Courtesy of my friend and colleague Bhav Patel, here is a link to some great facilitation resources collected and curated by the ICA:UK crew. ICA is the global network of practice that has brought the Technology of Participation approach into the world, and this is the first time I have come across a comprehensive collection of tools that supports that approach.
I have added that link to my own eclectic collection of quality facilitation resources. That has long been the most popular page on this site!
It’s Giving Tuesday and if you are in Canada and looking for places to donate money, I encourage you to head over to a new website launched and hosted by The Circle on Philanthropy which connects Indigenous communities and funders, foundations and donors.
The new website is called The Feast House and it is a place where you can donate directly, abundantly and without restriction to Indigenous-led organizations and projects across the country. It also contains links to articles, podcasts and videos to hep you learn more about giving and philanthropy in an Indigenous context
Donating money to Indigenous-led work is the bare minimum next move in what The Circle calls “Active Reciprocity.” What has been known as “reconciliation”in Canada should be a set of practices that develop relationship, return resources to Indigenous community and enable Indigenous-led organizations, projects and Nations themselves to lead the work.
For many years now, I have given locally to organizations and Nations in whos territory I am working. Whenever I am paid to run a meeting and the responsibility to acknowledge Indigenous territories falls to me, I donate to a local cause that requires unrestricted funds to do it’s work. This means that I have to research and make a connection with local people and local change efforts and so that becomes a beautiful part of this responsibility.
The Feast House is a great resource to help you do this too. So as you ponder how to spend your Giving Tuesday and how to put active reciprocity in your personal commitment to reconciliation, spend some time there today.
Christine Sinclair, photo by Ray Terrill, CC AT-SA 2.0
I have been loving watching Canada back in the men’s World Cup for the first time since 1986. And while this has been going on on social media and in the broadcasts, a number of people have been insisting that we remember that this is the Men’s World Cup and that Canada has been long known as a dominant force in international soccer on the women’s side. There are two FIFA run World Cups for senior teams. And it’s mind boggling how invisible our achievements on the global stage have been because of the neglect of women’s soccer in Canada.
I’m a bit salty about this, because our women’s team has been AMAZING. Here are some interesting facts.
- The Canadian National Women’s team is often referred to on social media as the “CanXNT” because we have a non-binary trans player, Quinn, who became the first trans athlete to win a gold medal last year when we won the Olympics.
- The top scorer in world soccer of any gender is Christine Sinclair who has scored 190 goals in 310 performances for Canada. She eclipsed American Abby Wambach last year and has played and scored in five World Cups one of only three players ever to do that (the others being Marta and Ronaldo). Next year, she will likely play in, and hopefully score in, her sixth.
- International women’s soccer in North and Central American and the Caribbean (the CONCACAF Confederation) is generally played in tournament settings, often all in one place,and hardly ever in Canada. THis is unlike men’s soccer where qualifying and Nations League games are played home and away. So despite appearing 310 times for Canada since 2000, Sinclair has only ever appeared in 13 competitive games on Canadian soil for Canada and the last time was seven and half years ago at the 2015 World Cup. The greatest international soccer goalscorer of all time has not played a competitive match in her own country since 2015. Just friendlies.
- The USA has played 63 competitive matches at home during that same time.
- And that isn’t just international matches too. Sinclair currently plays for the Portland Thorns and hasn’t played for a Canadian club team since she left the Vancouver Whitecaps in 2008.
- And even if she wanted too, she couldn’t play a competitive club match in Canada because Canada does not have a domestic women’s soccer league. Of all the countries appearing in the 2023 women’s World Cup, Canada will be the only one without a national women’s league, and this is despite the fact that Canada hosted the 2015 Women’s World Cup, an event which usually results in the establishment of professional infrastructure. We have had seven years of not much happening. Well, we did finally start a men’s professional league in Canada, the Canadian Premier League. Yes our domestic men’s soccer league was only started in 2019, despite some failed attempts earlier in the century.
- The highest level of women’s soccer is currently one of three regional semi-professional summer leagues in Ontario, Quebec and BC federated in League 1 Canada. League 1 BC features nine teams including TSS Rovers, the supporter-owned club I have written about before. We go into the World Cup behind in our development to Zambia, Vietnam, Nigeria, Morocco, and every other European, Asian, South and Central American country who has qualified.
- I THINK we will be the only team at the 2023 World Cup that has no players playing domestically for their country. All of our national team players play professionally abroad, in the USA and Europe.
People are excited to start talking about Canada as a finally arriving as a soccer country, and while lots has happened to get us to this point, we cannot make that claim. Not while we have the greatest goal scoring in international history only playing a handful of friendly matches at home. We will be the last country in the world at the 2023 World Cup to be without a league.
This largely falls at the feet of the Canadian Soccer Association, but I’m not going to list all the ways that the CSA has screwed this up. Suffice to say that the best accomplishments of a generation of Canadian global sport personalities have been hidden, squandered, and wasted. We have built no legacy and every year, even as we propo up the illusion with an appearance in a World Cup here or there, with a big name signing to a European juggernaut here or there, we fall behind the rest of the world because we coasted on the talents of a century-level player whose achievements were lauded, but whose appeals for a legacy fell upon deaf ears.
My involvement with TSS Rovers is a small way that I can be a part of investing in the sustainability of long term development of soccer talent in Canada. As the saying goes, the best time to have done this was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. So let’s enjoy the Morocco game on Thursday and look forward to the Women’s World Cup in July and maybe, just maybe, we’ll get around to taking the “We’re a Soccer Country!” idea seriously.
It feels like a day of transitions. The weather is clear today, and a strong westerly pummeled Vancouver overnight. It is sunny now, but the cold air and sea level snow that is a hallmark of an El Niña winter is upon us for later in the week. So time to chop some more wood and harvest the last of my salad greens from the garden.
Canada’s men’s national soccer team lost to Croatia this morning our Alphonso Davies scored the first goal for Canada’s men’s team in world cup history and it was a beauty. The above photo is from his last game as a Vancouver Whitecap in 2018 before he headed to Bayern Munich where he has since set the world on fire. We have one game remaining and then this team will transition into the next cycle as we get ready to host the 2026 men’s World Cup without the likes of Atiba Hutchinson and Milan Borjan and some of those veterans that carried us for so long as we languished in obscurity. Today’s loss was tough, but we need this learning and tempering in the cauldron of global competition if we are to stay at this level. So one more game against Morocco and then after this tournament is over, attention transitions away to follow the women’s team who will be playing in the 2023 World Cup. I am keen to see how we do as the only major women’s soccer power in the world without a domestic professional league.
And it is the beginning of Advent today, a season I very much appreciate. The waiting for something to materialize, for the light to return…in all its physical and spiritual manifestations, this is a powerful season of transition into deep darkness and then out again. As if to embody it, Friday I went for a cliff top hike along the south shore of our Island, in a place known as Nicháych Nexwlélexwm, which is the very edge of the world in so many ways. I was looking for the humpback whales that have been hanging out there and after an hour of watching and waiting finally there were three, breaching and splashing and diving and feeding. The Sound is full of anchovies and herring at the moment and there is lots to eat. Even this morning, watching from the ferry as sea lions and gulls filled their bellies.
In the Art of Hosting world we have a few shared core teachings that show up in nearly all the learning workshops that happen. At some point we talk about complexity – we usually explore the Chaordic Path as a simple introduction into complexity – and we always touch on the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting.
Back in 2014 I was doing a project with the United Church of Canada looking at the different levels of their structure in British Columbia and imagining what they could also be. If there is one thing that Churches have consistently done from the beginning it is that they adopt new forms. At the moment the United Church, and many other mainline progressive Christian denominations, are going through a massive shift, probably the biggest one since the Reformation. And it’s affecting everything.
So as I was doing this consulting work I started meeting communities of people who were asking how could they live through these transitions. Not survive them necessarily, but go with the transformation that was happening. As a part of the work I was doing I started offering talks and workshops based in the Art of Hosting, but wrapped in the theology of the United Church, becasue it turns out that having a way to understand complexity and to host life community is both necessary in struggling churches AND is pretty much the basis of Christian practice.
Now for those who don’t know, the United Church of Canada is a progressive, liberal Protestant denomination committed to radical inclusion and social justice. I was raised in that Church and at one point had my heart set on becoming a minister in that Church. My own spiritual practice is grounded in contemplative Christianity and I am an active member of the Bowen Island United Church where I help lead worship and preach one Sunday a month so we can give our paid minister a break.
That is just context to help you understand the theology behind this talk.
This talk was a keynote for the Northern Presbytery of British Columbia annual meeting from 2014. That year the churches of northern BC were gathering in Prince George to be together and practice being a bigger community. They invited me to come and speak on the work I was doing around community building and I chose to share the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice and I relished the chance to share these ideas using stories and teachings from scripture.
So if you work with Churches or Christian religious communities and you are interested in the way the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice basically help us use the teachings of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel in practice to build community, click here and have a listen.
1 2