Openly musing today on wondering what it might look like for participatory budgeting to be deployed for an Aboriginal governance authority responsible for child and family services. The work we are doing on Vancouver Island is about building the capacity of the community to be the owners of the child and family services in their communities. We are about to do an Art of Hosting training here with 40 or so community members to build the leadership capacity of the local communities, but I was thinking today, after having dinner last night with my friend Donna Morton, who knows much …
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It’s really impossible to overstate the worry I heard in people’s voices today. In our meeting an Elder named Billy Bird spoke briefly before lunch and reminded the group just what had been lost – the salmon runs, the crab and prawns, the seaweed beds, the clam gardens. The Namgis people and their relatives on Gilford Island, Kingcombe Inlet and Oweekeno are ocean people. Their life is on the ocean and without access to the ocean the fear is that they are no longer a people at all. For thousands of years these people have lived in …
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Interesting report from a group I hadn’t heard of before, the Centre for Innovative and Entrepreneurial Leadership. THey have just released a publication called “Coping with Growth and Change: The state of leadership in rural BC.” I have an interest in this given that I teach and facilitate collaborative leadership and I live ina rural community in BC. The report’s authors write: “Many people see leadership development assisting with issues like change, economic diversification, youth attraction, innovation and collaboration, key ingredients to 21st Century success for rural communities.” Many communities reported that youth are moving away and young families are …
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One of the key skills in deliberative dialogue is figuring out what we are, together. This is often called “co-sensing” or “feeling into the collective field.” There are many ways to talk about but the practice is on the one hand tricky and subtle, and on the other, blazingly obvious. In general, in North America and especially among groups of people that are actively engaged in questions about co-sening the collective field, a speech pattern I have notcied goes something like this: I feel that we need to… My thoughts are that we should… I just throw this out there …
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This week I was in a gathering with 16 friends about the nature of hosting new organizational structures that arise from the hosting practices that seek to move groups to new levels of consciousness and collaboration. The gathering was essentially four days long, and at the end of second last day I had an interesting conversation with my friends Peggy Holman and George Por about the art of harvesting. “Harvesting” is usually thought of as a way of telling the historical story of a gathering, and as a metaphor it has some value in terms of expanding the idea beyond …