Hosting an Open Space gathering in Kamloops today with about 40 people who work hard around issues of child and youth health. We are exploring ways to connect differently and do our work at the next level. The conversations have started and the topics are rich. I thought I would put the list here and see if any of you readers in blog land have resources to offer that we can forward to the folks meeting here today. And if you are in Kamloops and do this work, come on up to Thompson Rivers University and join the conversation.
Session 1
11:00 – 12:15
- How to develop intergenerational programming (ie seniors and youth)
- How do we engage children who come from families dealing with addictions?
- How can we drastically improve reading instruction in your child’s school? These top 5 items from research can be supported in a half-hour daily routine in the classroom.
- How do we start the process to develop a children’s charter in Kamloops?
- What opportunities are out there to use youth wilderness programs to engage youth in meaningful community development?
- How do we better connect youth/schools to the local food system? For example: engaging shcools to start gardnes or increasing local food sold in schools?
- How to create a culture to encourage families at perinatal stage to have access to services and supports which are integrated with traditional service providers?
Session 2
12:15-1:45
- Wow! Statistics!
- I would like to better understand our needs and gaps so that I can better support the community.
- How do we develop and sustain our networks? What are the possibilities of our networks?
- How to create service for parents with disabilities?
- How can we reduce unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases in sexually active youth?
Session 3
1:45-3:00
- How to develop fitness/physical literacy program for 2.5 to 5 year olds?
- How to keep children and youth engagement authentic, original and fresh so they have the agenda and don’t get bored?
- How do we better connect school and community centres and programs for collaborative work?
- How do we reduce stigma attached to social programs to include more children youth and family?
- Teachers and youth workers as gardners, hiking guides and community development professionals.
- How do we collectively support and empower parents in our communities to recognize that they have such a crucial role?
So we had our little learning village today with the kids at Aine’s learning centre which my partner, daughter and I designed. We explored these questions of what kind of inner climate is needed to engage around questions of climate change and the kids followed the energy. They got really interested in what kinds of things they could say to the global leadership meeting in Copenhagen. They wanted to convey a sense that, yes this is a serious issue, but how you choose to meet together matters. They were dismayed and discouraged by the prospect of a lot of angry and worried people sitting around for a few days trying to reach a creative agreement. One kid said that she doesn’t work very well if she thinks there is a tiger behind her about to eat her.
So we had a little circle and talked about what we know about principles of meeting together. The kids generated this list:
- Be serious but not bitter
- Optimistic
- Not grim
- Respectfully, without insulting each other
- talk with civility
- peacefully
- consider the whole planet
- Be calm
- happily and confidently
- include everyone and make sure everyone has a voice
- be positive and useful
- get different opinions
- have fun
- break into groups to get more ideas
- make sure groups get mixed up.
- no shouting
- come with an open mind
- talk nicely and treat everyone as if they were a relative
- make sure to move. maybe dance together.
- feast
- have music and entertainers, and hire a jester to make fun of yourself.
We even took this advice, and broke into groups to see what kinds of things we could brainstorm around climate change solutions. The kids worked for 40 minutes in a world cafe, and then we shared some ideas (“Someone needs to develop shoes that massage your feet while you walk.” “Busses should be free”). We discovered that if we practice some of the principles, they really do result in creative thinking, and a more civil tone.
So the kids were pretty clear that they didn’t have answers about climate change, but they did have recommendations about HOWthe leaders should meet in order to find creative and sustaining solutions. We made four videos (the kids chose to do sketches) which we are editing and will get quick parental approval before sending off to Copenhagen through various channels.
My takeaway on this is that there is a lot of science and highly technical information that is required before you can make useful contributions to the global warming debate. Very few of us have access to that level of understanding and while we might have some good ideas, we don’t really have the ability to engage at the level of understanding that results in concrete solutions.
We do however all have experience of conversations that work. Youth are very clear about ways in which learning takes place. I was delighted when they began naming principles of participatory process and conversational leadership, which are just fancy terms for what we already know about how to collaborate. Twelve year olds CAN make a contribution, and can learn and reflect on process as they share their own experience about what works.
As part of a global call to host Inner Climate Global Villages, tomorrow my daughter Aine and I will host a cafe at her learning centre with 16 young people aged 11-14 on these questions:
- What is it as young people that helps us feel connected to a big global issue like climate change without fear?
- How can we learn and contribute and make change from a place that is not based in fear?
As part of the day we will be watching this video on fun behaviour change.
We will try to harvest with video and photos and send something along to Cop15, to my friends who are working there to compile similar gatherings and harvests into strategies and inspiration. Hopefully we can discover some strategies and principles that will be helpful for leaders in recruiting the support of young people in joyful contribution. I’ll post the harvest here too.
You can be a part of this movement too. Host and post!
I was talking to my daughter tonight on the phone. I was walking out of The Forks in Winnipeg where I had just eaten a pickerel (that I learned was from Kazakhstan…W.T.F!) and my daughter requested that I get a GPS that could beep and show where I am on this epic trip. After being on the road for eight days already, with another 12 ahead of me, I don’t even know where I am sometimes.
Yesterday I was wrapping up the 2009 Good Food Gathering in San Jose and I took a CalTrain up to SFO, hopped an Air Canada flight to Calgary, spent the night there, and flew to Winnipeg early this morning where I joined national gathering of Aboriginal youth who are meeting to thinking about how to renew a very successful federal government program. That’s a lot of travel, but it doesn’t stop there. I fly to Ottawa tomorrow and spend most of the week at an Art of Hosting in Pembroke, Ont. before flying to Kelowna for a one day Open Space and then down to California again, this time to Hoopa, to work with a small Native radio station, KIDE. I get home May 6 after 20 straight days on the road split between five different gigs.
The Kellogg gathering was a lovely experience, and I was especially tickled by how we dissolved the traditional conference model. Day one was all speakers and plenary panel presentations, with a little bit of conversation built in around the ballroom set up with six foot rounds. Day two, we got rid of the tables and held the whole day in Open Space. Day three, a day that we deliberately left free for an emergent design, featured us getting rid of the chairs. When the participants arrived, the room was empty save for a few pieces of tape on the floor. Although half the participants called it a day right there, about 250 stayed on to engage in a beautiful piece of intergenerational work. Led by our youngest team members, Norma Flores, Manny Miles and Maggie Wright, the participants self-organized into a spiral by age, with the youngest person at the centre and the oldest on the outside. Looking around that spiral was to see the journey of a person growing in the Good Food movement.
We then people gather with the ten people closest to them on the spiral and figure out a song, chant, slogan, sentence or movement, that captured what their small demographic had to say to the whole. The next 20 minutes consisted of people bot speaking to the centre and speaking from their place. A voice and story of life in the movement unfolded all the way from the energy and optimism of the youth to the stretch of middle aged people to the tired, but persistent presence of the movement’s elders. After we took a breath we moved to another room and ended it with a drum circle.
Fun.
Tomorrow, a day of Open Space with youth who are designing the future of the Urban Multipurpose Aboriginal Youth Centres Program and then it’s off to Ottawa to run this Art of Hosting with dear friends Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and Kathy Jourdain and a great local team.
I’m twittering more than blogging these days. The microform works well. If you’re interested (yes Aine, YOU!) my twitter feed is here.
I am helping to design an interesting gathering in June of next year that will be part of a bigger initiative to shift the values conversation around sustainability. It’s interesting for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the conscious invitation of indigenous peoples, social entreprenuers and leaders who are firmly connected to the biggest and most influential systems in our world. We’re seeing what we can do together.
The initiative is called Beyond Sustainability: Cultivating a community of leadership from a platform of reverence. After an intense and creative weekend of designing, here are some of the propositions that we cracked, and some of the architecture needed for shifting values. These propositions are offered as principles for this community od leaders. They are in development, and this is version 1.0. Please let me know what you think:
7 basic propositions for shifting values
- We must operate as a community. The era of the lone wolf is over. There are no single heroes who will bail us out of the situation we have created for ourselves. Together we must act in community, bringing the values of our ancient understanding of the village to play on a modern global stage and never forgetting that as human beings we are built to work together and not in separation of one another.
- We must operate from a platform of reverence. Collectively, many of us who have been responsible and influential in the systems that shape our world have done so divorced from the consciousness that our ancestors held for the deep connections we have for the natural world. Reverence has been a capacity of human life that has kept us accountable to each other and to our environments for hundreds of thousands of years. Many of us have shed that reverence and have dulled our sense to the awe that is inspired by a deep connection to the earth, to each other and to ourselves. Reverence is our operating system, and connection is our practice.
- We need to embrace the practice of crossing boundaries. The answers to our questions lie outside ourselves, in the wisdom of community and collective intelligence In order to access this wisdom and offer ourselves fully, we are prepared to cross boundaries, to travel to unfamiliar places and be there as learners and contributors to an emerging sense of direction. The boundaries that exist between peoples, cultures and lands are artificial and constructed and they have unnecessarily divided us and deprived us of inspiration, wisdom and co-creation.
- We have time only to act and learn. We don’t have time to create a long term plan, develop consensus and choose only one path forward. The hubris of this approach makes any plan subject to the political machinations of the interests embedded in dying systems. Those machinations took the last great global attempt at Kyoto and scuttled it and now we are out of time. The time for planning is over, and the time for a myriad of experiments and activities is upon us. Indeed, the future is already beginning to speak through the millions of activities, social entrepreneurs, community organizers, cultural practitioners, business leaders and teachers who are not waiting for the sanction of the whole, but who are instead addressing the challenges head on and devoting their lives to saving humanity from it’s own stubborn refusal to change. And they are also showing the way forward by sharing what they learn in novel and accessible ways.
- Our way forward is a conversation about values AND tactics. Exploring values without tactics is wishful thinking and employing tactics without values is reckless. We need to employ the tactics of hope from a platform of reverence, supported by a community of influential leaders who are connected to the systems that need to change.
- Social entrepreneurs and traditional peoples are the sources of the world views and practices we need for the world. There are people in the world whose lives are devoted to practices of accessing the sacred source of reverence, crossing boundaries, collaborating with others, seeing themselves in relation to the natural world, and sharing and giving away what they know and have acquired. These fundamental practices represent both the foundation of many traditional indigenous communities and represent new ways of doing business, governance, education and social development. We have tools that will allow us to be in deep connection with one another face to face and across oceans, and these tools amplify and make possible the practices that stem from a platform of reverence Social entrepreneurs and indigenous peoples are sources of powerful and generative world views, guides on the path, and leaders to the future of a shift in the values that underlie global systems of domination, exploitation, disconnection, violence and greed.
- As a community we seek to become a system of influence. Only by seeing and experiencing our connections to the global web of human endeavour can we truly appreciate our resourcefulness to this call. All of those involved in Beyond Sustainability are deeply embedded in powerful systems and many have channels and connections to the underlying architecture of power in its many forms. Now is the time to put those resources to work, to help hospice the old systems so that they may die gracefully, to midwife the new and to steward the nascent so that we can accelerate the emergence of a set of values that restores right relationship to the the earth and to each other.
The architecture of reverence
Reverence – a profound awe and respect – is the word we are using for the fundamental set of values that we embody. The platform of reverence is based on three fields: reverence for the earth, reverence for the other and reverence for oneself. Cultivating this reverence is the key to growing a set of values based on deep belonging, deep listening and deep presencing. It is a set of values that connects us fundamentally to the source of life and community that lies trampled by humankind’s unrestrained race to modernity. It is a set of values that is generative and is our biggest asset in helping to create and nurture the systems that will restore balance to human life on earth.
The Beyond Sustainability initiative is an invitation to explore and practice together in this cultivation of reverence, noticing what is born in doing so, and devoting ourselves to helping new ideas grow in fertile and creative ways.
Reverence for the earth – cultivating deep belonging
Human beings are prone to forgetting that we are of the earth, children of the universe, embodied and born out of the mingling of material and spirit, containers for the conscious work of the cosmos. When we forget what we know in our deepest indigenous selves, we grow too big. We engage in the suicidal pursuit of domination and exploitation of the land, air and sea, and we become inhumane in our treatment of others, creating and tolerating unimaginable suffering among all living things. This is no mere appeal to sentimental and romantic back-to-the-earth mindset. We are now acutely aware that the brutal dismemberment of human beings from the natural world has made possible our own destruction and the destruction of many other species.
Deep belonging is captured in the Ojibway word dineamaganik, “I belong to everything” or “All my relations.” It is reinforced in the Hawaiian story of the Kumulipo, in which the very pattern of the universe is imparted to the sources of the material world and the increasingly sacred story that western science tells of evolution and the interconnectedness of all things.
Our first practice therefore, is the cultivation of deep belonging, an intuitive and unshakable understanding of where we come from and who we really are, of how the land and the natural world holds us, and of the patterns of nature that flow within us when we open to them. From that place comes the source of new values and new practices.
Reverence for each other – cultivating deep listening
We rush to judgement, take things at their surface value, outsource meaning making to experts and rely on rumour and innuendo to form our opinions of one another. Human beings have a remarkable ability to refuse to see what is right before us, to hear deeply what is being deeply said, to hold each other in the highest respect and compassion. When we cut ourselves off and stuff our ears full of rationalizations, we become inoculated to the pleas of others to be heard and seen as human beings.
Deep listening makes possible aloha, the Hawaiian art of sharing breath, hishook ish tsawaak, the Nuu-Chah-Nulth awareness of interdependence, and k’e, the Navajo concept of being tied together in a weaving of relations.
Deep listening means being with others in a way that allows us to see ourselves in the other, that invites us to open to the wisdom that is held in the centre of every person, that contributes to an emergent experience of community. Traditional communities cultivate this deep listening through ceremony that makes the communities most precious wisdom available to all. We are prepared to listen in that way.
Reverence for oneself – cultivating deep presence
We cannot come to the work as spectators, bystanders or skeptical cynics. Cultivating the shift in values that we seek is work done by people who show up fully, authentically and devoted to the service of life. It is only out of deep presence that we can become teachers of one another or that we ask the questions and seek the help that we need to move our work forward in the world. Reverence for ourselves and for our preciousness is critical for being fearless and helpful in whatever way we can.
A commitment to the practice of presence means that we invite collaboration in this work from a place of deep intent, offering what we can, and asking for what we need, and not holding ourselves back out of fear or arrogance. We are a community of fully present learners AND leaders, comfortable with not knowing the way forward, but confident in our own abilities to discern and act powerfully from a place of deep and interconnected reverence.