The Province of British Columbia runs an amazing Aboriginal Youth Internship progra. The program takes young ABoriginal people (under 30) and places them in a 12 month program featuring nine months of working within the provincial government and three months of working with Aboriginal organizations and governments. The chief architect and steward of this program is Sasha Hobbs, who is sitting next to me in a fog bound Vancouver harbour. She is working with another friend of mine, the amazing Priscilla Sabbas, and together they are working with 25 amazing young people in their second year of operation. Intake is done in the spring, so if you are interested in applying, or know someone who is, check the website in March or April and get your application in.
The cool thing about this program is that it is most definitely not a token position. These are real positions with government ministries and Aboriginal organizations, and by all accounts the sponsors in the BC government want interns to be able to build their capacity and knowledge in working within the BC Government’s new relationship with Aboriginal communities. Furthermore, the interns that go through the program meet three times a year with each other and stay in touch afterwards, moving towards a cohort model for their community of practice, working and learning together across ministries and organizations.
So here’s a plug for a great little government program that is working, under good grounded community leadership and making a practical and positie difference for the capacity of our communities.
I first saw Van Jones speak at the Pegasus conference last year, and I know of his work through some of the people I have been working with in the Food and Society network. Here is an article summing up his thoughts on a New Green Deal, which brings social and economic justice together. Having done some work this past week setting up a national network of urban Aboriginal economic development practiitoners and thinkers, I think what Van is pointing to here has immediate relevence for Canada as well:
To change our laws and culture, the green movement must attract and include the majority of all people, not just the majority of affluent people. The time has come to move beyond eco-elitism to eco-populism. Eco-populism would always foreground those green solutions that can improve ordinary people’s standard of living–and decrease their cost of living.
But bringing people of different races and classes and backgrounds together under a single banner is tougher than it sounds. I have been trying to bridge this divide for nearly a decade. And I learned a few things along the way.
What I found is that leaders from impoverished areas like Oakland, California, tended to focus on three areas: social justice, political solutions and social change. They cared primarily about “the people.” They focused their efforts on fixing schools, improving healthcare, defending civil rights and reducing the prison population. Their “social change” work involved lobbying, campaigning and protesting. They were wary of businesses; instead, they turned to the political system and government to help solve the problems of the community.
The leaders I met from affluent places like Marin County (just north of San Francisco), San Francisco and Silicon Valley had what seemed to be the opposite approach. Their three focus areas were ecology, business solutions and “inner change.” They were champions of “the planet”–rainforests and important species like whales and polar bears. Many were dedicated to inner-change work, including meditation and yoga. And they put a great deal of stress on making wise, earth-honoring consumer choices. In fact, many were either green entrepreneurs or investors in eco-friendly businesses.
Every effort I made to get the two groups together initially was a disaster–sometimes ending in tears, anger and slammed doors. Trying to make sense of the differences, I wrote out three binaries on a napkin:
1. Ecology vs. Social Justice
2. Business Solutions (Entrepreneurship) vs. Political Solutions (Activism)
3. Spiritual/Inner Change vs. Social/Outer Change
People on both sides of the equation tended to think that their preferences precluded any serious consideration of the options presented on the opposite side.
Increasingly, I saw the value and importance of both approaches. I thought, What would we have if we replaced those “versus” symbols with “plus” signs? What if we built a movement at the intersection of the ecology and social justice movements, of entrepreneurship and activism, of inner change and social change? What if we didn’t just have hybrid cars–what if we had a hybrid movement?
I wouldn`t be surprised to see Van Jones in the new administration in the US when Obama wins next week.
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission launches today (hooray that my friend Jane Morley was named as one of the commissioners last week!) and I’m here at Queen’s University in Kingston to run an Open Space as part of a conference of academics, policy makers and public servants from First Nations and non-Aboriginal governments and institutions on the topic.
In Canada, the process that is being embarked upon today is spurred by the residential school experience. The main brief of the TRC will be to write the history of that 150 year period in Canadian history when residential school did huge amounts of personal and collective damage to Aboriginal children, families and communities.
But as I’ve been thinking about this topic in preparation for tomorrow’s Open Space, I’ve been thinking about reconciliation from a broader perspective, and I’ve been thinking about it specifically in relation to the way reconciliation helps us to create generative relationships that can be the basis for paradigm shifts. Today I was in a conversation with the Mohawk artist and teacher Rick Hill who filled me in on his experience of the Haudenosaunee worldview about relationships. Rick said that for Mohawks, the primary form of relationship is the family. So in the thanksgiving address used by Haudenosaunee Elders for opening gatherings, the natural world is referred to by family relations: mother earth, grandmother moon, our brothers and sisters in the plant and animal kingdom. Likewise, for important relationships, the Haudenosaunee government gives names to politicians and senior public servants because by doing so the confederacy “extends the rafters” of the longhouse to include strangers. Once you are named, you are family and once you are family, you are able to be in relationship.
When I asked Rick the question “What are the purpose of relationships?” he answered me by saying that relationships are the places in which we find peace. It is most important in all indigenous cultures I know of that this search for peace be a communal experience. In contrast to the Buddhist path of individual enlightenment, the Haudenosaunee worldview holds that collective peace cannot be served by an individual seeking their own path. In fact, such an act is dangerous and hubristic and leads to a reprimand from the clan mothers. The purpose of relationships, Rick said, is to find ourselves in a peaceful place together.
So this had me thinking about my opening tomorrow and so I called my partner Caitlin to get her thoughts and she said similar things. Her take on reconciliation is that it is actually a means to an end. Only when we are reconciled to what is real, can we find new things to do and new ways to be. As long as we live with the energy of unresolved historical stories, we cannot be in a place of generative shift. So Caitlin suggested an appreciative exercise, which I intend to begin with tomorrow. She suggested that each person take a moment to notice for themselves what reconciliation feels like, and what it allows us to do. From there we can ask the question of what might then be possible in the public sector in Canadian society if we achieved the kind of peace and resourcefulness that comes with having reconciled with each other. If what is needed is a fundamentally different way of being with one another, reconciliation represents not an end state in itself, but rather a pre-condition to moving to the generative space of co-creating new paradigms.
I’m curious to see how this all plays out.
Update: Opened space this morning and had a lively agenda setting session. My favourite ones so far included a Kingston City police officer who convened a session called “Why do we support and adversarial justice system?” and a new federal public servant who asked how non-Aboriginal people cna become allies of Aboriginal peoples.
The Westin Hotel in Atlanta, which lost windows in last week’s tornado.
A strange week indeed. I left home yesterday morning bound for Toronto and then on to Atlanta where I am doing some work with Public Radio Capital and Native Public Media, looking at how Native community radio stations make an impact. Yesterday I made it as far as Toronto, but a flight delay meant I was cutting my connection close, and I still had to apply for a work visa at US Customs and Border Protection. I arrived in secondary screening at 10 to eight, with an 830 flight pending. There was no one else in the room, save a distraught Hispanic woman who was being denied entry and a tired Chinese man, waiting for his visa too. I have applied for four of these TN visas and it’s not an onerous process. All three officers however remarked on my short time, and I patiently explained to them that my flight was delayed, I was doing my best and could they try and get me on the 830 flight to Atlanta.
But alas, US Customs and Border Patrol is not about customer service. It is very much about creating an environment that seeks to put you off your game, get you to tip your hand, spill the beans. Officers stay out of rapport, breaking eye contact should you try to engage, and in secondary screening, they move very slowly, laughing and talking loudly about clearly non-related stuff. It seems designed to put you on the defensive. They’re cool…what’s bugging you? So alas at 830, after sitting alone in the customs hall with five officers trading stories, an officer finally called me forward, asked a few questions and gave me my visa. By then the plane had gone and I was bound for a night in Toronto. There was no apology to be had. But I don’t complain – that is their job: to screen anyone entering the United States and ensure that no immigration laws are broken. That is how things are with Homeland Security. For me it’s just good practice in patience.
As for Air Canada, they were good enough to recognize their part in the timing delay and they nicely put me up at the Sheraton right at the airport. So props to them.
Luckily my connection was non-essential, and so I rebooked for this morning, and shot down here on a quick CRJ flight, arriving at noon, which was too early for this Shearton, so, stranded again, I set out around downtown Atlanta searching for life. It was long before I discovered that life, even on this lovely cool spring day, was all underground, in the Peachtree Center mall, where long lines of office workers were queued up at fast food outlets for lunch. I found some decent pad thai (Atlanta is a very multicultural city, despite your prejudices about what Georgia must be like) and settled into read the Globe and Mail. In the Life section I read this quote by the poet James Richardson, which sums up my week:
The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.
Sweet. And so with that, I headed back out into the downtown core and shot some photos of the buildings, and especially the Westin Hotel which lost a whole lot of windows in a tornado last week. Tomorrow I run a two hour world cafe on measuring the impact of Native community radio stations, then I hop an afternoon flight to Toronto and on to Vancouver so that I can arise bright and early Thursday for the first day of two with the Department of Fisheries and Ocieans. I finish that job on Friday at noon, debrief, hit a 5pm flight to Nanaimo and head up to Parksville to run a weekend retreat for the Vancouver Aboriginal Transformative Justice Service until Sunday at noon. Then I’m home, and staying there for about two weeks. That will be the longest stint at home this year, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to play with my kids and tend our new garden.
If I didn’t have flow, and if I didn’t see travel and work like this as one long extended meditation, I don’t know how I’d survive it.
I ran a workshop last week for the Indigenous Adult and Higher Learning Association of British Columbia. The taske was to to spend a day and a half reviewing the high level vision and direction of the organization and to come up with some streams forward to present to the organization’s membership at the AGM. In thinking about the design of the gathering, I chose to consciously use Theory U to help structure a series of exercises. I proposed a five phase process for the day:
- Sensing needs and purposes and reviewing the world outside
- Appreciative Evaluation of the organization’s path over the past five years
- Presencing the vision for the near future
- Crystallizing the intention of the emerging visions
- Harvesting forward to present to the AGM
For the first three phases I created a series of reflective exercises, based in part by some of the exercises Otto Scharmer has been using in his work. The list of questions went as follows:
Sensing
- What are the voices tapping us on the shoulder? What are the forces competing for our attention?
- What are our sources of frustration in the world?
- What are our sources of joy?
- Think of the diversity of IAHLA membership. What are they facing that is coming through you in this moment?
Each person journalled individually on these questions and then we went around the circle of six and harvested what was in the field. At the end of the exercise we had a harvest that represented an environmental scan that was presenced through the minds and hearts of each Board member.
Appreciative evaluation
- Thinking of IAHLA’s journey as a canoe trip on a river, five years ago, when IAHLA began, what caused the founders to put the canoe in the river?
- What landmarks have we passed on our journey over the past five years?
- Who has been there with us, in the boat or on the shore?
- If we imagine the journey extending through where we are now, what does our past and present say about where we are going?
- If you received news this afternoon that IAHLA’s funding were to disappear what would your initial reaction be? What would you fear for first?
In the same fashion I led the group through these questions, with each person journalling individually. The result was a harvest, drawn on the frame of a canoe journey that recorded the founder’s vision as we have inherited it, the work that we have done, a sense of where we are going, a list of people and organizations that have been instrumental in getting us there and, most interestingly from the last question, a list of what is essential. Many of the board members remarked that this exercise was powerful in that it connected the current board to the legacy of the founders and those that came before, who started the entire movement of offering this type of learning centre in Aboriginal communities. This exercise resulted in a powerful sense of stewardship for the movement.
Presencing vision
For this exercise we used a framework document that describes the work of IAHLA and captures the overall intention and purpose of the organization. Participants were invited to spend nearly an hour on a learning journey with this document, using the following questions as a guide:
- Inspired by the framework, what are three shifts in the world you can see IAHLA spearheading?
- For each of these shifts, imagine being in that changed future and note down how we might have arrived there.
- Find and circle parts of the framework that will have contributed to that shift.
The harvest from this was a fantastic conversation in which we identified eight areas of shift and some of the major strategic landmarks that would appear on those paths. In the subsequent conversation as we crystallized the intent of these directions we talked extensively about some of the priority areas, the work that might have the most impact, and that which the organization’s members might be most excited in.
We will capture these results in a large graphic harvest for the AGM, at which time we will be inviting the membership in a cafe to reflect on these eight shifts and contribute another level of collective strategic thinking to the work.