Work these days and the Circle of Courage

Prince Rupert, BC

The sun goes down at 9:00 up here, in the TRUE Pacific Northwest (of Canada, anyway). It’s a beautiful day here on the north coast of British Columbia.

I’m here meeting with the group that is planning the appreciative summit on Aboriginal youth suicide prevention, and we are making great progress. We are two weeks away now, the agenda is largely complete and I am starting in on the workbook for the summit and the design for a policy roundtable the following day which will involve World Cafe process with policy makers and leaders to act on the recommendations from the summit. It’s getting exciting.

This week I was in Nanaimo as part of another initiative I am running, a community engagement process on child welfare. I had the great privlege of working again with Dr. Martin Brokenleg, who went over his circle of courage model again, and this time I took copious notes. We are applying the Circle’s principles – Belonging, Mastery, Independence and Generosity – to redesigning the child welfare system on Vancouver Island. If you want to know more about Dr. Brokenleg’s thinking, which arises from traditional Lakota teachings on raising children and youth, you can download this .rtf document of the notes I made of Martin’s full morning session.