Jack Ricchiuto publishes a new little paper on The Practice & Power of Authentic Community Engagement : When a community is authentically engaged in conversations that matter, the conversation engages their assets in the realization of their dreams. In authentic engagement, the community becomes author of its own future. The opposite of authentic engagement is lip service to engagement. It is an invitation to conversation that simply engages the community’s voices of victimhood and entitlement. Lip service engagement loudly proclaims commitments to change, but has no power to bring it about and is ironically the shortest distance to sustaining the …
I was watching the Cop15 conference at a distance and I have been thinking that big conferences are maybe not what it will take to shift things. Bigger and more may not be what is needed, or what works. One of the problems is the pressure and expectation that comes from big gatherings – it tends to result in a level of planning and pre-ordained outcomes that actually suppresses emergent behaviour, and emergent behaviour is the mechanism I believe we need to evolve our next level of being, if we are to have a next level as a species. An …
Today, the new moon rises, a time of aupicious beginnings, especially coming so close to the winter solstice. These are important moments in Nuu-Cha-Nulth culture, and the times are important in Nuu-Chah-Nulth history. Last month, five Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribes won a landmark court case that gave them the right to sell the fish that they catch. Not on an industrial scale mind you, but on a scale big enough to create small local commercially viable fisheries for communities that desperately need both the work and the reconnection to the sea. Moreover, the courta case declared this as an Aboriginal right, a …
It’s 11:30 and I’m about ready to tuck into bed. Through my open window I can hear the roar of the surf rolling on the beaches a mile away. The surf report says that the swells are coming in at 9 feet but are going to rise to 17.5 feet by tomorrow. The roar is deafening, but it is a sound that has been heard on these beaches from time immemorial. The Nuu-Chah-Nulth, upon whose territory I am working, have lived here as long as the sound of the waves has been heard, and they’ll be here until those waves …
Writing from Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island which is about as far west as you can go without leaving North America. I’m here this week to run an Art of Hosting training with a number of community coordinators for 14 Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities around Clayoquot, Barkley and Kyuquot Sounds. We’re going to be learning together about methods for community engagement and participatory leadership and all of it based very deeply in the concept of Tsawalk (from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth principle of “heshook ish tsawalk” meaning “everything is one.”) Last night I drove out here across the spine of Vancouver …