canada.
There are creative tuition options for this training and we want to make it as open and accessible to anyone who resonates with this call, whether you are working in churches or other faith-based organizations, or involved in deep community led change work. Consider joining us. There are spaces open and we’d love to see you there.
Tenneson, Caitlin and I are running a three day leadership course for MacEwan University here in Edmonton. It starts tomorrow and we are having a great conversation at Remedy chai cafe about why meetings matter for folks studying leadership. Here are some of the insights.
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Meetings are microcosms for leadership practice. They are places to encounter one’s own leadership gifts and leadership challenges. What you learn when you host a meeting is very much related to how you lead a team or and organization or a board. Meetings are a place to confront what’s real and meaningful. They contain all of the patterns the give life or deplete it in organizations. They are places of immediate practice because they can be places of both pain and healing and so they demand attention and consideration.
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We are after teaching how to host conversations that matter. “Matter” because they more things matter to people the more engaged people are in the work. The number one question I get asked about is “how to I get people to engage?” And the answer is “make the work meaningful to them.” If your work is less meaningful than what folks have going on in the rest of their lives they won’t engage. Sometimes you don’t get to work with everyone you want to. But start with those who see why the work matters.
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If you want good effort to be sustained you need to build connection between people and connection to the work. Sustainability requires connection. Stewardship (or good governance) requires a long term and generative relationship to what is being cared for: people, work, place…Once you know that your future and wellbeing is tied up in the sustainability and health of the people and work and places that sustain you, sustainability and stewardship becomes a way of being.
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What needs time in a meeting? Einstein’s famous quite about using 55 minutes of a hour to come up with the right question is good. But I might use that time to build resilient relationships instead. Because then if we don’t figure out the question, or the answer, we will at least have to commitment to keep looking.
(Pssst. You can build resilience while you are finding the question, by the way).
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One of my teachers Birgitt Williams teaches that there is always grief in the room. To which I would add “there is always trauma and always inequity in the room too.” And so hosting rooms is also a space to host restoration and repair and dignity. It’s not therapy. It’s not even healing, per se. It’s just leaving things better than you found them, as much as possible.
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Be thoughtful in how you host, even if it’s a short conversation. The absence of design is a kind of design choice. It often defaults to “the way we always do things” and that isn’t always a good thing. So be thoughtful. Add something slightly different. Take away something you don’t need.
Dry Falls, Washington, which is where the Missoula Flood waters poured over the rim of the Grand Coulee and created lakes from the plunge pools at the bottom of the cliffs.
It’s feeling familiar. After four years of mostly working from home and staying fairly close to my home place, I’m travelling more. The difference is that I’m doing it more with Caitlin, as we are working together with groups and organizations on longer-term projects that we are holding together with others. Much of our work together is around building deeper capacity in hosting and participatory leadership with larger institutional organizations such as universities, human services networks, unions, quasi-government organizations and the like. On top of that, we have been doing some Art of Hosting workshops in Vancouver and Manitoba and I have two more coming up in Ontario this fall.
Last week we were in Central Washington State working with a group called Thriving Together which helps build networks of health care providers for whole person health and health equity. This is the second year we have worked with a cohort of folks from that network. We met in Soap Lake, Washington, which in September is quiet. The kids are back in school, the tourists have all left and the town has very little buzz. Soap Lake, which is known as Smokiam (Healing Waters) in the local nxa?amx?ín language is a small, muddy, and very alkaline lake at the southern end of the Grand Coulee. The mud and waters are said to have healing properties and many visitors, especially from northern Europe and Israel, flock to the tow in the summer to partake.
The town itself is not affluent. Soap Lake does not have the water resources or the connection to the interstate to make it rival the towns in the rest of the county. Quincy, about a half hour to the south, is on the Columbia River and is a hub for big agriculture food processing and data centres, both of which use the river to power and cool their operations. Computing “in the cloud” is a misnomer. The cloud needs to rain, and the rain needs to be captured, and the water needs to be swirled around hundreds of thousands of computers that have a real live footprint on the ground. Cloud computing makes it sound so ephemeral. The reality is much more material.
To the north, in the town of Grand Coulee, also on the Columbia River, stands the great dam built during the 1930s to contribute to the two systems change points everyone needed to haul themselves out of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl: water and cheap electricity. In a country where almost every public service is privatized, the Bonneville Power Authority remains a public utility and sells the electricity generated by the dozen or more dams on the Columbia. These dams did their jobs, immortalized in song by Woody Guthrie, (he wrote these songs in less than a month, keeping in line with massive events that happen in a short period of time in these parts) who placed a limited and naive optimism in the people’s power and water, but they also flooded out dozens of Indigenous communities of the Colville Tribes and destroyed the Columbia River salmon runs. The landscape is stunning and captivating and has been radically changed by human hands.
Those human hands worked upon a foundation that was laid down by catastrophic flooding at the end of the ice age, when somewhere between 40 and 100 megafloods cascaded across central Washington, carving deep canyons from the volcanic basalt that had coated the bedrock millions of years before in thousands of feet of lava. the sheer scale of geological processes in this region are mind-blowing, and I found myself absorbed by YouTube videos of the Missoula Floods that carved out features on the land in as little as 48 hours as hundreds of meters of water flowed across the plains and carved the Columbia River gorge on its way to the sea.
Central Washington is no stranger to catastrophic shifts in fortune in the human time scale either. While Quincy and Wenatchee have done well, the further you get away from the Columbia, the harder it is to make a living. Agriculture held a lot of promise in Woody Guthrie’s time and irrigation canals crisscross the whole landscape. But like most industries, agriculture has been largely concentrated in a few hands, and automation has eliminated the jobs Guthrie was so optimistic about. While we were in Soap Lake, except for a single bottle of local wine, none of the food we ate was locally grown. If it was, it was only because it was part of a Sysco order that threw it together with Florida oranges, California lettuce, and bananas from God knows where. Someone is making a killing in agriculture, but it wasn’t the local folks I saw around me.
Instead, what Soap Lake had in spades was community, although it wasn’t obvious to the visiting eye. After spending a week there, we started to meet folks like Simon, the window washer who was sent by the drinkers at the local pub across the street to come and find out what we were up to. Or Nels Borg, who is the defacto golf pro at the Lava Links golf course, which has to be seen to be believed. Nels was in our workshop and is an undaunted community booster, even long championing the funding and construction of the world’s largest lava lamp, something which has very much remained the concept of a plan for 25 years. Like all small towns, Soap Lake has a long story for every “why?”
It’s political season in America and Grant County is a pretty conservative place in general. While there were plenty of Trump signs up (and a bunch of Harris/Walz signs, too), my experience working in the US during these times is that there is just too much work to do for the large-scale silliness to be top of mind for folks. When you are working with people who are caring for folks with addictions, childcare issues, educational challenges, and access to health care and housing, politics and policy are very real. We aren’t in weird arguments about people eating cats. We’re trying to meet the needs of vulnerable people and build public support and collaboration for health and well-being.
The work is real. Caring for veterans, fair housing policies, providing resources for neurodivergent middle schoolers, inclusive economic development, and peer-based support for people in recovery and active addiction. All of it is real and requires collaboration and multiple approaches to meeting needs. The participatory approaches and practices we are called to teach in these settings help set people up to lead in more open and participatory ways, even in a world where public conversations are coming apart and being subjected to lies, intimidation and ideology.
This group is really drawn to the methods we teach – Open Space, World Cafe, Circle, LImiting Beliefs Inquiry – and the theories and tools that help us think about creating participatory work and responses to really complex challenges that overwhelm people and systems. Sometimes, when the questions are just too big, the answer is – at least in the beginning – community. In our rush to do SOMETHING to respond to urgency, it is very easy to create situations that disempower and degrade connections. Organizations like Thriving Together play an important role in supporting the social infrastructure that builds community resilience. They can convene conversations that help diverse groups of people share knowledge and make sense of their conditions, leading to collaborations and resources. Without organizations like that and practices rooted in participatory work, agencies and organizations become siloed, disconnected and lonely.
Soap Lake is really no different from thousands of other communities around the United States and Canada and the rest of the world. It is a small town looking around for help and not necessarily finding it from higher levels of government or the corporate world that has extracted so much of its wealth and talent. It has to rely on its own resources to keep going, and remember what is essential about being a community: connecting, knowing each other, devoting a bit of time and energy to something a bit bigger than yourself because you know that when some are suffering, all are inhibited from full wellbeing.
I love working with groups like this. I admire their work and their undaunted commitment to solving absolutely diabolical problems. I learn so much about the imperative of participatory work from places like this, and I’m grateful for the reciprocal relationships of learning and change-making that we create together.
I was going through some old emails today and found one from 2020 from my friend Susan Phillips in Minneapolis who shared a really moving message about the closing of an important Youth Leadership Initiative (YLI) back then. It relates to how to end a container.
If you’ve been with me in real life you know that I like to end a gathering in a crisp and decisive way. I think it’s important to know when you are done, when the work is complete and when the next thing happens. So for years I have used a practice that I learned from Tim Merry and which he learned in Soweto, South Africa at the Soweto Mountain of Hope Project. This little ritual to end a time together uses three sets of three claps as little blessings. The first set is to clap for ourselves. The second set is to clap for our communities. The third set is to clap for our work in the world.
Susan introduced this practice to the YLI and when the program closed one of the participants, Nou, led the final claps, and she framed it this way:
“We clap on the inside for ourselves – may we always remember our worth, that we are more that what people say, that we are brilliant, that our voices are powerful, that we have wisdom regardless of our age and that we come from a strong line of ancestors. As we all graduate from YLI tonight, may we walk into the world with courage, confidence, knowing our worth and perseverance through hard times. The world isn’t always kind but know that no matter what happens, no matter where we go, we will always have friends here who believe in the fullness, not of who we were yesterday, but of who we are today and who we will become tomorrow. We clap on the inside to remind ourselves that change starts with us. Let us use our personal power to shine bright, to create, to lead, to heal; and vow never to let anyone take that away from us.
We clap in the middle to celebrate the community we have build here over the last 7 months; to acknowledge each of your leadership journeys, your commitments til the end and the contributions you have made this year and to remember the power of coming together across difference. We also clap in the middle to honor the people in our community who are fighting for justice; and to also commit ourselves as leaders to doing what we can to making our neighborhoods and cities a better place for everyone. We are the ones we have been waiting for y’all.
As we clap on the outside, may the universe hear our dreams, our cries and desires for change and justice. May our actions inspire people around us to listen deeply, fight harder and love more. Lastly, we clap on the outside to send our collective energy rippling throughout the world.”
It’s been four years since I got that email, but Nou, wherever you are, your actions continue to inspire me.