Campbell River BC
Constantly on the road these days. Just did a weekend strategic planning session with the VIATT Board – a very interesting session. We are at the point in our planning where we are developing the structures that will govern this system once we begin to assume full authority next year. This is a tricky set of questions, involving money, leadership, turf and control as we try to find the best structure that will run the system in line with deep community values. And so as we confront this moment, the Board decided to have a strategic planning session to get some insight on which direction we need to go in. However, wise as they are, instead of just inviting themselves to crack the question, each Board member brought two or three guests with them: family members, friends, associates, all of whom are like eagles themselves to each Board member. As a result we had forty people here, all devoted to suported their friends and loved ones in doing this work. The circle of eagles has been called.
We began with some appreciative inquiry into organizational systems that work, following on from the story of VIATT’s emergence and development over the past five years. Then we went into a World Cafe on the subject of what VIATT should be doing, once the Authority becomes a full fledged thing, next year. Finally, we ended with a more or less full day of Open Space during which we talked about the relationships we need to build and strengthen.
It was a rich session, and there is much deep content emerging.
Today, I am back up in the north Island and heading out with mates to the wild west coast. We’re visiting three communities way off the grid tomorrow, one of which, Ka:’yu:’k’t’h, is boat access only. I’ll post photos and thoughts when I’m back near a web connection.
Fascinating article in the New York Times about the norther area of Somalia where people have built peace in an incredibly turbulent region by mixing indigenous governance with democratic participation, using elders and tribal leaders to harness attachment to clans AND to transcendent principles such as independence and peace. Some quotes:
“You can’t be donated power,” said Dahir Rayale Kahin, the president of the Republic of Somaliland, which has long declared itself independent from the rest of Somalia. “We built this state because we saw the problems here as our problems. Our brothers in the south are still waiting – till now – for others.”
…
Its leaders, with no Western experts at their elbow, have devised a political system that minimizes clan rivalries while carving out a special role for clan elders, the traditional pillars of Somali society. They have demobilized thousands of the young gunmen who still plague Somalia and melded them into a national army. They have even held three rounds of multiparty elections, no small feat in a region, the Horn of Africa, where multiparty democracy is mostly a rumor. Somalia, for one, has not had free elections since the 1960s.
…
Somaliland, like Somalia, was awash with weapons and split by warring clans. Their first step was persuading the militiamen to give up their guns – a goal that still seems remote in the south. They moved slowly, first taking the armed pickups, then the heavy guns and ultimately leaving light weapons in the hands of the people. Again, this stood in contrast to the south, where in the early 1990s thousands of American marines and United Nations peacekeepers failed to put a dent in the clan violence.
“We had a higher purpose,” said Abdillahi M. Duale, Somaliland’s foreign minister. “Independence. And nobody in the outside world was going to help us get there.”
…
But the one issue that unites most Somalilanders is recognition. Somaliland has its own money, its own flag, its own national anthem and even its own passport.
“And we have peace, a peace owned by the community,” said Zamzam Adan, a women’s rights activist. “You’d think in this part of the world, that would count for something.”
[tags]somalia, somalialand[/tags]
Openly musing today on wondering what it might look like for participatory budgeting to be deployed for an Aboriginal governance authority responsible for child and family services.
The work we are doing on Vancouver Island is about building the capacity of the community to be the owners of the child and family services in their communities. We are about to do an Art of Hosting training here with 40 or so community members to build the leadership capacity of the local communities, but I was thinking today, after having dinner last night with my friend Donna Morton, who knows much about these things, that participatory budgeting might be a cool thing to try.
Participatory budgeting is a deeply democratic process of having citizens use deliberative dialogue to set budgets for the ervices that affect them. It has it’s deepes community of practice in Brazil, where the cities of Porto Alegre and Sao Paolo have pioneered the use of the process. It has since spread to many places around the world.
I know there is a small movement of people here in British Columbia interested in the process, and one councillor on my island, Lisa Barrett, tried to introduce t as a practice on Bowen Island. She was met with too much reticence to pursue it at the time, although it sems like at some level and over some longer period of time democratizing public budgeting may be an inevitable move especially in municipal governments.
So I’m looking for some expertise among people near and far who have used this process especially in the non-profit world, or even better, in the quasi-governmental world of school board, health authorities and the like.
My main inquiry at this point is around how you have the conversation with the people that control the purse strings in a way that invites them to share power. I was talking to my friend Tuesday Ryan-Hart this morning as well, who works in the social services sector in Columbus Ohio and she gifted me with a great question to use to invite a conversation about this process. She was talking about how easy it is to talk a good line about sharing power – and in still-semocratic North America, there are many places where people are able to participate. Many of these forums however are shallow if they don’t tie the exercise of that shared power to shared responsibility and benefit. Tuesday’s insight was that it makes sense to talk to people who are already open and who already believe that sharing is the right thing to do and then ask “Where can we share power that results also in shared benefits?” That is a way to talk about how to include the voices of clients for example in the structuring of the budgets that affect their lives and it helps us get at what Tuesday called “what we don’t know we don’t know.” It’s a brilliant little question.
So, friends, where can you point me for people that have had experiences using participatory budgeting in the social services sectors anywhere in the world?
PS. Here are some links I uncovered about participatory budgeting in a quick scan around the web:
Porto Alegre Participatory budgeting virtual library
Articles and books in English, Spanish and Portugese
Participatory Budgeting Project — Resources
This page contains papers, links, and other information about research and other projects related to participatory budgeting that are being developed throughout the world.
participatorybudgeting.org
ParticipatoryBudgeting.org is a companion site to the book, Militants and Citizens, and a general resource site on participatory budgeting.
Participatory budgeting tag at del.icio.us
[tags]participatory+budgeting, democracy[/tags]
My friend Jeff Aitken has been a strangely influential person in my life. He has been an interesting guide across intercultural spaces, helping me to frame and see my own journey as a person of mixed ancestry facilitating cross-cultural groups and helping to find the creative spark in the space that are created when we all claim our centres and show up whole. Jeff and I met in 2001 and have had a few conversations over the years, but I’ve always felt very close to him.
Now at his blog rio grand-i-o, he is posting his doctoral thesis which documents his journey to his complex and liquid centre, as a man of mixed ancesrty cultivating an indigenous relationship with the land upon which he lives. Worth a read, worth subscribing to and worth following if you are interested in how white people can participate in the decolonization process on this continent.
Ottawa, Ont.
I’m here in Ottawa at the National Aboriginal Forestry Association meeting threading some World Cafe work into their annual conference. This is a real time harvest of the work we are doing.
This conference is bringing together about 130 people to dust off recommendations that were made by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples ten years ago. We are looking specifically at about a dozen recommendations relating to forestry. Certainly much has changed in the past ten years, but there are some essential things that would allow First Nations to take over much more control of their resources that simply haven’t been done. These include sorting out better access, and looking at tenure reform to allow for First Nations to log in a way that supports sustainable local economies rather than feeding the industrial forestry model.
The design for this work proceeds through a fairly straightforwad plan. We have four sessions which will take the group through divergence, a groan zone and into some convergence. The first session is aimed at getting a broad sense of what might be possible to leverage the power of the system. The two groan zone sessions deal with how these strategies might actually work in practice and our final session tomorrow afternoon will look at the good bets for supporting action that will ensure that the ideas we discuss get some legs post-conference.
The breakout sessions are dealing with the ideas for moving forward these stalled thoughts, and in the plenary we are using a really interesting blend of Cafe type conversations to think about the action part. Today we completed two parts of the Cafe and there are two more tomorrow.
We began the day asking this question:
What do we have to do if we are to leverage the entire power, potential and capacity of this whole sector to do things that we have never done before?
With delegates sitting around conference tables in groups of 4-6, we posed the question and had two rounds of conversation. Participants switched tables between rounds. At the end of the second round, we asked participants to capture their nuggets on an index card and to have those available to us. Close to 100 cards came back. The participants all departed for their first breakout sessions armed with the question of how we could leverage the power of the sector to move the ideas forward.
During that breakout session and over lunch myself and Chad, a NAFA staffer, went through the cards and looked for the main themes. I captured the essence of what was being said using FreeMind and produced a mind map with text weighted according to how much attention each theme received. I then redrew the mindmap by hand to show the emerging themes, photographed it and projected it on two big screens so people could see it while I presented these back to the group as a whole.
mp3: My explanation of this mind map as a way of seeding the second round of conversation
Once they had the whirlwind tour from me, I asked them to turn to one another again for one round of focussed conversation on what they are now learning about these strategies. We heard a few voices back after this brief 25 minute conversation and people had both questions and insights that I then invited them to carry with them into the afternoon’s breakout sessions.
Tomorrow we will use the Cafe process to move through the groan zone by jamming on these leveraging strategies to get the sector to address a number of emerging crises relating to climate change, consolidation and global trade impacts on local communities and small and medium sized businesses.