1. Practice noticing who’s in the room at meetings – how many men, how many women, how many white people, how many people of color, is it majority heterosexual, are there out queers, what are people’s class backgrounds. Don’t assume to know people, but also work at being more aware. 2a. Count how many times you speak and keep track of how long you speak. 2b. Count how many times other people speak and keep track of how long they speak. 3. Be conscious of how often you are actively listening to what other people are saying as opposed to …
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One of the most useful books of the past five years in terms of the work I do is Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging. In it he aggregates the wisdom of those of us who have been practicing participatory process for the last 30 years in North America. The essence of the work is that social fabric, created through conversations that produce relationships, is the foundation for improvement in communities and the fundamental pre-requisite for effective and sustainable problem solving. This set of videos is a great introduction to Peter’s work. View parts one, two and three.
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I’ve recently been introduced to the work of Al Nygard, a Native consultant working out of South Dakota primarily in Tribal communities. Al’s approach and values are very similar to my own, and it’s cool to see familiar ideas in another person’s hands. Al works with traditionally based models of leadership and calls his community development work “community empowerment.” My colleague Jerry Nagel sent me a link to a video of Al answering the question of why it is so hard to get things done in Tribal communities. Essentially he identifies seven factors that make community empowerment unique. These seven …
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In Seattle yesterday I was listening to a keynote by Dr. Jack Shonkoff who is a breain researcher at Harvard with an interest in early childhood development. He said an interesting thing about American health care which kind of answers the question for me about what the US is good at. Many Americans who are opposed to public health care use the argument that people from other countries come to the United States for the world’s best treatment, surgery and acute care. No question that if you can afford it, the USA has the best. BUT – and this was …
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Silo busting is a very interesting thing. Everyone knows that systems atrophy when they divide their work into silos. Silos entrench difference and prevent learning across sectors whether we are talking about departments in an organization, or a social system like health care or child and family services. Silos have limited usefulness. They divide work into manageable chunks. But in general they create reductionist responses to systemic problems and they pose a massive challenge to people working nfor change. If we first have to bust the silos, and only then can we address the problems, how do we know we’ll …