Everyone wants action – that’s the current business buzzword. Dialogue and conversation seem fine “but they have to focus on action.” It’s almost growing tiresome to hear it.
The problem with the mantra is that people rarely have any idea of what action really looks like. Very few people think through to the personal responsibility THEY might take in animating action. Even less see conversation and dialogue AS action.
But today in my email box, comes confirmation that action is intimately connected to dialogue and when passion and reposnibility come together, real things happen.
Back in the fall, my business partner Lyla Brown and I conducted a series of Aboriginal engagement meetings for the Victoria Urban Development Agreement process (the report is here). As part of the work, we held an Open Space Technology meeting with more than 100 community members to discuss and implement ideas that had been raised in a series of focus groups. One of the conversations at the Open Space gathering was on food security, and the results of that work have now borne fruit. Today, I received a press release in my inbox from one of the community agencies that took up the implementation challenge and ran with it:
Aboriginal Group Promotes Food Security as humble start in reducing Aboriginal poverty as Big Business
VICTORIA – Inner City Aboriginal Society (ICAS), by promoting an aboriginal community dialogue on food security, is actively working towards reducing poverty as big business.
As a reaction to the fact that an estimated 50% of the street-homeless community in Victoria are aboriginal – and that current funded strategies are focused on charity based or service provision approaches – ICAS has organized itself to encourage a move towards a third option. ICAS is facilitating a series of Aboriginal Sharing Groups on Food Security at the end of March to provide information about food security issues, to explore cultural aspects of food security and to set some direction for further action. The discussions on food security represent – for those in the Inner City Aboriginal Society – the restoration of economic justice by transitioning the aboriginal community from victim to dignity status. Bruce Ferguson, one of the founding directors of ICAS expressed his opinion on the Aboriginal Sharing Groups on Food Security.
“Imagine if 50% of the budgets of all the downtown service providers and dedicated funds for the street community went to aboriginal people to empower ourselves….need I say more. Empowerment of the marginalized cant happen over night, but at least with taking back the dignity of feeding ourselves, we can one day reach equality with other Canadians…”
“The work of ICAS in food security dialogue will provide a challenge that moves the aboriginal community away from being objects of charity and-or clients of service providers towards strategies and languages that talk about empowerment and self-reliance” adds Rose Henry, long time aboriginal activist and recent candidate for City Council.
The Aboriginal Sharing Groups will be held between March 22nd and April 3rd.
Action is passion bounded by responsibility. Action becomes easier when there is a strategic architecture for acting. That architecture is forged in the fire of conversations about what matters, where people create relationships, connections and shared vision about what might be. When that action infrastructure is laid down, acting becomes fairly basic. When that architecture can be created from the bottom-up and then used by those who actually created it, then the action becomes both efficient and powerful.
The interesting thing about this series of community conversations on food security is that they have been taking place outside of the official program of the Victoria Agreement. The agreement itself is not yet signed, and there are many planning conversations going on behind the scenes to tranisition the structure of the inter-governmental relationships from working groups to action groups. While this has been happening, Inner City Aboriginal Society and its partners have been leveraging the strategic architecture that was formed in the community Open Space event to put this topic and approach in front of the community. They are seeking solutions to the problem that avoids a dependant relationship on governments and “charities” and in doing so, they are planning, organizing and meeting without government or charitable support.
Leadership, even in business, is about walking your talk and both creating and leveraging the strategic architecture to find a way to take responsibility for what one loves. ICAS is showing the way here.
Before I took off to the Evolutionary Salon last week I blogged about Sarvodaya.
Today I have been scouring recent postings at the Sarvodaya blog and I find this, from Deepak Chopra’s comments to a Sarvodaya Peace dialogue:
Today we are shifting from the industrial age to the information age. Today wealth and power come from Information Technology. And Information Technology has become very powerful today. In a few years it will become even more powerful. It will be possible for anyone to have this kind of computer in their pocket and interfere with air traffic. It will be possible through handheld implements to make nuclear stations leak and cut off electricity. And when that happens we will make ourselves extinct because we have powerful technology combined with ancient habits.But Dr. Ariyaratne and Sarvodaya are giving us a new model and this is saying that we have to move from the age of information to the age of knowledge. And we have to move from the age of knowledge to the age of wisdom. When you saw those slides on the screen, you saw a model that was based on the wisdom of civilization. And this wisdom and this civilization say one thing and one thing only: that the future does not belong to the survival of the fittest, but that it belong to the survival of the wisest. Survival of the wisest will become the new criteria for evolution. It is a new civilization based on wisdom-based consciousness, a wisdom-based economy, and a wisdom-based power structure and leadership, the three pillars that you saw in the slide from Sarvodaya, which are economy, consciousness, and power. This wisdom therefore is the most important thing that we seek in our lives today. Two thousand five hundred years ago, the Lord Buddha said that the world is about interdependence; the environment, the forces of nature, and human consciousness are all part of one single reality. And today many scientists are talking about interdependent co-arising. But this interdependent co-arising gives birth to a field of consciousness that should make this change.
What can we do to nurture the evolution of the wisdom-based age? I am most interested in ways of being together in groups, communities, families and other aggregations, but also in what wisdom looks like in the structures that support those groups, structures like money, power, the natural world and information. Those of you that have read along with me for a while will know of my ongoing inquiry into philanthropy, decentralized governance, learning from the natural world and our stories about the natural world, and peer to peer ways of connecting. Where is your edge of inquiry around this question?
I have been engaging with Lenore Ealy since the Giving Conference in Chicago. She turned me on to Richard Cornuelle’s work which seems prescient in many ways. This paper, De-Nationalizing Community (.pdf) is a short but very interesting read. It weaves together anarchist and libertarian perspectives arguing that the idea of community has been appropriated by government. The paper generated a really interesting spark of mutual interest between Lenore and I. We come from very different political poles and through our conversations I have been losing my grip on political spectrums, compasses and other typologies, which can only be a good thing.
So in the context of this slippage I have been thinking a lot about the role that government plays in our lives. I wouldn’t say I’m a libertarian and I think there is a need for government to provide services to citizens. But the anarchist in me wants to attach a warning to those services, like the warnings on cigarette packages: use at your own risk.
I don’t trust corporations to provide services either, and I’m not advocating privatisation of community resources. That’s what appeals to me about Cornuelle’s paper. It’s not a perfect solution but it is thought provoking.
I already unschool my kids, and I’ve pretty well unjobbed myself. I was thinking of finding a new doctor (my former GPO has gone into a community based ob-gyn practice…yay to her!) but recent interactions with the medical system has convinced me to actually avoid getting an MD and, unless there are dire emergency circumstances, not going anywhere near a hospital. I have a good homeopath, and I’m active and eat reasonably well. If I can at all avoid it, I’d rather spare myself exposure to iatrogenesis.
In general I think that government services are the worst possible option for people who are really in need. I don’t know why this is, as most of the people who work in government are generally there because at some level they care in a way that drives them to join the public service. But as a whole, it’s as if some dark-side of emergence takes over when government goes to offer a service. Whether it is welfare, education, child protection, health care or infrastructure, we tend to receive services which are offered on a shoestring budget by overworked people with little time for personal contact. If you need those services, it’s great that they are there, but god forbid you should ever need them.
In general efforts at reforming public services are very long and drawn out affairs which have very little impact for the amount of energy they consume. In many cases it is easier to actually do it yourself, be that homeschooling children, constructing community housing or starting community-based child welfare agencies.
Still, I feel like government needs to provide services to those in the direst need. And I feel especially that corporations and profit making ventures have very little place in public services. The question is how can we best use collective resources (such as tax dollars) to support the best possible sets of services and community initiative to ensure that no one falls through the cracks without creating a situation where people come to depend on government to the point where individual and collective volition evaporates.
Thoughts?
[tags]libertarianism, anarchism, richard cornuelle[/tags]