Burlington, Vermont
I grew up in Ontario and this my favourite time of year in Eastern North America for many reasons. But chief among those reasons is what happens to forests out here in the fall. It is hard to describe to anyone who has never seen them, a maple forest in the fall, where the colours are bright yellow, orange and red. Pitched against a blue sky, the scene is iconic, beautiful and stirs up a nostalgia in me for home.
Flying from Choicago to Burlington today, we crossed over the maple woodlots of the farming country of southern Ontario and upstate New York which were alive with the colour of turning. Then over the Adirondacks, past Mount Marcy and Skylight, two peaks I have climbed upon, these ancient worn down mountains, 20 times older than the ones I live on now but still showing their grandeur and the shape of peaks and valleys covered with pine and spruce with pockets of yellow birch and red maple. Over Lake Champlain, and into Burlington, a lovely older town on the lake, biger and more modern than I remembered it from a previous visit in 1993 but still small enough to have a main street feel about it.
Met up with my Art of Hosting mate Lenore Mewton and we stopped in at the CommunityMatters reception at the Echo Centre and then on for an excellent meal of contemporary Cantonese food at A SIngle Pebble.
Beautiful part of the world to retrun too, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the gathering tomorrow.
My friend Peter Rukavina is a pretty good traveller. He usually make a couple of trips a year to Europe, some with family in tow, and he offers this wonderful guide to travelling in the continent, RuK style.
Bekkevoort, Belgium
Arrived here last night in preparation for the first gathering of Art of Hosting practioners in Europe, the first Art of Hosting on the Art of Hosting. I’m staying with my friend Ria Baeck, in a small converted stable on an old farm in the countryside outside of Brussels. Tom Hurley joined us this morning from San Francisco (he’s sleeping right now) and Toke, Monica, George Por, Maria Scordialos and Sarah Whitely and others are all arriving this afternoon. Tomorrow we start in a learning centre about 15 minutes away from here called Heerlijckyt.
The flight from Vancouver, through Heathrow was a strange experience for me, It was in many ways a journey back through some personal time and landscapes that have formed me. In 1978, when I was almost exactly the same age as my daughter, I moved with my family to England, where we lived for the next three years. Since 1981, when we left I haven’t been back to Europe at all, so it was interesting landing at Heathrow again, almost 29 years to the day since I first landed there. There is nothing recognizable about the place to me, and I used to know it pretty well. I was an avid planespotter in my youth and I used to spend whole Saturdays with my friend Dominic Adams at Heathrow, watching the world come and go. Today I’m hard pressed to even guess where we used to watch planes from, if indeed that structure is even there anymore.
But this journey was also significant for other quick visits to personal landscapes. In flying from Vancouver to London, we travelled over almost all of the major homelands of my ancestry. First the fields of Saskatchewan, where my great grandmother’s family farmed, and then the Ojibway lands of Ontario, and much later, the homeland of my father’s family, the north of Ireland. We were within view of Moy, the town where my father’s family left from in the 1860s to come to Canada. A few minutes later our low earth orbit took me over the Isle of Man, where my some of my mom’s mother’s family came from. We sort of missed Scotland although it lay not far off our port wing, and that was it; the sum total of the landscapes in which my genes had travelled most recently. I covered in nine hours what it took my genetic material hundreds of years to do.
Ria met me at the Brussels airport and we drove east through southern Flanders to this little rural farmhouse, nestled in a beautifully tended garden. All I know about Flanders has been shaped by the Canadian narrative of the First World War, and so a lot of what I was seeing in this incredibly peaceful and pastoral land was some ancient grief of the wars that have raged over time in this place. I even pulled out a CA$10 bill when I got here and noticed for the first time that it has the first stanza of “In Flanders Fields” printed on it. (I’ve been travelling so much these days I currently have four currencies in my wallet, Canadian and American dollars, Euros and British pounds)
So here I am, happily ensconced in a Flanders fields and awaiting the arrival of some mates for what will prove to be a tasty gathering. More to come as we cook together.
I’m back from Bella Coola, and reflecting on the remarkable three days of learning and Open Space we did there.
Saturday, we held a small community Open Space gathering around the issue of what the community needs to do to prepare for assuming full responsibility over child and family services. This is a provocative question in the Nuxalk Nation. The Nation is a strong and independent community and putting children and families in the centre of any conversation brings heart, passion and commitment.
We had a small group of people present for our Open Space. 20 people began the day with us and more came and went. There was a flurry of activity to post sessions in the morning, much of it spurred by pressing community needs. The conversations had a kind of solid adhesion to them that I haven’t witnessed in every community gathering like this. People sat in very well formed circles, and very little bumblebeeing was seen.
There were two incredible pieces of action that flowed from this gathering – one immediate and one long term. The short term project that arose came out of a conversation on the safety of children and youth. At the outset of that conversation a young man, Stephen, told a story about what happened to him the previous night. He was waiting to be picked up by his mother at 2am after being out with friends. While he was waiting a young girl, who he estimated to be between 10 and 12 years old, came out of the bushes, pulled out a crack pipe and started smoking it. Crack and crystal meth are just beginning to make an appearance in the community, but it was the age of this girl that was shocking to Stephen. He told his mom that no matter how he felt the next morning, he was going to that community Open Space to talk about what to do. Stephen’s story inspired the group on the spot to create a network of parent and Elder patrols. Parents signed up to take turns driving around the reserve all night, looking out for kids and helping them get home or stay safe. If it wasn’t possible for them to go home, Elder’s offered to open up their houses so the young people could stay with them until it was safe. The first patrol happened Saturday night.
The long term project involved further development of the idea of a community house that came out of our World Cafe on Friday. A group met to discuss what came next and they committed to open a bank account, begin fundraising and to meet in a week to flesh out a more detailed todo list. As a result of the concreteness of their invitation and willingness to work together, the group raised $260 just by passing a hat in the closing circle, a tangible investment of money that arose very much as a koha, which is the Maori word for what happens when people commit money to an idea at the end of a meeting.
One of the reasons why this Open Space seemed so “adhesive” was that it came at the end of two days of training, and the folks who came through that experience together ended up co-hosting the invitation for the Open Space – by directly inviting two or three other community members to show up on Saturday – and they took responsibility for co-hosting the conversations and the action in the Open Space. We came up with these two concrete projects without even doing any action planning.
As usual I learned much about community and Open Space in this process. The most important thing for me was noticing what happens when a community enters Open Space with some preparation. In the past I have facilitated these kinds of events in a way that was completely self-contained within the Open Space. It has long occurred to me that simply doing that is not leveraging all the potential for leadership and change that is present in a community. I have been thinking for a while about how to combine training and capacity building with Open Space events to maximize this high potential.
On this score, Michael Herman, Julie Smith, Judi Richardson and I developed an approach in 2002 in Alaska that addressed this by holding an Open Space event and then following up immediately with two days of Open Space training to further explore applications of the process and to develop ideas that were started in the Open Space. In Alaska in 2002 we had great success with this approach and Open Space became used fairly widely within the school system, and in some quite surprising places. The advantage of this approach is that the community gets to experience Open Space first, develop ideas and then refine them further.
This alternate approach is based on the work that I am doing with The Art of Hosting community. The Art of Hosting is a training event that covers many aspects of leadership, process design and methodologies and is built around the core of Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe, Circle practice and Open Space. In wanting to give participants a more realistic experience of Open Space, we have been adding more and more time in the Art of Hosting to the Open Space events, and typically putting them at the end of the three or four days of training. The advantage of this approach is that it begins by building a broader sense of leadership, design and process and then uses Open Space to create the kinds of projects that flow from the learning work. In the context of community-based leadership development, this approach works beautifully, to give people a variety of tools, host conversations that are at times theoretical and at times deeply experiential and to sew it all together with a concrete experience of Open Space which actually gets so-hosted by the community members themselves.
I hope to get back up to the Nuxalk Nation in the not too distant future, to check in on where they are at and contribute where I can. You can contribute too if you like, by donating money to the community house fund, the project which started entirely in Open Space. If you could even spare $10 that would be fantastic, and to have it come from far flung parts of the globe would be an inspiration for the community members working hard to improve the lives of their children and families.