Robert Paterson is doing some interesting work these days: KETC, a client of mine, the Public TV Channel in St Louis, has been chosen by CPB to test how well a public TV station can be in Convening the wide community of its city to come together and help each other cope with a giant crisis. Here is a link to the background.I am writing today to offer up an early report. This week we held the first on air/web town hall meeting. For the first time St Louisans could see that they were not alone. The room was full …
As Marc’s conversation has unfolded at teh OSLIST, he dropped this lovely analogy about holding space into the mix today. Here’s what he does when people ask him why they pay him: Usually I then refer to my memories living in West Africa. We mostly had a night watchman in our garden (in many ways the reason was also to give another person a job). They were always there, sitting under a tree, brewing tea and they were great to have a chat with – they knew everything that happened in the neighbourhood! But they never actually did something. …
Back in April, I got to be a part of one of the best hosting experiences of my life when I joined Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Phil Cass and Tim Merry and a bunch of others in designing and hosting the 2008 Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference. The other day Erin Caricoffe, one of the staff members of the core team we worked with sent out this summary of where we are now: By all shared accounts, the 2008 Food and Society Gathering for Good Food was a success, meeting planning Team goals of providing a …
On the OSLIST, Marc Steinlin posed a few questions that I took a stab at answering: What means “holding space”? What is the function, if demonstrably one can do without? The $100,000 question! Several of us over the years have written things on it (I wrote a whole book trying to understand it) but it is an elusive process. And I think it changes with the scale and size of the group AND most importantly with the pre-existing depth of their own relationship. If I was to generalize I would say that holding space means helping the group …
I have never understood the idea that you can’t talk to terrorists. I don’t mean in the moment of vioence being committed. I mean the idea that negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan for example, are a non-starter for Canada. We have committed 6 years to the “war on terror” and the exit strategy seems to be “kill all the bad guys before going home.” This is an impossible condition for victory. At some point people have to sit down and talk about how they are going to leave each other alone, no? This interesting article …