I spent part of Father’s Day yesterday working with one of the youth PODs at the World Urban Forum along with some friends like sara kendall.. We spent part of the morning in a circle, using a talking piece to discuss what should be in a final statement from the youth to the World Urban Forum leaders. The blog for the Youth leadership POD should have some of the final reflections. In the room we had 50 youth from every continent, all of them investigating ways of engaging youth on the local, regional, national and global levels. What struck me was how …
Rob Paterson posted a link to a great short documentary about a Sudbury Valley type school in Maryland called Fairhaven. Sudbury Valley schools are democratically run and non-coercive. In our Supported Homelaerning Program here on Bowen Island, we use many of the same principles and we operate under many of the same assumptions that these kids are expressing in the video. I love the last comment, that this kind of learning prepares a kid for living and learning within a worldof chaos, which is what the real world is actually like.
A piece of the mural from “The Gathering“ I don’t usually blog news, but this has a direct correlation to some work I did last year with some incredibly inspiring youth and it’s shocking in its implications. Last year I facilitated an Open Space event as the concluding act of a brilliant rights-based monitoring project co-hosted by the City of Vancouver. The idea of the project was to use the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as a framework for looking at how well “duty bearers” were upholding human rights in Vancouver. Now this is no police state, …
It’s a Tsimshian expression that means “of one heart.” It was also the name of a very powerful appreciative summit I facilitated last year on youth suicide in northwestern British Columbia. Today Jane Morley, the Child and Youth Officer for British Columbia, and the convener of that gathering released her special report on the summit and its results. The report is available as a .pdf from her site. The gathering was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. On May 4th 2005 I saw nearly 200 Aboriginal youth step into a gathering rife with fear and trepidation and …
My friend Toke Moeller and I are running an Art of Hosting training this week with 12 Aboriginal youth here in British Columbia. We are having a marvelous time so far with one day behind us and two ahead. There have been some good insights as we head deeper into the essences and practicesof hosting conversations that matter. Today we spent time in a natural circle of trees in Cathedral Grove near Port Alberni, which is a pokect of nearyl 1000 year old douglas-fir and cedar on the Cameron River. These old ones make good teachers, especially when we bring …