Here comes community!
I’m on a flight home to Vancouver from Ontario. It has been a mix of family and business on this trip. This past weekend I joined my colleagues Jennifer Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle for our third Reimagining Education Art of Hosting. Thirty-one people in total gathered at the Queens University Biological Station in Elgin Ontario on the most beautiful fall weekend. The leaves were bright yellow and a little red – more muted this year from drought than usual, but still beautiful. The water and air was warm enough for swimming and canoeing. And the skies offered us moments of crystal clarity during the night. The land was – as it always is – the first and final host.
While we were teaching the chaordic stepping stones yesterday, a very powerful conversation broke open in the group about invitation. In my practice the whole point of using the chaordic stepping stones is to slow down the conversation about process design to really name the shared urges necessity and purpose of a meeting. It is from this place that a quality invitation arises. And when a person is deeply and sincerely invited to a meeting, it makes all the difference for how they show up.
The conversation yesterday contained a thread of grief. Participants were sharing how painful it is to have to go through meeting after meeting in their day without any genuine invitation. Many meetings aren’t even necessary and, like weekly staff meetings sometimes, just occupy a regular hour every week on the calendar help with minimal intention. Because so many of these gatherings are on line now it is becoming common practice for participants to divide their attention between what is “mandatory” and what is more interesting or more pressing. My heart breaks when a participant in a meeting says hello and then turns of their camera, mutes their audio and never appears again. What a waste of their time.
This bleeds into community life too, and I was especially moved by one of our participants, an Elder who cares very deeply about her community, who witnesses public meetings, community gatherings and politics as being hurtful, disenfranchising and a place where people come and work out their own pain and trauma often in laterally violent ways. There is no healing, no restoration, no creativity, no sense of shared purpose and no call for people to offer something. The meetings are corrosive and toxic. We talked about the kinds of room set ups in meetings like that – rows of chairs, no one looking at one another, exchanges only between “the people at the front” and “the audience” as if citizens were actually a mix of paying customers and school children.
When this Elder was speaking, she was expressing the grief of this state of affairs. It occurred to me that this grief is everywhere. Very few of us in any public or community setting feel invited to community work. We might go along to a public information session. Or we might go along to a Council meeting and make a presentation. We might take part in a shouting match over a controversial decision or course of action. But I think many people are mourning the fact that we are never invited into active, creative community with one another. Some don’t even believe that is possible. “Oh a community meeting,” they will often say, folding their arms. “That’ll be…interesting.”
(As an aside, “that’ll be…interesting” is one of the most Canadian ways I know of saying “that whole thing is going to be a complete disaster.”)
Communities are full of talent and resources. How many times have you been asked to serve your community with what you know or what you do? Where are the opportunities for people to participate in community work that also builds community? At the very least, can we do this work together without poison relationships and eroding the promise of democratic and community participation.
The erosion of democracies, the professionalization of decision making and the capture of legislative bodies by huge commercial interests has been going on for my whole life. But when I look around my own home community – which has seen its fair share of divisive conflicts – I can see initiatives that were citizen-led that built things that we need. We now have a health centre on our island, a credit union, a recycling depot and second hand store, and playing fields for fast pitch, soccer and ultimate. We have preserved forest and coastline with the Nature Conservancy. We have institutions like the Arts Council and the Fabrc Arts Guild and the Nature Club and community choirs and the Legion and the Food Bank that all bring us closer together and weave our connection to one another and the place.
In small communities the chance for that kind of thing is higher because we know each other a little better and we can put our finger on the folks that can contribute, and ask them to show up. And we can do it in a way that invites the community to come along and be a part of something. Not every small community is this lucky. Some are in terrible moments of division and conflict that are violent, harmful and probably irreconcilable.
Peace and reconciliation at any scale is not possible without people being genuinely invited into it. The dehumanization of our world in conflict, at work, and in governance leaves us mourning for something that we may not ever have experienced: a genuine invitation to form and join a field of belonging that gives our lives meaning and connection.
I think this is why dialogic work is so important. Anywhere people gather is a chance to correct that tyranny of dehumanization that sees persons as cogs in the machine, to be counted, corralled, manipulated, avoided, lied to or disposed of. As Christina Baldwin has said, you treat a person differently once you know their story. You invite them, you get curious with them, you wonder what they have to offer and you might even make something together.
Our TSS Rovers League 1 BC men’s team, boys academy and supporters celebrating together this summer, photo courtesy of Tom Ewasiuk at AFTN Canada.
When I’m back in Ontario, as I am now, I spend a lot of time with my family watching sports. We’re all Toronto Maple Leafs fans, so when the hockey is on, we don our Leafs jerseys and watch together. At the moment this part of the world is also consumed by the deep playoff run of the Toronto Blue Jays, who have, against the odds, advanced to the American League Championship Series of Major League Baseball. I don’t follow baseball, but it’s impossible not to be caught up in the energy of the moment.
Both the Leafs and the Jays had bad weekends. The Leafs lost two games to Detroit back to back, with dire performances in which their offence sputtered. A leafs legend, Mitch Marner was traded away in the off season and his replacement on the top line last night is an enthusiastic young talent called Easton Cowan. He has big shoes to fill and it’s fun watching young players begin their journey. Cowan was probably the pick of litter last night as nothing else seemed to get going. Both games against Detroit had the feeling of pre-season warm ups. The hunger and energy and resilience isn’t there yet.
Meanwhile, across the tracks at SkyDome, the Jays dropped game two of their playoff series to Seattle. They too seemed to be truly sapped of enthusiasm and energy. Despite an early flurry of runs, the Jays had some poor pitching and defensive errors that Seattle pounced upon and they were sluggish with the bats. They are under the cosh now as they head to Seattle for games 3 and 4, and the mood in this city is far from ebullient.
In soccer news, while the Canadian Men’s team struggled against Australia and gets ready for Colombia tonight, there are machinations afoot at the governance level of the sport. I can hardly stand to engage in the arcane minutiae of how soccer is run in Canada – and I have a far from complete picture – but at the moment there is a concerning trend happening. In Canada, the Canadian Soccer Association has a deal with a company called Canadian Soccer Business. The deal gives all of Canada’s marketing and broadcast rights to CSB for a flat rate. CSB can then sell these rights and make a profit which it largely channels into the Canadian Premier League, the division 1 professional league for men’s soccer in Canada. The owners of the CPL teams, are also the directors of CSB.
Back when the deal was signed, it was a practical solution for Canada Soccer. The Association was having a terrible time getting funding for the national teams and getting them covered, marketed and recognized. Since then however, CSB has moved towards an ownership stake in the game. Last year they bought the second division semi-pro leagues which are organized under League 1 Canada. In BC, our league was set up by BC Soccer initially to provide a pathway to professional opportunities for BC based players, a vision we champion at TSS Rovers, the only community-owned team in the League 1 structure. It still exists for that purpose, but it is now owned by a marketing company who profits from the selling sponsorship rights to our league and so far hasn’t returned much into our level to assure it’s sustainability.
And lost in the mix of all of this is the women’s professional game, which has finally hit the ground running with the launch of the Northern Super League. The NSL is the brainchild of Diana Matheson and other former national team players who had to do it on their own, because Canada Soccer has made no effort to create a professional women’s league despite hoisting the women’s World Cup in 2015. Meanwhile CSB has profited from selling the images and broadcast rights of the national women’s team who were defending Olympic Champions and have maintained a top 10 global ranking for years. CSB has not at all invested in the NSL, nor have they been invited to. Their involvement in Canadian Soccer has largely NOT enabled the professional environment for women, and has been highly problematic for the national team, which is why Matheson and her partners started their initiative own their own.
This is a direct example of the forty five year project of privatization and commercialization of community resources that was started in the Western world in the 1980s and has spread around the world. This month Canada Soccer Business released a vision for soccer in Canada and it is deeply at odds with the idea of grassroots based, publicly-owned clubs and leagues who are building the game in the broader public interest. Instead it fits the privatization agenda to a T, and promises results based on growth. It is a financialization vision for soccer in Canada that primarily and ultimately benefits the Canadian Premier League. It doesn’t address the women’s professional game at all, because CSB has no involvement in that game. It is by definition not a unifying vision.
It is also profoundly at odds with the vision that is championed by the federal government’s Future of Sport in Canada Commission who released their preliminary report back in the summer. Their vision is very different and seeks to develop elite athletes in the context of a safe, vibrant and participatory national sport strategy that puts the welfare of the athletes first and roots sport in the community and national interest.
My buddy Will Cromack shared his thoughts on these competing visions today and I deeply appreciate his perspective and connection to the issues and his thoughtful, slow deliberation on what is laying before us and the possible pathways to the future.
Developing sport in Canada is a long slow road, because developing athletes is a long slow road. Our culture is changing in many different ways, and sometimes in directions that run counter to each other. We fetishize the professional at the expense of community. We create structures and enclaves which create opaque places where people and communities can be hurt. We demand results, but wring our hands over funding and investment. We laud accessibility but demand elitism. We eschew public involvement but fear the market’s rapacious rush into the vacuum. And at the end of the day, we often take a narrow self-centred view towards sport, making sure our kid or our team or our agenda is the one that succeeds with no awareness of the broader ecosystem for our sports, or the bigger role of sport in general.
As Will writes, a bigger conversation is afoot, as it has been for many years. We need to feel our way through all of this, while also taking bold steps to set the container for sport development on the right footing. And the context is changing all around us.
For as long as I have been working in the non-profit and government worlds, since 1991, I have been confronted with the idea that somehow we always must do more with less. When I began work at the National Association of Friendship Centres in 1992, my first real job after leaving university, the organization was coming to the end of a five-year cycle of funding for urban Indigenous programs and core capacity that had grown steadily since 1972. Over twenty years, the federal government had increased funding in the Friendship Centres in Canada’s towns and cities, and the movement had grown to over 100 communities with between three and five core funded positions in each centre, offering a myriad of services to urban Indigenous populations from Halifax to Port Alberni and Red Lake to Inuvik.
In 1993, the Liberals were elected to power after ten years of Progressive Conservative government, and they committed to tackling the federal deficit. The did this by actually continuing a series of budget reductions that the last Tory finance Minister Ray Hnatyshyn had proposed in his election budget. Paul Martin got credit for it, but it was a PC plan.
The upshot of these across-the-board spending reductions was that we “had to do more with less,” or “become more efficient” or “get creative” or “innovate” or “tighten belts and find redundancies.” With very, very, few exceptions almost every organization I have worked with since then has had to face the same problem. The neo-liberal economic revolution of Regan and Thatcher and Mulroney delivered massive amounts of money to the richest people in the world and starved government of revenues and marginalized communities of funding and material support, even as they picked up the work of addressing the increasing social problems externalized by the private sector.
We went through periods of funding freezes, cuts, occasional bumps (“investment” it is sometimes called) but there has in general been a growing trend of increasing social problems and complexity, decreasing government support and increasing wealth inequality in Canada leading to massively underfunded non-profits. We are now seeing core government services shredded too. When the word “austerity” is used it seems to signal that direct government services such as health and education and income security are in for a tough time.
Ideology drives all of this. For most of the past 45 years that ideology has been the market-based economic liberalism that has privatized and financialized everything. In the past 20 years it has included ideologies of the culture war that has tied government funding to strange ideas that are put out there to stoke outrage, fuel algorithms, divide citizens and achieve razor thin electoral margins. In places like Alberta a bewildering set of strange ideas about public health, energy independence and education has meant that the public purse is weaponized against people who are trying to provide vaccines against fatal and preventable illnesses, or create sustainable and low-cost energy technologies, or build education systems that create welcoming and inclusive learning environments. These were things we used to fund, plan for and organize around.
In talking with a colleague today we were noticing how this moment of austerity is showing up in the work we do to support organizations and facilitate dialogue, and engagement, especially in this moment when we are confronted by nearly overwhelming confusion and complexity. It used to be that the conversations we were hosting suffered at times from a scarcity mindset, meaning that we weren’t aware of the actual richness that was around us. Participatory leadership and process opens up access to that richness.
Today we are suffering from an austerity mindset, which can be thought of as a realization that the richness we need has been taken away from us. It is harder and harder to find diverse groups of people and voices to work on issues of staggering complexity. People have had their time and material resources privatized, colonized, and taken from them.
We were noticing that coming out of the pandemic, people have welcomed the chance to be together in person again, but how we show up has changed. Every face-to-face meeting is high stakes and there is decreasing trust in opening up and letting go into a participatory process. While in the past it seemed easier to coach leaders and organizations to find solutions at the margins of their work with authentic and creative engagement with their people and communities, these days it seems like our work is to keep leaders from becoming autocratic. With so few hands willing and able to do the work of addressing huge systemic issues, most organizations and networks seem to have only a few key people who are close to the work. This creates a fear that if the leader doesn’t directly influence and shift everyone to their way of thinking, we won’t get the chance to do the work properly.
To be honest some of this worry is warranted. We know from the ways in which Cynefin advises us to act in crisis, that applying tight constraints is the best way to establish safety. But what you do with that safety once you have it is what’s at stake. These days it seems that many leaders are drifting towards consolidating that power by offering to sustain the work of maintaining safety at the expense of other ideas, diverse thinking, or even a challenge to their plans. We see this in national leadership. Trump is the obvious example, but it has been interesting to see Prime Minister Carney stumbling in the House of Commons as Pierre Poilievre looks his seat and provided the first testing challenges of Carney’s leadership. Carney has had it easy since he was elected.
There are lots of implications here for facilitating participatory work and supporting leaders in this time, and to me they come from our lessons in complexity and dialogic practice. Here’s a few, and maybe you can add to them:
The work of the world is teetering on the edge of chaos AND is deeply complex. So that means that yes, leaders and facilitators and Board chairs need to consolidate decision making and create safety. But it also means that this is EXACT time to open up leadership to people who have differing view points and perspectives and experiences. That diversity is what provides the sophisticated situational awareness needed to address the challenges we are in. Polarity management is coming back into my practice in a big way as we help groups to see the tensions they are working with and engage with them productively.
Avoid premature convergence. One of my favourite Dave Snowden slogans implores us to not choose the first good idea and go with it. Even if thing seems to be moving fast, committing too early to a course of action can send you on a path from which return is very tricky. Use scenario planning to keep a view on possibilities, and adjust plans as you go. COVID killed the five-year plan, but you can still set longer-view directions of travel and think about the different landscapes you will confront to get there.
Leave more community than you found. In times of crisis it is impossible to build the social connectivity and relational fields that help sustain us. We need to be doing that in the moments when we can take a breath and think. And meetings are what those moments look like in organizational life. If you are using meetings to preach to the masses, you are missing this chance. Every conversation in the organization right now has the chance to build community while also doing good work, including conversations about how to be together. And if you are a leader with a good idea that you want others to take up, you need to build trust and relational capacity if that idea is to be supported and improved upon. Participatory work does this. It also does this much better if we are physically n the same room.
Big messy conversations are a feature, not a bug. Since the pandemic, I have been doing A LOT of Open Space meetings. Open Space just creates the kind of agenda that is impossible if only one person is in charge. When participants begin posting sessions in Open Space everyone gets to see the real texture of need and capacity in the organization, and we are given the chance to dive in and work on them. Same with Pro Action Cafe, which helps individuals in large gatherings get the help they need with the many different projects and programs they are running. We don’t need alignment on everything right now. We do need much more activity happening in plain view, co-created and co-supported. Like Harrison Owne used to say “Trust the people.”
We need to look after ourselves. This time is taking a real toll on many people. Caring for oneself is not greedy. It is essential. If we are all to stay resourceful in the messy chaos of the present moment we need to be taking our time to be grounded, become familiar with our own patterns of reactivity and do the world a favour and work on them. Yesterday, in talking with a colleague who works right at the coalface of social change and community organizing, I asked her how she was keeping it together. Her morning practice of prayer and meditation has never been more essential, and in fact she had to remind herself to get back to it. I can relate.
I’m sure this list could go on, and I invite you to add to it. Leave a comment about what you are noticing and how you are working with others to cope with the realities of this moment. We are living in a thin time when the macro currents of war and conflict and austerity and hatred are seeping into each of our special places. We need to work within these contexts and find islands of meaning and respite so good work can continue and people can be looked after.
Spent the day in Vancouver visiting family and heading to the Bard on the Beach matinee performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Bard is the Vancouver summer Shakespeare festival, and is known for their cheeky mountings of the Bard’s plays. For whatever reason I think we’ve mostly seen comedies over the past number years, so my take on their repertoire may lean more towards “excellent masters of farce.” But I love the ethic of this company and even with well known plays, there is often a twist that sends a message, whether it is the setting, or some topical asides, some clowning, or some casting or editorial decisions. My impression of the production principle here is that Shakespeare is presented faithful to the experience that the original audiences might have had, and that means not sparing the sacred cows of the day. The commentary is cutting and contemporary, and I often leave feeling what I imagine Shakespeare’s original audiences felt in the 16th and 17th centuries watching these plays, entertained by a production that spoke to them, and that spoke a little truth to power.
Today it was The Two Gentlemen of Verona which is a play I have never seen or read. It’s one of Shakespeare’s earliest and weakest plays, and has been performed only sporadically over the centuries. We did some pre-game research on the play, just because these romantic comedies tend to twist and flail and it’s easy to get lost. This one features the foibles of Proteus and Valentine, two buddies from Verona who head to Milan for some adventure. Proteus, true to his namesake, is a shape shifter, falling in and out of love depending on the circumstance. Valentine has more integrity, although that observation has to be tempered by the fact that these two are consummate boneheaded bros The setting of this production was the 1980s and as a result. each of these characters evoked people from my own high school days, which made for an interesting personal experience.
The lead characters are semi-loveable idiots. In this production they occupy a kind of anti-hero character arc. As the play progresses and they twist themselves into more and more ridiculous and narcissistic situations. It gradually dawns on the audience how reprehensible these guys actually are. They treat romantic love as an inferior form of relationship to the bro code and that has been a knock on the play through its history. It has some truly troublesome misogyny in it, not the least of which is how the play ends. Throughout history critics have wrestled with how to interpret the ending of the play. Directors have rewritten it, edited it or just ignored it altogether. I think rather than dancing around the problem of the ending, director Dean Paul Gibson learned into it and SOLVED it. He adds no dialogue to the play, adds nothing to change the ending at all except a shifted perspective that melts the fourth wall. It’s brilliant. It’s very moving. It becomes immensely real for every single person who has aged out of that immature world of superficial high school relationships. You should go and see it, and maybe after the festival is over, I’ll spoil it.
Apart from the ending, there was an added level of brilliance having the play set in the 1980s. To me it made it feel like I was watching a high school play from my own era. The play becomes even more funny when one remembers that these characters are basically all teenagers (in maturity levels if not actual age) and the company play them with a remarkable take. These actors appear to me not to be earnestly occupying the characters, but rather earnestly occupying the character of teenage actors staging this play. You know the way that high school theatre sometimes tends to typecast the actors into characters that resemble them in real life? It felt like that. These are actors playing actors playing Shakespearian characters. The detachment and the 80s setting lends a layer post-modern irony to the whole thing made it even funnier. And it’s probably the best way to handle the fundamental weakness of the play in general: lean into it. I loved it.
One of the things Shakespeare’s characters often do is to reason themselves into tragic or comedic situations. The reasoning itself is such a device of the age. It’s as if Shakespeare, writing on the edges of of modernity, was trying out these new forms of thought: a scientific reasoning of how one’s passions are at work and what it means. His soliloquies are full of this stuff. You see the origin of the characters’ limiting beliefs, you see the mental gymnastics they are doing to justify and rationalize absurd beliefs that give legitimacy to the emotional lives. It’s immensely relatable.
Part of the fun of Two Gentlemen of Verona is watching these dudes try to reason their way into abominably stupid situations and the more they do so the more respect they lose. By the end of the play they are so convinced of their rightness in the world that their triumphant and confident exit is easily turned to a complete mockery. As a former teenage boy, I found myself staring into a pretty brutal mirror at times. Simultaneously guffawing at these idiots and then slapping my brow with uncomfortable recognition.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona runs until September 19.
From an article that came through the UN Development Program: a group of development workers spent some time studying Pasifika philosophy at Pasifika Communities University which underlies their approach to human development in the region. Here were some of the lessons they learned:
1. Relationality, not transactionality — Pasifika philosophies emphasize relationships over transactions. In global policymaking, this presents us an opportunity to move toward genuine reciprocity, whether between nations, communities, or sectors. In the Pacific, time is not measured in moments but in seasons and relationships.
2. Nature as kin, not resource — Pacific cultures often see the ocean, land, and skies as family. In the face of climate breakdown, this worldview offers a profound shift: protecting ecosystems is not simply environmental policy, but an act of kinship and responsibility to our Vanua*. It aligns with the principles of deep ecology and the principle of integration, which recognise the intrinsic value of all life and call for a holistic relationship with the natural world, one where human wellbeing is inseparable from the wellbeing of the planet, and our consciousness embraces every dimension of life.
3. Progress as continuity, not growth — In many Pasifika contexts, progress is measured not just by growth, but by cycles of regeneration. This stands in stark contrast to the relentless growth-at-all-costs mindset driving much of the global economy. Pasifika philosophies teach us that the beauty of Vakatabu (restraint) is not merely about the end results, but about the self-discovery in the waiting.
4. Consensus and Collective Stewardship — Decision-making in the Pacific often flows from principles such as the Fijian Veivakamareqeti (sustainability), which literally means to treasure or to keep and protect as something beloved. This care is held as a collective responsibility, a shared duty to safeguard what sustains us. Governance rooted in dialogue and consensus may move more slowly than top-down directives, but it works at the speed of trust, anchoring decisions in relationships, nurtures legitimacy, and builds long-term stability — qualities the world urgently needs in this era of polarisation.
5. Leading with Loloma (love) — In Pasifika philosophies, leadership is not a title to be worn as an ornament, but an act of service to the land and its people. True leadership is guided by loloma — a deep, relational love — anchored in connection to land, community, and spirit. Although love is rarely part of mainstream development discourse, overlooking it risks creating interventions without guardianship, autonomy, respect, and intergenerational connection.
6. Honouring Many Truths — Recognising that different perspectives can coexist without cancelling each other out. Pasifika philosophies teach us that mutual contradiction is not a weakness, but a space where diverse truths can live side by side. In this space, respect deepens, creativity flourishes, and collective wisdom grows, reminding us that value lies not in uniformity, but in the richness of many voices.
I resonate strongly with these lessons. These are core practices of dialogue work in human community and especially important values to practice and embed in work done in socially and environmentally threatened communities. The recovery of Indigenous worldviews, philosophies and approaches to land and community is essential in places where communities and land are in vulnerable states. Managerialism and exploitative capitalism sounds the death knell for these communities, both in local work, ecological sustainability and in the ways in which place like small Pacific islands bear the brunt of climate change. The voices that come from the Pacific are voices that plead for the world to change the way it think about life itself.
I live on a Pacific Island myself, within Skwxwu7mesh territory which lies beneath the imposition of Canadian law, regulations and the ways of life that have historically been at odds with the Indigenous worldview of this part of the world and the health of the ecosystems in the land and the seas around here. The recovery of the health of the inlet in which I live, Átl’ka7tsem, parallels the recovery of the strength and jurisdiction of the Squamish Nation, as prophetically documented in the book The Whale In The Door by Pauline Le Bel and Tiná7 Cht Ti Temíxw, a collection of writing from Squamish Nation members about the history and worldview of the Skwxwu7mesh uxwumixw.
In the UNDP report Upolu Lum? Vaai is quoted and I had a read through some of his work yesterday. For more of his philosophy, here are a couple of recent pieces. In Climate Change in Pasifika Relational Itulagi he writes
“This chapter argues for an ‘unburial’ of this neglected dimension [Pasifika philosophy, ethics and spirituality] which not only holds the key to constructive and sustainable solutions to the climate crisis, it also holds the key to a so-called ‘corrective balance’ of the whole human and ecological system, a kind of balance that activates self-healing and regenerative growth.”
In “We Are Therefore We Live” Pacific Eco-Relational Spirituality and Changing the Climate Change Story he explores these ideas more deeply an in the context of Christian theology as well.