Working with 8 programs in the state of Minnesota this week, all of whom are putting together projects in local communities that work on acute health issues by creating upstream solutions. This is the third residential retreat with the 8 propoenent groups. all of whom are engaged in a year long planning process through which they are learning participatory leadership practices and are getting soaked in the Art of Hosting.
There are two things going on here. First is the design of an actual project that will move “upstream” and tackle one or more social determinants of health. For example, a group working on indigenous health and nutrition issues is building an indigenous food network that aims to bring people into better relationship with food through growing and cooking while addressing the need for available healthy food. While there is a program aspect to this there is also a capacity building aspect to it too.
Alone, small projects that are are linked to social determinants of health don’t stand much chance of long term success, especially if the long term sustainability of the project is anchored to a three year implementation grant. But a key piece of the work we are doing is also teaching hosting practices. Our cohort last year began work on their projects around creating healthy communities but have since been using participatory methods to organize in the community. They have been tackling racism, systemic abuses in the education system and saying no to arbitrary policy decisions. One hundred people in the community are signed up for Art of Hosting training in the fall which will probably also result in 25 new projects – safefail probes if you like – activated to effect changes in the community.
I’m skeptical about any given project to make a difference, but projects that are led with the purpose of learning how to lead help to develop practices that launch and spread leadership throughout the community. To me this is “there” to get to from “here.”
Now if only evaluators would catch up.
I was up north on the weekend, working with a small community that has been driven apart by a large and contentious decision. It doesn’t matter what it was, or what either side wanted – the result is the same result that happens in many small communities: people who are friends and neighbours shouting and fighting with each other.
The team I was working with are trying to reinvent the way this community is engaged. We used a lovely redux of Peter Block’s work to help frame our conversation about design and implementation. A few things stood out for this group with respect to Peter’s work.
Changing the room changes the conversation. We talked a lot about the fact that changing engagement starts in this room and in this moment because this room IS the community. When we dove in about what was missing from the way the community engages it was clear that the ownership piece was the biggest one. As in many community meetings the way people traditionally engage is with passion that is directed outward. There is an expectation that someone else needs to change. We joked about the sentiment that says “I’ll heal only after every else has healed!” It was a joke but the laughter was nervous, because that statement cuts close to the bone. So we DID change the room and decided to hold a World Cafe. gathered around smaller tables, paper in the middle, markers available for everyone to write with…
So how do you begin a meeting with people who are invited to take up the ownership of the outcome? I am not a fan of giving people groundrules, because as a facilitator it puts me in the position of enforcer, and gives people an out for how the behave towards one another. So instead we considered the question of what it looks like when people are engaged. What stood out is how people “lean in” to the centre of the conversation. So the question became, how do we get people to lean in right away and take ownership of the centre?
The solution was simple but was later revealed to have tons of power. At the outset of the cafe as I was introducing the process I gave the following instructions:
“That paper in the middle is for all of you to use, as are the markers. We want you each to record thoughts and insights that other need to hear about. So before we begin I invite you to pick up a marker and write your name in front of you. <people write their names>. Now I want to invite you to answer this question: what is one thing you can do to make sure that this meeting is different? Write your answer beneath your name.”
People took a moment to write their names and their commitments. And they shared them with each other at the table. That is how we began.
The first round of conversation proceeded as usual, but I noticed something very powerful in the second round. When everyone got up and moved around they took a seat in someone else’s place, and often the first thing they did was to read the name and the commitment that was in front of them. Can you imagine coming across the name of someone who you have a disagreement with only to see that they have written “I won’t fight anymore” beneath their name? The core team is now going through all of the tablecloths and making a list of the commitments that people made. Taken on their own, they form a powerful declaration of willingness.
People reported that this was the best meeting the community had in a long time. And it had a lot to do with this tiny intervention of public ownership for the outcomes.
AFter a phenomenal trip across the country, featuring three back to back to back Art of Hosting workshops on water, I am taking it easy, relaxing for a couple of days in the Beaver Valley, beside Georgian Bay. Reconnecting here with family and friends, we’ve been watching crazy, crazy weather come through off the bay – hail and sleet and snow and wind, three foot waves crashing on the breakwater. Last night we lost power and four foot high snowdrifts appeared on the top of the valley sides. Down here at the valley bottom, it is just wet, but I have a long drive tomorrow across the top of the Oak Ridges moraine to get a morning flight home to Vancouver, and I’m giving myself lots of time to be surprised by what I encounter on the way.
So catching up on email, and on thinking about several issues including decision making processes, the character of local civic conversation, how to work with fear and division and deliberately diseased politics in our society and what role conversation plays in acute moments of small town/reserve/village negative community dynamics. Probably more to say about this later, but some more instant reflections are unfolding at my Bowen Island blog.
In the meantime, getting ready to go watch the Champions League semi-final match between Chelsea and Barcelona with a lovely Iraqi refugee family in the area. Even in small small towns, the world’s game connects diverse people!
On the plane to Minneapolis for 12 days of teaching, learning and co-creating with the Art of Hosting. While I’m there, I’ll be working with the Bush Foundation, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Foundation of Minnesota, and 100 people who will be coming to an Art of Hosting from all around the state. I’ll be deep in practice with my close friends and colleagues Jerry Nagel, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Toke Moeller and Ginny Belden-Charles among others. It’s a busy 12 days, with only 1 day off, and so I’m thinking a lot about what I’m doing.
And as I was wandering around the airport this morning, I came across the above mask, which sits in an alcove in the US Departures terminal at YVR. This is a transformation mask from the artist Stan Wamiss. If there was an active word to describe what is happening here it is “revealing.”
There is transformation that comes from outside, like a meteor strike or a tsunami. And there is transformation that comes from inside, like a seed sprouting, an egg hatching, or a butterfly emerging. The transformation comes from inside is revealed and in its revealing it has a powerful effect: it renders the transformed aware of the interior abundance of one’s self.
Transformation from outside can make us feel small and ineffective, unable to deal with what is coming or what has arrived. Indeed, this is so evident around us that it is almost too obvious to see. The products of colonization – whether in North America, Ireland, the middle east, Africa or elsewhere leave communities and people dispirited, dispossessed and disillusioned. In contrast, transformation that arises from within can have the opposite effect, leaving us in awe of the new levels of spirit and energy, ownership and mastery and vision and story that emerge. One of the reasons why “change management” fails is because a small group of people undergoes a transformative moment from their individual and collective interiors and they “roll it out” over everybody else with a – literally – missionary zeal. For the leaders, the mission is to give everyone the incredible experience of awe and wonder and creative energy. For the rest of us, we experience a meteor strike.
I once had a very good friend and teacher, Bob Wing, point this out to me. We were together in a small Open Space, and we were in different conversations. In my conversation a small group of us cracked a vexing problem by stumbling on a new map that seemed to make a great deal of sense in describing where we were. It was exciting and we were fired up. When we shared this map back with our colleagues, they listened politely to our exuberance and then Bob very calmly looked me in the eye and said “I like it. I like it a lot. But I don’t trust it, because I didn’t help create it.” Where we thought we had produced a solution, Bob reminded us that at best we had merely produced and invitation, and that our exuberance for our own experience of transformation had made that a very bad and incomplete invitation.
I think interior transformation is important, in fact I think it may be among the most important experiences that we can have as human beings. This is why such experiences are revered with masks and dances on the west coast of North America. It is what is fuelling the appetite for contemplative spiritual practices, for presence based leadership experiments, for all of the self-development and self-actualization process that goes on around us. And I think that it is important that we do not limit this experience to a chosen few.
Citizenship for example, is crying out for this kind of transformation. There is a tremendous poverty of beauty, intention, vision and soul in the public sphere right now. John O Donohue calls this “the evacuation of interiority.” There is a deficit of the kinds of qualities to public dialogue that are powered by listening, kindness, compassion and co-creation. The result is that we come to believe that it is a mean world out there and that if we don’t do things to others preemptively, they will do it to us. So we steel ourselves against vulnerability, wounding and hurt. Declare emotional intelligence “soft skills” and deride relationship building as “time wasting” or unpractical. So we end up in a cycle of terrible quality with a longing for something ineffable that seems further and further out of reach as we tie our actions to outcomes that can measured, funded and justified.
In Art of Hosting learning experiences I think we are trying to work against this cycle by, in a phrase, “serving wholeness.” This means working with the interior transformations that birth new stories and visions of possibility, as well as being skillful in dealing with the exterior transformations that we have no control over. We begin with provocative assumptions that somewhere within us, individually and collectively, is the resourcefulness we need to move from the stuck and unsatisfying places we are now in to places of possibility and resourcefulness. We might be wrong (and we need to get WAY better as a species in being wrong most of the time), but we serve the inkling that leads to individual and collective resilience. We are trying to teach and learn about a form of leadership and being together in organization and community that innovates with more diversity than we are comfortable with, to build relationships that can hold more confusion that we are comfortable with, so that we can develop solutions that will have effects that we can only imagine. I don’t know any other way to develop the capacity, person by person, to survive the external transformations that are upon us.
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of working with the tireless staffs of various Neighbourhood Houses in Vancouver. Most of these people are involved in the work of Welcoming Comunities Initiatives, working with refugees and migrants to Vancouver.
Yesterday we were in some learning about engagement design using the chaordic stepping stones and the collective story harvest tool, both developed by the Art of Hosting community of practice. In the collective story harvest, the group of about two dozen listened and witnessed the story of two prominent members of our community who left Guatemala in the early 1990s and came to Vancouver. Their story was profound and powerful, divided into two parts. In the first part they spoke about growing up in rural Guatemala, in the shadow of two beautiful volcanoes. Then, the civil war came on the heels of US subversion of Guatemalan democracy in 1954. Farms that were previously owned by indigenous farmers were given over to American corporations. Our protagonists left for the city to get educated and quickly became involved in social activism and revolutionary politics. One of the storytellers recounted many many tales of friends and colleagues being kidnapped and disappeared, tortured and killed before he finally made the decision to leave his country. After kicking around a little hea and his wife moved to Vancouver, intending to stay for only a year.
The second part of the story picks up in Vancouver. When this couple arrived the met up with a beautiful activist in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, Amalia Dorigoni. Amalia worked with the Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society, an organization that was at the forefront of Vancouver’s harm reduction practices in the 1990s. Our storytellers worked with her picking up condoms and needles from the neighbourhood, focusing especially on the area around Strathcona Elementary School. They later went on to found several initiatives in the Downtown Eastside, especially focusing on Latino men, who move the area as refugees and have a hard time establishing themselves.
There was much in the story that was powerful, but this image of two newly arrived refugees, one of whom was pregnant, picking up needles and used condoms so that children would not be exposed to the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS is just remarkable. I have no doubt that the scores of people who hold anti-immigration views have never done this work. It just filled me with gratitude that these two, motivated by their powerfully honed sense of social justice, undertook this volunteer work as one of their first contributions to Canadian society.
Later in the day, another man came to me to remind me of something. He had fled Argentina in the 1980s as a refugee, fleeing many of the same experiences that our storytellers had. He works now as a community organizer and he reminded me that he is getting paid now to do work that in Argentina he would be killed for. We can complain about government, he said, but the fact is that they fund this work rather than sending out death squads to kill the people doing it. So yes, gratitude for that also.
And also, this current federal government is taking a dim view of refugees and immigrants. This is the most oppressive and anti-immigrant government we have had in Canada in recent memory. A new legislative initiative is especially hard on refugee claimants who have not yet been granted Canadian citizenship. Opponents fear that refugees could be returned to their countries of origin if the political conditions change or if Canada reaches a trade agreement or other alliance with the country. This is a problem because many refugees who come here have a hard time feeling welcomed to Canada. As a result, many of them are reluctant to obtain Canadian citizenship, opting instead to remain landed immigrants or permanent residents, as indeed do many capitalist immigrants to Canada.
However in the case of refugees, if the political situation in their country changes, and the country becomes democratic for example, and they are able to go back and visit their families, the fear is that they may be denied entry back to Canada. Obviously if the country of origin is safe to return to, then you are no longer a refugee, right?
Wrong. When refugees arrive in Canada, they are required to give testimony about what danger they are in. Naming people or institutions can mean that for the rest of your life you are in danger from those you have named. If you come to Canada because you are gay, a simple political change in your home country does not mean it is safe for you to be out there, even if you manage to travel back to visit your family. This must not be allowed to happen. Simple justice declares it so.
It is important that refugees who arrive in Canada are welcomed and that we do everything we can, through our governments and in our communities to embrace what people bring. As a friend of mine – an immigrant himself – has written on the issue of the transformative capacity of the stranger: “What if the alien holds the key to unlocking our own alienation?” That is a worthy question for a world in which we are increasingly intermingled with one another.