[OSList] Open Space with Children's System of Care in NJ

[chunili2000 at yahoo.com]

This is an open letter.
Dear Harrison and Suzanne,


I wanted to drop you a note to tell you that the wish I made in Jan 2011 in New York (when we first met) had just come true a couple of weeks ago. I remember saying to myself then: "This open space format would be so beneficial to the NJ Children's System of Care that I need to figure out a way to sell it to my agency and the entire System!"

Well, on 9/20 and 9/21, we held a two-day Children's System of Care Call to Collaboration convening for Monmouth County. My agency MonmouthCares sponsored the event, my Executive Director was the host, our partner Community YMCA donated the camp ground as the venue, and I was the facilitator. 

Everything went beautifully! 60 system partners came representing the government, schools, juvenile justice system, behavioral health
 services, mobile response system, family support services, youth advocacy, etc. Weather was great and the open space environment couldn't have been better.

And the best part of this journey is that it wasn't me who drove the project. It was one of our supervisors who created a vision from last year's strategic planning retreat, which I facilitated using Open Space, and took the initiative to make this happen. I watched the entire leadership team in my organization doing this without me having to convince anybody. I did little in the preparation; I just showed up, opened the circle, held the space, and closed the circle. And for that, they thanked me for my "leadership" and gave me a pair of Tibetan bells as gift!

Seriously, now that the word has gone out, my next wish is to take it to the government and the state level.

Looking forward to seeing you
 next week!

Chuni Li
New Jersey
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20121005/3d3a22c8/attachment-0007.htm>