“If you really knew how beautiful you are, you would fall at your own feet” – Byron Katie
Working with some organizations, people and communities these days that are going through hard times. Not everyone is dealing with it very well. There is sniping and infighting and distrust and alarm. The narcissism of small difference.
But as a consultant that comes and goes with these organizations, I am continually struck by the latent resourcefulness and beauty that lies within the people and the groups I work with. Sometimes I think that my job is just to help groups see themselves, see their raw beauty, their power and potential in a way that is useful.
The quote above is on my partner’s website. I used it today with a client who holds the deep architecture of her organization, and who does her work in an atmosphere that doesn’t often see what it offers. It’s a gift to be seen, and a gift to have the perspective to see.
If you are a part of an #Occupy group and are focusing on the facilitation teams, I’d like to offer you some resources from the Art of Hosting community.
On my site are scads of Facilitation Resources for use. All of these are offered free of charge of course. In terms of some of the challenges that #Occupy camps are facing, consensus decision making is one of the big ones. I am amazed at the capacity people are showing in undertaking consensus at the General Assemblies. But there will always be frustrations with these processes. My friend Tree Bressen offers a comprehensive set of consensus decision making resources on her pages and that is well worth a look.
In terms of deeper hosting practice Here is a link to a document i wrote a number of years ago called “Hosting in a Hurry” it can be a useful printout to hand to Occupy Groups to help them think about process. It was written for an indigenous North American audience which explains a few of the context specific stuff. But the essence of it is that it conveys art of hosting practice in a simple and succinct way. It can be used to compliment facilitation or as a discussion document among facilitators at #Occupy events who are learning as they go.
There is some amazing facilitation happening in the #Occupy world and people are learning on the fly. I hope these resources can be useful.
Lawrence Lessig has noticed a very important practice that is emerging from the #occupy movement. It is the principle and the practice of non-contradiction:
In this movement, we need a similar strategy. Of course a commitment to non-violence. But also a commitment to non-contradiction: We need to build and define this movement not by contradicting the loudest and clearest anger on the Right, but instead, by finding the common ground in our demands for reform.
This is a a very useful contribution to the tools that are emerging from the #occupy movement. It is edgy because in traditional social activism you are defined by what you stand against, and opposing things is the means to ending them.
But one of the implications of “we are the 99%” is that no one is more 99% than anyone else. That is a big tent, and it is powerful as long as we can practice true diversity within it. This is a massive challenge. The 99% contains every kind of person, friend and ally and loathsome enemy. That is the nature of a huge complex human community. So practicing non-contradiction is like practicing non-violence in that it requires us to be in relationship with those we do not like.
Even though I practice non violence as much as I can I bet there is a limit to that. My job as a peaceful human being is to stretch myself beyond my own limits in practicing peace. Sometimes non-violence gets tagged as “compliance” but it isn’t that really. It is a commitment to a new world and a new way of being.
It is similar with non-contradiction. There are things in the world that probably need contradicting, and I am sure there are limits to this principle in my own practice and capabilities. But for this movement, and for this new world, we need conversational space and space is opened by engagement and being non-contradictory. If you believe that we truly interdependent, then we have to work to see that one person’s racism is my problem too. That I participate in the conditions that perpetuate those things that I would otherwise stand in contradiction to.
Let’s track this modality. Election seasons, protests and events can all benefit from this practice. It is a high calling to call yourself a practitioner of non-contradiction, but is it essential to a world of interconnection, interdependence and mutual benefit.
Location:Cambie St,Vancouver,Canada
Refugees in U.S. Take Up Farming, as they always have:
At the Saturday farmer’s market in City Heights, a major portal for refugees, Khadija Musame, a (Bantu) Somali, arranges her freshly picked pumpkin leaves and lablab beans amid a United Nations of produce, including water spinach grown by a Cambodian refugee and amaranth, a grain harvested by Sarah Salie, who fled rebels in Liberia. Eaten with a touch of lemon by Africans, and coveted by Southeast Asians for soups, this crop is always a sell-out
Among the regular customers at the New Roots farm stand are Congolese women in flowing dresses, Somali Muslims in headscarves, Latino men wearing broad-brimmed hats and Burundian mothers in brightly patterned textiles who walk home balancing boxes of produce on their heads.
New Roots, with 85 growers from 12 countries, is one of more than 50 community farms dedicated to refugee agriculture, an entrepreneurial movement spreading across the country. American agriculture has historically been forged by newcomers, like the Scandinavians who helped settle the Great Plains; today’s growers are more likely to be rural subsistence farmers from Africa and Asia, resettled in and around cities from New York, Burlington, Vt., and Lowell, Mass., to Minneapolis, Phoenix and San Diego.
In my work these days with migrants and refugees in the United States, it’s stories like this that are a treasure trove of what is really happening on the ground for refugee communities to forge ties of beloning in a culture that is chilly at best and occasionally hostile at worst. Just look at some of the comments attached to this article to get a sense of the uphill battle it is in the US for refugees to get respect, even for a war refugee who is developing opportunities and contributing to the local economy.