Changing public meetings
Peggy Holman
peggy at opencirclecompany.com
Sun Sep 20 18:09:21 PDT 2009
I love synchronicity! Last night I was at a friend's 50th birthday
party and found myself in a conversation with a long-time city planner
who works for King County (the county Seattle is part of). He was
speaking of the worsening behavior at public meetings. I offered that
perhaps it was time to use new forms of public participation, in which
people actually spoke with each other. The concept was completely
foreign to him.
Today I read your eloquent story, a perfect example to share with
him. So, thank you for telling the story I needed at this moment!
appreciatively,
Peggy
______________________________
Peggy Holman
The Open Circle Company
15347 SE 49th Place
Bellevue, WA 98006
425-746-6274
www.opencirclecompany.com
www.journalismthatmatters.org
For the new edition of The Change Handbook, go to:
www.bkconnection.com/ChangeHandbook
"An angel told me that the only way to step into the fire and not get
burnt, is to become
the fire".
-- Drew Dellinger
On Sep 13, 2009, at 10:16 AM, Chris Corrigan wrote:
> A story from some work I did last week:
>
> “My grandmother was the one that inspired me,” said my friend Liz
> over lunch at the Valley Inn in Bella Coola. “She said that the
> world was once all together, and then it came apart and one day it
> will be all together again. So I just try to bring things together.”
>
> Liz is a pretty remarkable woman. She worked for years in family
> reunification in Vancouver, bringing together First Nations kids
> with their birth families, reconnecting them to their culture and
> communities. She is at home now in Bella Coola on council, working
> for the Ministry as a social worker, but always about bringing
> people together. The reason I am here, for these two days of
> community conversations, is simply to be a part of designing and
> hosting community meetings that do that.
>
> The Nuxalk Nation reserves sit in this stunning valley, at the mouth
> of the Bella Coola River, where it meets the ocean at North Bentinck
> Arm, still nearly 150 kilometres inland from the open Pacific
> coast. At the Bella Coola town site is an old cannery, an icehouse
> and a wharf. There are a couple of hotels and restaurants, a Coop
> store, some repair shops and and RCMP station. Across the street
> from that is one of the Nuxalk communities, an old part of the
> reserve called “Downtown.” It mostly consists of old Department of
> Indian Affairs Housing, never designed for the wet climate of the
> Pacific coast, some trailers that house the band office and a couple
> of community buildings and a playground. Yards are full of mullein,
> plantain and blackberry bushes and the occasional carved headstone
> can be seen in a yard. A small creek winds through the reserve and
> joins the river on the north side of the community. At this time of
> year there are people out on the river, drift netting their food
> fish, gathering coho for canning and smoking. The Nuxalk fisheries
> personnel are trying to find some sockeye to take eggs from so they
> can stock some of the streams and lakes around the territory. Like
> everywhere the fish are dwindling. In the past, oolichans ran
> through here in the millions, but now only a handful return in the
> early spring and the once rich Nuxalk grease, one of the healthiest
> human produced foods in the world, is now gone.
>
> Up the river from here is the newer community of Four Mile, a
> subdivision of larger lots and larger houses. Kids roam around on
> their bikes and young families are out walking. The houses look
> like any rural subdivision but there are telltale signs you are
> still on Nuxalk lands. Poles dote the neighbourhood, carving
> studios take up garage space, and the occasional lawn has a fish
> boat parked on it.
>
> As the Bella Coola valley winds eastward, a few more communities dot
> the landscape – Hagensborg is the biggest, another 10 kilometres
> along highway 20. It is an old Norwegian settlement, and here the
> houses look bigger, more durable, and on large lots featuring
> manicured lawns and gardens. No one is outside, the kids get
> dropped off from the school bus and head right inside in contrast to
> the reserves, where the kids scatter in all directions after
> school. As highway 20 heads up towards Williams Lake, it climbs the
> “hill” a steep grade of narrow switch backs with no guard rail, that
> is said by some to be the most terrifying drive in Canada. If you
> don't fly out, or leave for Vancouver Island far to the south by
> ferry, this is the only way to go.
>
> This is the valley in which I have been working this week. A place
> of stunning natural beauty and deep social alienation. Liz and the
> Nuxalk elected chief, Spencer, were both fed up with the kinds of
> community meetings that have been going on for years, where people
> come and yell at one another, where anger becomes unbottled rage and
> questions are asked that have no answers that will ever satisfy.
> Both realized that how we talk to one another is important, so we
> agreed to try an experiment, and see what might happen if we ran
> meetings using participatory methodologies.
>
> The first day was a World Cafe, which I wrote about earlier, and
> yesterday we tried an Open Space meeting for a general community
> meeting. As is not uncommon, we started very late, once people had
> arrived, and a pot of moose stew appeared and everyone was settled,
> it was 5:00 – 90 minutes past the posted opening. We had about 20
> people sitting in a circle wondering what would happen, and I was
> wondering the same. Most folks were Band employees, present to give
> information and participate in conversations as best they could. A
> number had been reluctant to come because they had no idea what
> would happen, and feared community members being out of control.
> “How are you going to stop people from getting on their high
> horses?” one man had asked me. “I'm not,” I replied. “But the way
> we do this will lessen the chance of that happening.” He wasn't
> convinced. It was as if I had just described the concept of magic
> to him. I clearly knew my stuff, but that didn't make me any more
> in touch with reality.
>
> After a prayer and a quiet opening welcome, I stepped into the
> circle, with really nothing but an invitation to talk differently.
> We had not been able to do very much planning, and the notices for
> the meeting had only gone out to the community a couple of days
> before. Still, the invitation was to move from some visioning that
> the community had been doing for an Indian Affairs mandated planning
> process, to something more based in what the people wanted. I
> walked the circle, explained the process, reminded them that they
> had the power to set the agenda, and waited for what might happen.
>
> Always in Open Space meetings, there is this moment of being on the
> edge of the complete unknown. All of the preparation and time spent
> building the invitation and the theme and the question usually pay
> off in that moment. If we have done all of that right and produced
> a strong social field, the ideas flood into the centre. But there
> are times when the conditions don't tap the passion of the
> community, when people just remain confused about why they are there
> and what they are supposed to do. When they haven't seen through
> their cynicism far enough to even listen to the instructions. Those
> times only happen if there has been little preparation in the
> community or organization. Open Space is not a magic wand – it does
> not automatically generate participation. Invitation is the magic
> wand and Open Space is the place where the magic can happen.
> Yesterday, I feared that the wand had not been well used. That we
> would be staring at the floor between our feet for a while.
>
> But sometimes passion trumps preparation. It turns out that in
> Nuxalk, there are plenty of things to talk about. Life is hard for
> most people. There is 90% unemployment, the fish are disappearing,
> huge scale land rights issues loom over the heads of 1600 people,
> the language and culture is hanging by a thread, youth are drinking
> and drugging and getting pregnant. It's no wonder really that
> people shout at community meetings. It's the last place to rail
> against the morass of conditions that keeps these communities poor
> and out of the loop. The last place where people can feel their
> power, even if it comes at the expense of others.
>
> So last night, as I sat down, four people rose up and we were off.
> One Elder who had been a vocal critic of how bad the Council was at
> communicating with the people convened a session on how she wanted
> to see it done It felt at some level like there was some
> forgiveness buried in her question. Let's move on, she seemed to be
> saying. Let's figure out how to do this better.
>
> There were similar sentiments around jobs and youth and culture and
> language. Ten small groups were formed, and there was lots of
> visiting over the next hour as we did all the sessions in one time
> slot. Laughter broke out all around the room. More community
> members, who had been hanging around the outside of the hall, joined
> us. Liz picked up a conversation that she had started two years ago
> when I had been here before working with her. She introduced people
> to her idea of a community house – an intergenerational space where
> people could gather and be with one another.
>
> As we gathered in the circle at the end, we talked about what it
> felt like to be working like this. People had a good feeling
> towards one another. I asked when was the last time people had left
> a community meeting feeling good. There was hearty laughter.
> “Never!” said one Elder, her eyes wide with the absurdity of the
> question. “Feels good now though,” she said.
>
> We have a choice. We can meet in ways that get nothing done in the
> name of “information sharing” and “accountability” or we can meet in
> ways which allow our hearts to set the agenda, and our hands and
> feet to see it through to action. We didn't begin massive amounts
> of work last night, but we cracked open something – a possibility
> that it could be different. Hopefully we opened a jar out of which
> choice flowed. As Thomas King once said, you can't pretend not to
> have heard the story If you were there last night, you would have
> seen and felt something different. You can spin it to say some guy
> came up from the south and ran this kooky meeting and we talked in
> small groups. But no one who was there can deny that it DID feel
> good at the end. We felt like something was accomplished.
>
> What do we dare choose now?
>
> Liz reminded me that when we worked together two years ago, a young
> woman uttered a phrase that is stark in it's power and implication
> for communities like Nuxalk: Leadership is seeing the beauty in
> others. It's to draw together the world again, as Liz's grandmother
> says. To heal by making whole, which is not to say fixing
> everything, but rather to bring things closer together.
>
> As we left the hall last night, Spencer, the chief, waved at a man
> coming across the playground. He was a “trooper” one of the small
> number of chronic alcoholics in the community who have the hardest
> time of all. “What's happening Spence?” the trooper cried out.
> “Community meeting,” replied the young chief getting into his
> truck. “We were just talking.”
>
> “Oh, mmmhmm,” said the trooper. “That's good.”
>
> -----
> CHRIS CORRIGAN
> http://www.chriscorrigan.com
>
> Sent from an iPod, typed with thumbs...
>
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