The sun is shining here on Bowen Island and I am relaxing on the porch enjoying my 41st birthday. Hope all is well where you are
Back on my home island from a short trip down to the Warm Springs reservation in central Oregon visting with the staff of radio station KWSO and the community members that rely on the station. This was the second site vist for a project I am doing with Native Public Media and Public Radio Capital looking at how to measure the impact of Native community radio stations in the US.
Really struck with the role the station plays in the community. Most radio stations, at least mainstream commercial and public radio concern themselves a lot with reach – are we getting enough listeners. With Native community radio that isn’t the problem at all – in Warm Springs it seems like they reach 100% of the people quickly either directly or through word of mouth. When there is an emergency or a school closure, everyone knows about it right away. The luxurious problem these stations have is how to use that influence to actually help the community maintain wellness and health.
In Warm Springs, the KWSO do this by focusing on health, education and culture. They produce PSAs and short documentary or news programs that focus on important issues like diabetes prevention or language retention or repeating stories that help ground ceremony and history. One of the key impacts the station is having is in the area of education. The bording school experience in the States, like the residential school experience in Canada, left many Native families with intergenerational trauma and a deep distrust of institutional learning. (I share that mistrust in general, and we homeschool our own kids, but for families where that isn’t possible a decent educational experience is important). In Warm Springs, the radio station and the school work together to create a climate of positivity around learning. This has paid off in a couple of ways. First there is a culture of positivity at the school that carries over into behaviours. There have been a total of four suspensions in five years at the school. Kids get along really well there, and the radio station continues to support this positive climate by focusing on learning, by playing good music during the school bus rides that helps the kids stay relaxed on the trip into town and by encouraging parents and kids to be active in the life of the school. There are very few formal parent-teacher interviews, but all of the teachers reported that they have a hard time getting the parents OUT of the school, so involved is the community.
On the diabetes front we learned that the Warm Springs community has a diabetes rate five points lower than that national Native average in the US. There is extensive public health information broadcast all day on KWSO from announcements about classes and workshops to recipes and nutriotion tips. I have a sneaking suspicion that if we look across the country, the reservations with community radio stations will have a lower diabetes average than others.
It’s a fun project, and now with two site visits under our belts, it’s time to write up the findings and see what loacl media really means.
Harvesting things from the RSS fields:
- Rob Paterson begins a series on The Natural Organization which uses a model of systemic change that is very similar to the one we are using with the Berkana Institute in Art of Hosting learning events.
- Geoff Brown‘s new blog design looks great, and his link to Kaki King is a bonus.
- Euan Semple finds a film that describes what it’s like sometimes to be a consultant.
- Time on how twitter can be used in conference settings.
Really interesting gig this week. Steven Wright and I are working together here in Vancouver at an international conference on restorative practices, the kinds of things that people do to bring relationship and community to the justice, education and community systems that more often than not drive us apart. There are some real heros here and leaders in the field including Howard Zehr, one of the founders of the restorative justice movement, and many leading practitioners from around the world.
The conference itself is a pretty standard set up with plenary discussions dotting a schedule of concurrent sessions. Steven and I are putting into practice an idea that a number of us have been playing with for a could of years, namely hosting a reflective conversation space in which the conference participants can help create the harvest and meaning making about the whole event.
We have a little conversation space set up in the foyer of the hotel, with table tops covered with flipchart paper on which we are writing questions for reflection. All of the insight is being harvested every day on two large murals that Steven is creating, based on a three panel image of a river emerging from the headwaters, travelling through fertile lands and emptying into the ocean. This metaphor is charting the learning journey of the 280 people here. Yesterday we were interested in the questions that were coming up, the droplets of water and insight that lie in the multiple headwaters of our mainstream of restorative practices. Our question for our space was “What are the questions you are hearing today?” From that question we harvest three main tributaries that flow into our mainstream: people are curious about conceptual questions (What are the values and deep practices of restorative community?), contextual questions (How do we do this in education/community/social services?) and individual practice questions (Where do I start? What are the essential capacities?). At the end of each day, Steven, Howard and I have been reporting what we have been hearing and seeing back to the whole.
Today our river is moving into the rich plains and fields of established practice and we are asking the question “What patterns give life to restorative practice?” Already people are engaged in questions of process, listening, showing up, facilitating and working that are suggesting a pattern language of restorative practice. That is our goal for today – to surface that learning for the community. Tomorrow we are looking at the ocean of possibility and the new ground that is created as we extend these practices into new places.
This is not a standard conference facilitation job for sure. Rather we are inviting people into a deeper reflective space, harvesting collective meaning and learning and giving a context for a shared learning journey. Lots to come.
Inspired by spending a bit of time with Keith Webb this past week at ALIA West, I’ve been looking deeply at the patterns of the natural world for teachings and illumination on questions that I’m working with. Wlakiong through a forest with Keith is a revelation, as Susan Szpakowski points out in this blog post from ALIA West. He helps you to see patterns that are instantly recognizable but which you may never have noticed before, even for someone who knows his way around the woods a little.
This week, along with Tennson Woolf and Esther Matte, I’m running an Art of Hosting with labour educators and union activists from the Canadian Labour Congress. Some of us were in a little conversation tonight about the relationship between invidual and collective, which is a topic that is of great interest to unions. There is special interest in what it means to be an individual leader working a whatever level WITHIN a union to help bring a union into an innovative space. Many of the people we work with feel this tension.
I thought of Keith today as we were talking about this topic and I spoke a little about what I know about the way the natural mixedwood plains hardwood forest of this part of the St’ Lawrence River valley reclaims a pasture, in a process known as ecological succession. The natural form of landscape here is mature hardwood forest, and that forest comes into being after a number of successive stages of reclamation by different species. First cedar tress move in, and it is not uncommon to see abandoned meadows and pastures with little stands of small cedars in them. A field with one cedar sapling in it is already on it’s way. After the cedars, nitrogen fixing species like poplars arrive and then later maples and oaks and ironwoods and so on.
The question I asked was, in the context of individual and collective, when does the FOREST arrive? Is it in the presence of one tree? Is it two? Is it more? What is the forest anyway, for it is not merely a collection of individual trees. It is a phenomenon itself, arising from many individuals, but possessing an emergent property. Undoubtedly, individuals have an importan role to play in this process, but when does the forest arrive?
Likewise I said in human history union is our natural way of being. The holy books that tell the creation stories that start with Adam and Eve mislead us into thinking that humans were ever alone. We have never as a species known lonliness – we have always been living in union with each other. When our structures lose life, it is individuals that reclaim our natural way of being within them. When, then, does union appear? Is it with the first relationship, or is it when the structure of the Union appears on the scene?
We’re playing in questions like these this week, all in service of the most powerful and compassionate work that unions do in this country – supporting the learning and survival of working families and communities and helping community to thrive in all times, not just good ones. Or bad ones.