Clara Hughes, one of Canada’s all time great athletes, wrapped up her competitive career yesterday with a bronze metal in speed skating. In her press conference she had this to announce:
The international media and Olympic visitors noticed the Downtown Eastside.
So did the five-time Olympian who carried Canada’s flag in the opening ceremony.
Winnipeg’s Clara Hughes won bronze in 5,000-metre speedskating on Wednesday at the Richmond Olympic Oval and donated her $10,000 bonus to the Take A Hike Foundation. The charity runs outdoor recreation programs for inner-city youths.
“I took a wrong turn and ended up in the Downtown Eastside in my little car. I will never forget seeing people suffer so much,” Hughes said in a Canadian Olympic Committee news conference.
“People were just shells of themselves and I couldn’t believe the situation, this reality, exists in Canada. It was surreal, I felt like I was in a movie set.”
Hughes said she can leave Vancouver knowing that she “didn’t just come here and skate in circles.”
I am in Seattle today with a friend of mine, Bob Stilger, and he shared a great reflection with me. He said he was amazed that the Vancouver games have not made a secret of homelessness and poverty in the Downtown Eastside, and he was impressed that the media had covered the story of Canada’s pooerest postal code and that people were out there protesting and telling their stories. He was inspired to tell that story as a way of encouraging others to take advantage of major events and festivals to talk about what is really going on. High marks to Vancouver for not burying the issue, he said.
Back during the Summer Olympics of 2004 I made a passionate argument for why we should spend public money supporting Olympic athletes. The essence of that argument was that the discipline and practice of transforming oneself towards excellence builds a remarkable capacity to see that possibility in others. Today, Clara Hughes confirmed my hunch, and in so doing challenged all of us not to skate in circles about poverty and homelessness.
After the games are over, there will be deep cuts to services and staff who work with the most vulnerable people in our society. Will you rest on your laurels or take Clara Hughes example to heart and put your money where your mouth is? If you are looking for ways to contribute time and expertise and money to good efforts in the downtown eastside, let me know. If you are interested in the issue of violence against Aboriginal women, there is an Open Space coming up in teh spring that will address that issue and we are looking for wanyone who wants to help to come out and be a part of making new solutions in a world of diminishing resources.
Way to go Clara!
Improv again last night here on Bowen Island. It is such a rich learning space for me in many ways. Last night, one of our group kept bringing scenes back to the Olympics, and especially the luge. At times it was funny but it became tiresome in other cases, and in an extended game of freeze tag, when he stepped in, everyone knew where the scene was going. My learning from that is what it looks like when we come to a situation prepared, with a pre-conceived idea of what will work, being attached to an offering, but insensitive to what is going on or worse, unable to co-create something new. In aikido the art of entering is known as irimi, and it is a powerful thing to learn. It is about entering from a place of essence rather than a place of having a desired effect.
The view from the Rockefeller Foundation meeting room, looking south towards the Empire State Building. Today I worked in this location with friends Willie Toliver and Kelly McGowan supporting the work of a group of executive leaders in the New York City municapl administration. I was struck by how, despite the responsibility and magnitude of influence these people have, that they are nonetheless human beings – vulnerable, falliable and authentic as the rest of us.
Here is the poem that was created from the checkout.
We are just poor weak human beings,
Resisting the call
Because we cease and desist
our belief in all we can offer
Somehow we have created
single places upon which everything hinges
and when we are put in those spaces
we confront our smallness, see it in
perspective because none of us are
big enough to be the change others expect
and we have long stopped fooling ourselves.
To confront our own smallness is terrifying
especially when people project bigness on us –
the scale of challenge, the scope of our capability.
The I we are through other people’s eyes
is never the me we see through our own.
Know this – you have been chosen only to live.
It is never over until you leave.
the only line you ever cross
is the one you choose to draw..
I’m back in Johannesburg after three days on the veld west of the city running an Art of Participatory Leadership workshop with my friend from REOS Social Innovation. The weather here has been crazy – constant rain showers and thunderstorms for the whole time we were away, and there is flooding locally here. Driving back into the city we went fender deep through many intersections; major thoroughfares were rendered into fords, water coloured with deep red soil flowing everywhere.
Usually its easy for me to write about these kinds of workshops, but I have to say that South Africa is an overwhelming context. It does not at all lend itself to a simple set of observations. In many ways it is the quintessential study in contrasts: squatter camps next to luxury suburban malls, torrential rains in Joburg and 30 minutes away, lovely summer weather on the safari. Somehow these things have much in common. You are always taken by surprise by the contrast while at the same time struck by how normal it all seems.
REOS Partners is working with two major teams right now, both of which are present at this training. One is Kago Ya Bana (Building together for our children), which is a program that works in the municipality of Midvaal, aimed at ensuring that every child is cared for. The other is a team of people who work with distance learning at the University of South Africa (UNISA). On the face of it, these tow teams have nothing really in common, but in mixing together over the past three days they discovered much in common about moving towards a culture of participatory leadership with stakeholders, funders, learners, parents and children. One project even got started that uses KYB leadership with some support from UNISA folks to build it and see it off.
I think South Africa is a country that exists only because of partnerships and particiption. But much like Estonia, two dynamics are at play. First of all, with the struggle against apartheid now over, a creeping complacency has set in. There has long been extraordinary expectations on the ANC government, but what is catching people by surprise is the decreasing impulse for people to take charge in their communities. I heard this often over the course of the workshop – that there is a hunger for the kind of community leadership that was present in the struggle days, but which has seemed to have waned in the past 15 years. And secondly, like Estonia, South Africa is an emerging country and as such it is trying to perform well on the world stage. To do this, it makes a point of meeting the world’s expectations of it, trying to prove that things are going well and that progress is being made, and I notice that some people re reaching the breaking point in encountering the culture of management by measurement. This was another frustration spoken by many.
Participatory leadership is simply the application of what we have learned from hosting participatory meetings to bigger and bigger contexts. It asks the question what if we applied these principles to ongoing team, organizational and social contexts. To that end participatory leadership offers some relevant antidotes to groups that are suffering from the apathy of a surfeit of chaos or control. This week we found that out in spades I think. People are just quite open and interested in a way of doing things that involves others, that engages that somehow returns humanity to work.
In our work we shared models of hosting participatory meetings, described maps and practices that help us stay grounded and open, and explored ways of harvesting that were inclusive and holistic. In the end, several people stepped forward to crack open and lead projects within their workplaces to make work more inclusive, to work more with clients and learners, and to explore ways to apply some of these ideas and skills. One thing that I love about this work is how REOS is offering it as a part of an ongoing capacity building initiative with their clients. In doing that it continues a shift of seeing in ways that one participant described as “Changing the way change works.” With an ongoing relationship, coaching, and real work at hand, those that take up the practices and explore them in their own contexts will embark on a cool learning journey together, and my sense is that people will begin seeing the results they are looking for as their projects become more inclusive and co-owned by the people with whom they are working. And that is the whole point.
Canada is about to be roundly shamed at the Copenhagen summit, and it can’t happen swiftly enough or with enough emphasis for me. Our government is showing itself to be a dinosaur when it comes to tackling climate change. Here is Stephen Harper touting a total myth:
“Without the wealth that comes from growth, the environmental threats, the developmental challenges and the peace and security issues facing the world will be exponentially more difficult to deal with,” Harper said in an address to South Korea’s National Assembly.
via Harper Says Global Recovery Must Precede Environment (Update1) – Bloomberg.com.
The truth is actually the other way around, but Harper is so willfully blind to the realities of system thinking, climate science and global consensus that he has chosen to act as a bully and a coward all at the same time.
George Monbiot recently wrote a slamming indictment of our potentially negative contribution to these climate talks coming up. It seems that, doing the bidding of big oil, Canada will try to scuttle the talks by dividing and conquering the conference. The Saudis will be hiding behind our skirts delighted that they don’t have to be the bad guys.
So, rest of the world, you need to know that Harper has never governed in Canada with a majority of Parliamentary votes, nor has his government ever had anything close to a mjority of the popular vote. It is a particular set of regional political anamolies that has resulted in him becoming Prime Minister. Canadians have never wanted him to govern in numbers that would give him a mandate to speak with such surety about what we want as Canadians, or what our role in the world should be. He has refused to govern cautiously as a minority leader, and has refused to even try to build consensus, choosing instead to be a brinkman of the highest order and calling the bluff of the Opposition parties who have ended up supporting his bullying through a fear of their own political hides being hung out to dry.
So knowing this, world, and speaking as a Canadian, I hope you will not hold back in exposing Harper for what he is, and challenging at every turn his right to speak for Canadians. He should be a marginal curiosity at this summit, and he will be if YOU ALL put him there. Please do not accord the Canadian government’s position at this conference with any of the respect that is usually accorded to us. We sometimes are allowed to punch far above our weight, but in this case, call the man’s bluff. He does not speak for most of us.