Hard on the heels of Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley’s new book Walk Out Walk On comes a commissioned single from my mates Tim Merry and Marc Durkee by the same name. Tim and Marc have beenmaking poems and music for the past five years or so about the work we all do in the world. THis is a great sounding track, and covers what it is we do in a beautiful and inspiring way.
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Just off a call where we were discussing what it takes to shift paradigms in indigenous social development. We noted that we hear a lot from people that they are busy and challenged and they need clear paths forward otherwise they are wasting their time.
I have a response to that.
We don’t know what we are doing. Everything we have been doing so far has resulted in what we have now. The work of social change – paradigm shifting social innovation – is not easy, clear or efficient. If you are up for it you will confront some of the the following, all of the time:
- Confusion about what we are doing.
- A temptation to blame others for where we are at.
- Conflict with people that tell you you are wasting their time.
- A feeling of being lost, overwhelmed or hopeless.
- Fear that if you try something and it fails, you will be fired, excluded or removed.
- Demands for accountability and reprimands if things don’t work out.
- Worry that you are wasting your time and that things are not going according to plan.
- A reluctance to pour yourself into something in case it fails.
- A reticence to look at behaviours that are holding you back.
Social change is not easy. Asking for it to be made easy is not fair. Leadership in this field needs to be able to host all of these emotional states, and to help people hold each other through very trying times. It is about resilience, the kind that is needed both when things fall apart AND when things take too long to come back together.
Everyone needs to be a leader here, everyone needs to recognize these states in themselves and hold others in compassion when they see them arising in others. Working with the emergent unknown requires pacing, a big heart, and a stout challenge. To create the experiments that help us forward we need to be gentle with judgment, but fiercely committed to harvesting and learning. We need to cultivate nuance, discernment, advocacy and inquiry rather than jumping to conclusions and demanding rational analytical responses to every situation.
You up for that?
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As a traditional musician schooled primarily in the Celtic tradition, I am fond of traditional themes and devices for communicating messages. On our home island right now there is a sometimes fierce debate occurring about the future of the Crown lands, that involves the possibility of creating a national park. Today I was thinking about the complexities of the debate, and how it has seemed to me that those leading the opposition to the park are speaking on the one hand out of a concern for protecting something dear about our Island, but it has felt a little off to me. Like a father who won’t let his daughter grow up. That, it turns out is a a very old story, and so I made a little song today about our place, telling a little story that captures I think how I feel about the park, and the partnerships that we would enter into to make it possible.
the short answer is that, given everything, the option of establishing a national park on Bowen excites me. While I have been carefully weighing the pros and cons, and while I could happily live with either option, I am increasingly finding many of the articulated reasons for voting no to such a future to be riddled with pessimism, fear and clingy attachment. For me, a park offers Bowen a chance to be creative, interesting, beautiful and innovative in the way we move forward in the future. And so, here is the song:
Come gather round you islanders, a story I will tell
About a gorgeous maiden within whose midst we dwell
Whose beauty and whose presence was coveted as well
By her negative and ever doting father.
“I raised you from a baby,” he was wont to say.
“I saved you when an evil man came to steal you away,
I preserved the beauty that is yours for you to wear today
And I’d do the same again in an instant.”
Now the maiden had her suitors, who came from far and near
And every one her father met left her home with fear.
They sought her hand in marriage but left her place in tears
And her father only ever issued no.
One day as she sat watching the latest suitor leave.
Her heart began to fail and her breath began to heave
She felt herself imprisoned and she began to grieve
For the fading of the promise of her beauty.
She went to search the country for a partner for her life
A stable man who loved her, and who would take her for his wife
Who would stay beside her through the victories and strife.
And she found him and she brought him back to father.
With deep suspicion in his heart he looked him up and down
He accused him of an evil plot to usurp his crown
He met the maiden’s one true love with a stony frown
And he issued forth a stern and solid no.
Now the maiden didn’t stand for this and she looked him in the eye.
Said she “it’s time you stood aside and hold your strident cries
This suitor will be with me long after you have died.
And I know I’ll finally come to life beside him.”
Her father had no answer for this surprising turn
He showed so little interest in what she’d come to learn
His anger boiled over and he became more stern
And demand that she prove to him she loved him.
She sat down by her father and took him by the hand
She broke it to him gently so he would understand
His overbearing attitude and selfish reprimands
No longer had a claim upon her choices
For if the maiden were to stay within her father’s range
Her future would be grim indeed for as the world changed
She would stay forever in her father’s gilded cage
And her life would wither down to nothing.
Islanders you’ve strongly heard the tales others tell
You’ve seen the paranoia of the coming living hell
But surely you must know that a maiden can live well
If her partner helps her build a life of beauty.
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Last week I was in a number of conversations about the role of governments and their relationships to citizens. I heard a common metaphor in these conversations, one which sounded familiar to me from my days working in the federal public service: people were speaking of citizens as customers.
In their desire to provide good services and meet community needs, governments often consider citizens as customers. Big consulting firms, perhaps re-purposing their commercial processes, sell this idea. Conservative commentators and those who import business ideas into the realm of public administration are enamoured by the simplicity of the metaphor. The problem is not only that it’s not true, but it’s also the wrong metaphor.
For starters, citizens are citizens and not customers. The art of governance is not the same as leadership in a business setting. Communities are not strategic entities with goals and mission statements – what is the the strategic objective of your neighbourhood? So much community planning confuses processes and measures aimed at organizational efficiency and applies them to community building. The purposes are different. The purpose of community is belonging, happiness, a sense of security, wellbeing, resiliance. Communities are not efficient, they are not a good use of resources, they do not exhibit directionality. People who live in communities rarely think of themselves living in a strategic entity, but they often think of applying strategic planning to other people’s communities.
Citizens are not customers. They are citizens. And as such they are entirely responsible for the community they create or choose not to create.
But if you do insist on using a metaphor from the commercial world, then try changing the conversation from citizens as customers to citizens as owners. What if citizens were considered the owners of their community and their governments? What if it was their role to create plans and ideas about their future and to invite development, amenities and services to meet those needs? If you are an elected official or a community planner or a developer, how would things change if you approached citizens as the ownership group of the enterprise you are involved in? Citizens are owners in the fiscal sense, the property sense and also owners of their future. This is not about just owning land and paying taxes, this is about the commitment of time and energy you invest in a great community. That makes you an owner and gives you a responsibility for the future. It is up to governments NOT to rob communities of this responsibility, but help enable them to exercise it.
Peter Block’s six conversations and his reframing of community are immensely important in this respect. As are many of the tools you can find at the Orton Foundation’s website which looks at the role of heart and soul in community planning and sees citizens as owners. These are not “soft” tools or touchy-feely processes: rather they are powerful ways to engage with communities and citizens to create the kinds of resilience that sustains communities through good times and bad, and that makes development possible and relevant.
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In a recent email thread between Bob Stilger and a bunch of us friends and colleagues about how to support community rebuilding in Japan, Nancy Margulies shared this story of working in post-Katrina New Orleans with a series of World Cafes:
I hosted a number of World Cafés in New Orleans. The participants were a mix of people who had been directly impacted by the flood and those who had less or no material loss. We used the time for people to exchange their stories, share their feelings and listen to one another. This story-telling seemed to be so necessary that we didn’t attempt more initially. However, during the last round I asked the question, “What can community be for you at a time like this?” or a similar question. My co-hosts for these events were churches and local non-profits.
After a few months I offered “Cafés of Hope”. In those events we provided a sheet of paper that is placemat sized in front of each participant. I asked them to draw a symbol that represents hope for the future and then with lines radiating from the center write down key words or images to convey examples of what gives them hope. We did this in silence. Then people shared at their tables and as they listened if they heard something that they agreed was hopeful they added it to their “Map of Hope”.
As people moved to new tables they took their maps with them and build upon them as they heard more stories of hope. One variation I used was to ask each table to leave behind a few words or images that represent hope (by drawing/writing on another sheet of paper that was in the center of the table). This remained with one person who shared its meaning with the 3 new people who joined the conversation at that table.
At the end of the Cafe we harvested the ideas and each person was encouraged to take their map of hope home and share it with someone else, post it and add to it as more moments of hope came to mind.
After the initial work of providing immediate aid and safety for people, in disasters there is the need to rebuild community. It might not be an immediate need but it is an important one. Relationships are critical to rebuilding. A few years ago, speaking with a colleague that works in refugee camps in sub-Saharan Africa, I learned that most people, when they first arrive in a camp fleeing violence, malnutrition or worse, ask first about their families and friends. If they are able to connect to people quickly in the camp their chance at survival increases. Community resilience is built on those connection of the heart.
Nancy’s cafe design provides a brilliant and quick way to begin this process.