As a traditional musician schooled primarily in the Celtic tradition, I am fond of traditional themes and devices for communicating messages. On our home island right now there is a sometimes fierce debate occurring about the future of the Crown lands, that involves the possibility of creating a national park. Today I was thinking about the complexities of the debate, and how it has seemed to me that those leading the opposition to the park are speaking on the one hand out of a concern for protecting something dear about our Island, but it has felt a little off to …
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Last week I was in a number of conversations about the role of governments and their relationships to citizens. I heard a common metaphor in these conversations, one which sounded familiar to me from my days working in the federal public service: people were speaking of citizens as customers. In their desire to provide good services and meet community needs, governments often consider citizens as customers. Big consulting firms, perhaps re-purposing their commercial processes, sell this idea. Conservative commentators and those who import business ideas into the realm of public administration are enamoured by the simplicity of the metaphor. The …
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In a recent email thread between Bob Stilger and a bunch of us friends and colleagues about how to support community rebuilding in Japan, Nancy Margulies shared this story of working in post-Katrina New Orleans with a series of World Cafes: I hosted a number of World Cafés in New Orleans. The participants were a mix of people who had been directly impacted by the flood and those who had less or no material loss. We used the time for people to exchange their stories, share their feelings and listen to one another. This story-telling seemed to be so necessary …
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This past week I have been in Minnesota working with colleagues Jerry Nagel, Ginny Belden-Charles and Mandy Ellerton. We were conducting a second residential training in collaborative leadership with a number of planning grantees working in communities to make impacts on the social and economic determinants of health. In this residential we spent a fair bit of time working on tactical community organizing, exploring how to teach this from the perspective of the Art of Hosting. The traditional tactics of Alinsky-style community organizing operate by creating strategic targets for action and mobilizing community power against those targets. It’s a zero-sum …
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A lovely description of what happens when the magic of conversation flows. This past weekend I had the opportunity to be part of a Quaker-style “clearness committee” with a few twists thrown in. I have done a few similar sessions in the past, though it has been a while, and once again it proved to be a remarkable experience. The impetus for the session was a friend who, acknowledging that she is at a crossroads in her life and career, reached out for help with discernment. My wife, Emily, and I suggested convening a small group of …