Today I ran into an interesting situation. I was in a conversation about a community process I have been designing and a potential participant took me aside and said that she would love to participate but that one of the people who had already agreed to also participate had committed some serous abuse against her partner. She wondered how I would do to resolve the situation. That was a good one, a little bit out of the blue and somewhat unexpected. I thought for a moment and then, putting my best collaborative principles into practice said “I …
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Courtenay, BC I’m coming to the end of a Moleskine notebook I’ve had since March, and it’s almost filled up. I’m going through it harvesting a few things, and thought I might post a series of notes here. The journal began with a few notes that I made about the preliminary design of an Art of Hosting we ran for VIATT on Quadra Island. This particular Art of Hosting was called to train with 40 or so people who are helping us to build an Aboriginal child and familiy services system on Vancouver Island. It’s big …
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Here is a selection of interesting papers for your summer reading: Is it time to unplug our schools? – Almost everything published in Orion is interesting. This article looks at what schools are doing to teach a deep relationship to nature. Altar calls for true believers – on the challenge of practicing what we preach with respect to sustainability. This is a good piece on why systemic change in general doesn’t necessarily correlate with necessity. Horse Power – Old technology for a new world. No coffee – A great piece on Jurgen Habermas, coffeehouses and the power of conversation. Modern …
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Nick Smith has a nice post on common vision and team building in which he offers a few useful approaches for building common bonds, prefaced by this: I’ve never been comfortable with the word ’empowerment’. It’s speak to me of something manipulative and I’ve never found that motivation works that way. I tend to agree with what Henry Miller said, “The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.” I like that.
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The Elders are with us. Could we do this locally? We are building Elders into the work of the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Authority for child and family services. What if the Elders sat in Council for all of us here?