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Asset Based Community Development

November 22, 2005 By Learning


I’ve known about the work of John McKnight for a long time. He is perhaps best known for Asset Based Community Development. When I was studying community development at Trent University, we were treated to his series on CBC Ideas called Community and its Counterfeits, later published as a book. McKnight was a young apprentice to Saul Alinsky, the famous Chicago-based community organizer. Over the years his work has garnered accolades from folks all over the political spectrum and has spawned community mapping, asset inventories and other now standard practices of community and economic development.

A few years ago another Chicago-based man of interest, Michael Herman, sat in on a class with McKnight and thought about how Open Space and ABCD might play together.

A post last month at Wealth Bondage, combined with a conversation I had with Richard Cornuelle (Denationalizing Community is my favourite paper of his) reminded me again of ABCD. There are a number of projects I am doing at the moment that might be a chance to put my work together with McKnight’s ideas.

When I began work in consultation and what is now called “community engagement” I based my approach on some lessons I learned from an Oneida Elder, Bruce Elijah. Bruce was our organizational Elder at the National Association of Friendship Centres in the early 1990s when I was there and he taught me a huge amount about process, healing and community work.

Over strong tea one night at my place Bruce recounted his approach to working with communities on community-wide healing. The first thing he does when he arrives to work in a community is to ask the people to take him to the place of power. When they are there, literally standing in the clearing, the building, the space where the community has its heart ans soul, he asks about why THIS spot is the power place and the begin talking about what the community still has. It’s appreciative, asset-based, spiritual development for a whole community.

This approach works for places of virtual power as well. If you are a facilitator or an OD consultant, the next time you begin a project with a client, ask them to take you to the place of power in the organization or community and see if you can’t discern what makes it so. It might be a physical place, or it might be a time or a collection of values, or a highly regarded project or initiative from which people take strength. I’m willing to bet that what you learn there will form the basis for whatever it is your about to do.

Making decisions by consensus

November 20, 2005 By Facilitation, Uncategorized


I was working with a client this weekend, the board of a quasi-professional association, and we were discussing ways to build better support for decisions. I introduced them to the consensus decision making model I use, something which is adopted from the work of Sam Kaner. They liked it and I agreed to write it into the report I was doing for them. Thought I’d share it with you readers as well…

Voting certainly has its place, but if you are looking for sustainable decisions, where unity and long term support for a decision are important, a consensus decision making model can often work better.

For consensus decision making to work it helps to have an issue with the following characteristics:

  • Passion or real or potential conflict, meaning that the issue is truly important
  • A diversity of opinions and people involved, meaning that you can draw on creative resources for getting to consensus.
  • Complexity, meaning that the issue has to be bigger than a yes/no decision.
  • Other time pressures that make resolution important. Even though consensus can take more time, having a pressing need for a decision helps clarify what’s important and makes everyone a stakeholder in the outcome.

Consensus means that there is broad support for the decision. It essentially means that the decision of the group will have the support of the group to varying degrees. It also means that if there are key areas of disagreement, the groups commits itself to finding alternative ways to turn EITHER/OR questions into BOTH/AND solutions.

It is important that you make an agreement regarding what can happen should the group fail to come to consensus. My preferred alternative is to state that the group will use consensus until they reach an absolute impasse, at which time the group will decide the issue by a method chosen by consensus. So, if the group is stuck and everyone agrees to using voting to solve it, you may do so. This commitment keeps the group focused on meeting the needs of all participants, valuing everyone’s input and opinions on the subject at hand.

Consensus works bets when participants can indicate their support for a proposal with a range of opinion. Using a scale of 1-5 is the simplest way to do this. You may think of the scale this way:

1 = Absolute support, no reservations
2 = Solid support with some reservations
3 = Satisfied enough to move forward and support the decision
4 = Substantial issues remain to be discussed
5 = Significant issues remain, and support for the decision is absent.

The process works like this:

  1. Issues that come up for decision should be phrased as an open ended proposal. The process is not served if people come to the conversation with hard and fast positions. Openness is the first order.
  2. The issue can be discussed either in a round table format or another method but it is important that every participant gets a chance to ask questions and make statements about the proposal.
  3. When people feel the need to poll the group on support, ask the question.
  4. Begin counting with the ones and go down to the fives.
  5. For those that are four and five, the question becomes “What would it take for you to become a 2-3 on this issue?” The discussion can proceed then towards resolving specific issues.

This is a straightforward process, but leads to very sophisticated decisions, with time spent focusing on the most important issues that need resolution for everything to move forward.

Remembering a great Open Space, and now into practice

November 19, 2005 By Open Space

The Open Space Practices

An email on the OSLIST today prompted me to find the story of the Open Space event I did in Alaska with Judi Richardson and Michael Herman. The event was a gathering of 200 middle school students, teachers and counsellors and the theme was “Becoming a Peacemaker.” Over the months that followed Julie sent stories about Open Space blossoming all over Alaska and Michael collected and posted them at his site.

That was also the first time we offered the Open Space practice workshop together in a two day format. We had 60 people in that initial training, and in the next year Michael and I offered it together and separately in Canada, the USA, Ireland, India, Nepal, Australia and New Zealand.

Last week I was with 15 remarkable people near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island offering the most recent iteration of the workshop, a three day version that really builds on the practices of Open Space. We feel now we are truly moving into the realm of practice in a deeper way, teaching learning and writing about it.

So here’s a marker to remember where it all began.

A community at work

November 13, 2005 By Open Space, Stories, World Cafe

Social issues
Over the past few weeks I have been working hard in Victoria facilitating the Aboriginal engagement strategy for the Victoria Urban Development Agreement.The work unfolded in two stages, with the first stage being three focus groups on economic, physical and social issues. We used the ICA Focused Conversations methodology to deepen and inquire into the participants experience of their community. Objective data was recorded as mind maps which we then overlay with data harvested from the reflective, interpretive and decisional parts of the conversations.

Following the focus groups, we conducted a large 1.5 day community meeting to gather issues and challenges from the community itself. The first day was an Open Space meeting which brought 60 people together including a number of homeless and virtually homeless folks. This was followed on day two with a World Cafe which we called an “Action Cafe” aimed at discovering strategies for keeping this process alive within the larger development agreement process. We knew we had the right people in the room when at lunch an announcement was made that “a shopping cart was illegally parked!”

Following the conclusion of the cafe, we had fiddling and dancing from some Metis performers and Coast Salish and Kwagiulth drum songs from Victoria’s Unity Drummers.

It has been a rich experience working on this project. For more information, see what one of the community groups, the Inner City Aboriginal Society, wrote about our work. And for more photos, visit the Flickr page for “A Community at Work.”

An Abkhazian tune of unspeakable beauty

November 8, 2005 By Music One Comment

I have no idea about these tunes, but I suspect they are Armenian or Georgian choral pieces.

At any rate, have a listen to this one, and if you speak Russian (Raffi?) let me know what it is I have stumbled upon.

UPDATE: In the comments, my Friend Raffi Aftandelian writes from Moscow:

I think this is Georgian. The music is from an Abkhaz site. The Abkhazians are another Caucasian ethnic group. Abkhazia used to be part of Georgia, now it’s in the neverneverland of not being part of Georgia and yet not quite recognized as a separate country.

Thanks Raffi.