On my way to Regina to work with the Urban Aboriginal Strategy steering committee there. We’re running an Open Space for the community on Saturday preceded by a community development/hosting training on Friday. Still designing the training and using the basic structure of covering invitation, hosting and convergence/action/decision making. Can anyone suggest exercises that might be useful in the context of a day long training to explore skills around these three areas? I’m interested in trying new things to teach the importance of these areas of attention.
I’m looking forward to our Open Space. I was in Regina a year ago, when the windchill was -55 and we were talking about how people survived these temperatures on the prairies 400 years ago. If you were not a part of the group, you were dead. So depending on relationship and getting to a fire was a life or death situation. Amazing how easy it is to forget that when so many of our basic needs are covered.
John Engle writes about some of the work done by his colleagues in Haiti where last year 48 school hosted Open Space meetings to bring teachers and parents together.
In partnership with Concern Worldwide, our colleagues did open space meetings in 48 schools during the last two months. These meetings were organized so that parents could talk with teachers, which is very counterculture, about education of the students. It was an effort to integrate parents into the life of their children’s school and to help them in the critical role they play in their children’s formation. It was an opportunity to acknowledge and honor the parents as key stakeholders.
Virtually no schools in Haiti are free. Teachers are poorly paid and schools operate on shoestring budgets and are forced to close if fees are not paid. Often, parents failing to pay their children’s school fees, which is very common, is more about feeling alienated by teachers and principal than it is about economic hardship.
Of the 48 schools, 29 are in remote areas. 19 are in a very poor neighborhood in Port au Prince, historically known for violence. There were more than 3,000 participants in all during the last two months. More than 12,000 children go to these schools. Thus far, the outcomes of these meetings are extremely positive. Some of the stories like parents feeling heard and paying past due fees on the spot are quite powerful.
I can see doing the same thing in Prince George around the establishment of the Aboriginal choice school.
Back in June, I hosted the Open Space part of a conference on reconciliation policy and practice co-sponsored by Queens University, the First Nations Technical Institute and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The harvest from that gathering is now online as an article about the event in Canadian Government Executive Magazine
It makes for some interesting reading.
Johnnie Moore has a great post today that discusses how people act within three distinct forms of networking. Along the way he points out that in the above diagram we have too much A and B masquerading as C.
IN the discussion he praises the establishment of seemingly redundant links in a network, which is something I am heavily in favour of as well. The more ways you have to work between people, the more creative you can be and more truly community you are. Johnnie rolls this into his observation of how people behave in Open Space events:
First, it’s really important if you want to talk about something to put it up for discussion without concern for it’s popularity as a topic. And second, be wary of criticising how others choose to engage: are you in effect demanding they conform to your personal view of what’s important, as if yours is the only one?
I think the picture that Johnnie uses to illustrate this is very important. Often in talking with organizations they want to move to a more networked way of being but in reality they choose just to decentralize. This intermediate stpe has several characteristics. It is certainly a shift to a networked organization and it invites a community to arise within. It also preserves some of the weak points of a centralized organization, which includes reliance on a hub, meaning that the system does not have the kind of resilience that a true network has.
The trick I think is seeing that the network actually does exist in several organizational settings, and lives happily alongside a bureaucratic structure which moves resources and accountability around. It is the active network within siloed structures that invites and encourages innovation to emerge. Open Space events are a great way to make the network visible and to put it to use.
Prince George, BC
Four years ago less a month I was running a huge Open Space event here in Prince George, in fact in the building that right outside my hotel room window. Called “Seeds of Change” the event was a kick off for the urban Aboriginal Strategy, a community driven and led process intended to begin and seed projects that would make a difference in the lives of the urban Aboriginal community in this northern city of 80,000 people.
One of the participants at that event was Ben Berland, who was at the time working with the Prince George school district as an Aboriginal coordinator. Ben had a vision of doing something really different within the education system here in PG. He built upon a long standing recommendation to start a different kind of school. He attracted a number of interested folks at the Open Space and moved his project idea forward.
A couple of years later, a task force was struck to study options for systemic change in the school system and one of their recommendations was to establish a primary Aboriginal Choice School within the school district.
The choice school idea is based on some very successful models in Edmonton and Winnipeg. Getting it rolling has been a lot of work for many people here in Prince George, but tonight was the first of four consultation cafes we are running with four inner city school communities to find out what it would take to make a choice school successful in this city.
Ben, who is now working with the local Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council showed up tonight to hold some space with us and help run some small group conversations. When he saw me the first thing he did was to remind me that this whole idea – four years in germination – had started at the Seeds of Change event.
This whole choice school initiative is a huge undertaking and it feels like in many ways the community here is just beginning its work, starting to engage in earnest with the complexities of finally implementing the idea that gained momentum across the street four years ago.
Things take time. It’s interesting that we know that and we forget it at the same time. We crave immediate results for our ideas. When we forget that things take time, we forget everything that has gone on to take us to the point where we are finally able to start something and we forget the people that laid the groundwork for things. So tonight I am sitting here grateful for Ben’s reminder about where things come from, and what it takes for big shifts to happen. It takes hard work, and a firm conviction and most of all, it takes time.