Resilience — Berkana Collaborative

Open Spaces Project in Southern Africa

April 15, 2010 By Bob Stilger

I’ve had the chance to come to Southern Africa a couple of times a year for the last decade to work with wonderful people. My work has been as part of The Berkana Institute and our efforts to create the Berkana Exchange as a translocal network of people and places building healthy and resilient communities. Especially for the last couple of years I’ve been working with people from Johannesburg, Harare, Cape Town and Durban about how to find and support the people doing “our” kind of community work. This work is based on beliefs that are resonant with those listed on the About section of Resilient Communities. We find them everywhere (next month my daughter Annie Virnig and I will be talking about these at the 2010 TEDxTokyo — but that is a different blog).

So, what’s cooking? Over the last three months the GreenHouse Project in Johannesburg, South Africa and Kufunda Learning Village outside Harare, Zimbabwe, have been involved in an in-depth Appreciative Inquiry Process with the “Champions” of different community-based work and their partners. They both asked certain key questions:

What motivates you? What gives you strength?
What do you value about your work?
What are you working to change?
Really Why are you doing this work?
Where do you see yourself and your work in the near future?
What do you need to take you and your work to the next level?
What natural partnerships are emerging and will be necessary in your work?
What practical lessons have you learned? Are you sharing them with others? How do they respond to your work and the lessons you have learned?
How is your work and the lessons from it useful?
What have you learnt from sharing with others?

In a word, these sessions have been amazing! Listening to Dorah Lebelo talk about these conversations with people who are just getting on with getting on — who are changing their lives for the better by working with what they have without complaint — was inspiring. And, at the same time, we noticed the difference in her energy when speaking about this work as compared to her protracted battle with the National Lotteries Commission to release funds already awarded to GreenHouse Project for two major construction projects.

I’m going to link their reports here — the one from GreenHouse Project is over 50MB so it will take a while to download — filled with lovely pictures and well worth the wait! GreenHouse Project Report. Kufunda Learning Village Report. They are amazing, powerful and delightful reads.

As we talking about the learning from this process some different key phrases kept surfacing:

growing the work while shrinking the institutions
reclaiming relationships with people, land and food
learning — doing – reflecting
finding new meaning, creating new beliefs

At its core this is all really simple stuff. And, most of us have forgotten it.

As our conversations continued we began to speak of the role of GreenHouse and Kufunda in all this. They are hubs, seed crystals, catalysts, enzymes. They play the critical role of helping people and systems see themselves and each other. But what do they really do?

Okay, this is where it gets even more interesting. They do the same things as the people ar St. Luke’s Health Initiatives mentioned in other places on my blogs. Last month, working with SLHI in Phoenix we eventually said they have four core competencies:

They connect and convene
They support peer learning
They are the “goto” place for information and knowledge
They work from a strengths-based approach.

BINGO. In their roles as hubs and catalysts, this is exactly what GHP and Kufunda do. This is the core work which supports communities that practice what they believe and which aspires to create an influence beyond the immediate boundaries of their work.

Lots more to say about all this, but I’ll stop with this teaser!

Filed Under: BC, Resilience, Strenght Based Tagged With: syndicated

Bootcamp is Over

January 1, 2010 By Bob Stilger

Bootcamp is over. Those are the words that came to me last month when I was working in Phoenix with people from the St. Luke’s Health Initiatives. My trip to Phoenix came right after I returned from almost a month in southern Africa. What I heard and saw in Phoenix fit into the same pattern as my experiences in Africa.

My sense is that I, and many others, have been in deep training for this past decade. We’ve been learning how to see our world, our selves, our relationships and our work in new ways. The learning didn’t start ten years ago, and it won’t stop now, but I’m feeling like this is the time when we need to move on.

On a phone call yesterday my friend Chris Corrigan used three phrases which really caught my attention. He said we are not yet a community that practices and we are not yet a system that influences. He went on to speak about the work that needs doing now is practical decolonization.

A community that practices… My friend Robert Theobald used to always talk about how we needed to listen to the music, not the words. We’ve heard and used many words in the last decade. And they are powerful: presencing, hosting, healing, zero-waste, appreciation, feeding ourselves sustainably. The list goes on and on. Many of us have learned how to dance with words like power and love, warrior and midwife. The dance is good. But it is time now to practice, practice and practice. It is time to hear the music with our bodies. It is time to embody these practices. It is time to practice together as if our lives depend on it. They probably do. No, I don’t know exactly what this means. But I sense it means now is not the time to feel satisfied and complete in what we’ve done and learned so far. Now is the time to push our edges more than ever before.
A system that influences… Together we have a chance to create a new era, a step beyond the era which is disintegrating all around us. Many of us have been pioneers, engaging in promising experiments with new forms, processes and ventures which carry the DNA of the era we might create. Much of this work has been powerful, rewarding and exciting. And, it is not enough. We must find ways which allow this work to easily and naturally spread. I’m not talking about going to scale, I am talking about creating systems of influence. Systems of influence require the creation of eco-systems which are larger than our individual work and which connect that work so it can GROW. Communities of practice can create systems of infulence, indicators can create systems of influence, scenarios can create systems of influence. In South Africa I saw a reality TV show create a system of influence. What else? How do we help this work grow.
Practical decolonization… I love the phrase, simply because it hasn’t yet been overused! Decolonizing is the process of shrugging off the shackles of domination that have controlled our lives. We’ve all been colonized. Certainly the colonization and extermination of indigenous peoples all over the world has been the most obvious and most brutal. Many of us have been victims and perpetrators of practices of power over which has separated us individually and collectively from our selves, each other and all other life on this planet of ours. Now is the time for us to step out of our roles as colonized and colonizers — practically, clearly, irrevocably.

We know how to do this! That’s the good news from our work of the last decade. No, we don’t have a road map. Hell, we don’t even really know the destination. But we do know enough to continue, to deepen, to go to a next level. But we have to move. Part of this is, I am sure, learning how to be comfortable working with the Alchemy of Opposites. All of it, I know is done collectively in community, not individually in isolation.

A lot of my own thinking about this over the last couple of months has been influenced both by Adam Kahane’s new book Power and Love and an essay from Barry Oshrey that grew out of a conversation he and Adam had, also called Power and Love. I’m personally a little leery of both these terms — power and love — but they have been an important doorway into my current learning. Oshrey speaks of the need to develop robust systems which combine power and love and I think he’s got it right. I think that I’ve spent much of the last ten years working on relationships and harmony and listening. I think the focus of the next ten needs to be more on getting real work done.

Many blessings as we end the era of the “oughts” (aught 1, aught 2, …) and come into the era of the “tens” (inTENtion) <grin>

Filed Under: BC, communities of practice, emergence, Resilience, Robert Theobald, Social Innovation, systems of influence, Zimbabwe Tagged With: syndicated

Alchemy of Opposites

December 19, 2009 By Bob Stilger

I thought when I headed off to southern Africa in early November, I would have a spacious time for reflection, learning, and writing here. That wasn’t the case. I was engaged in pretty much non-stop work in various systems. AND, because I went with the intention of reflecting and learning, I carried that spirit into my work. I hope this will be the first of a number of posts here.

I started experimenting with a new Mac software — View Your Mind — and it was really help in chasing some ideas down. What I want to write a bit about today is holding the tension of an alchemy of opposites.

I think that many of us are being called to find our balance in this ecosystem of forces which are seemingly in opposition to each other, but which are each needed to find right direction and right action in these times. We must learn to be equally skillful in the role of midwife and warrior. We must be clear about our intentions and also able to surrender them. We must step into our own power from a place of love. It’s critical that we learn to listen more deeply than ever before, and to speak out without blame or judgment. We need to rigorously apply everything that we’ve been learning and do so from a place of spaciousness. We need to learn to travel the spiral of work that is both planned and emergent.

Calling this tricky is, of course, a huge understatement. It’s so easy to become trapped in either the upper or lower section of this ecosystem. None of us can let that happen any longer. I’m curious about where you find your self standing and working in this alchemy of opposites and look forward to some holiday discussion here.

Filed Under: BC, emergence, Resilience, Zimbabwe Tagged With: syndicated

A New Zimbabwe Emerging

November 15, 2009 By Bob Stilger

I arrived in Zimbabwe several days ago, my first visit this year. Since before Kufunda Learning Village was a glimmer in the heartmind of its founder, I have been journeying here. When people ask what I do at and with Kufunda it is often with a typical assumption of people in the global north that I am coming here to teach them something. I come here to learn. Of course, this dichotomy between learning and teaching is a false one. But mostly, I come to listen. To witness. To ask questions. To be present to the changes taking place at Kufunda and in Zimbabwe. I also come to connect Kufunda with others around the world — calling forth connections and relationships which help us all learn.

I first visited Zimbabwe in 2001 and have been witness to many years of things falling apart. Everything I’ve thought I knew or understood about collapse have been challenged. Each collapse is unique. Perhaps the only common thread is that times of collapse are a call for resilience. In some ways the country “hit bottom” last year. Some progress has been made since then, but for people who feel like they are at the end of their rope, it is slow and agonizing.

I came here aware of the pain and agony some were feeling. It wasn’t until I arrived that I also felt how strong the winds of shift are as well. So it is all present at the same time — agonizing stuckness, emerging creativity, willingness to change. When you’re stuck, what do you do? I was thinking this morning about cross country skiing on groomed trails (perhaps an odd thought since the daily temperatures here are in the 90s). When I’m skiing and see a crash coming, it is almost impossible for me to remember to simply lift my ski out of the track, and to take it from there. That first step, lifting out of the current track, can be so darn hard.

At Kufunda the need to do so is clear. The structure and processes which brought Kufunda to where it is today cannot continue. Among other things, the global economic crisis has shown up here in the form of fewer donor dollars. But even beyond that, it is clear that changes are needed. Kufundees have been able to spend a lot of time over the last five years learning how to host processes which help them develop deep relationships with each other. They have learned how to do permaculture. They have learned how to build with local materials and how to move towards zero-waste. They have learned how to use herbs for healing. They have learned how to share knowledge with surrounding communities and are beginning to learn how to help those communities reach out to others. Everything from bee-keeping to “arbor-loos” are part of the culture. There are many pieces in place and part of the work over the last several days has been looking at how to shift those pieces into a more productive overall pattern.

One of the questions I’ve had for years is about how Kufunda reaches out beyond the six communities it has ben working with since 2003. Even that is more clear. It does it through partnerships. For example, one of the friends of Kufunda founded something called “Tree of Life.” It is a process which works with victims of torture to help them heal. It is a powerful process led by the former victims themselves. Once people in villages are more healed, what next? Perhaps a partnership with Kufunda provides part of that answer — Kufunda can come in and help them remember ways of being a healthy village again.

Enough for now. Lot’s happening and I’ll be writing more!

Filed Under: asset-based, BC, emergence, Powers of Place, Resilience, Zimbabwe Tagged With: syndicated

Evaluations and Outcomes: Working with Emergent Processes

October 16, 2009 By Bob Stilger

One of the great challenges of the kind of work I and others are doing is figuring out how to measure our progress. We often have fundors involved who want to know what our metrics are, but more importantly our communities themselves need to know if their efforts are effective. All to often our work is sidelined when someone says where’s your strategic plan? Many of us don’t believe in strategic planning. We say show me a plan that was actually followed and that was helpful. But, still, we don’t have much that we work with instead. Sure, we follow our intuition and we’re good at using conversation and other tools. But it feels insufficient.

And I am so tired of hearing if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there . What does it mean to work with making the path by walking on it? How do we get collective reassurance that we’re headed in the right direction and not just spinning our wheels? One insight I had a few years ago was that in our new ways of working, we measure from the inside out. Rather than having a fixed set of reference points (goals and objectives) constructed in advance, we’re actually called on to learn how to watch what is actually happening in order to understand the direction that is emerging from within our system and then we have to talk about what that direction means.

One methodology I’ve come across that works in this way is something called Most Significant Change. The link will lead you to a version of the user’s guide from a couple of years ago. I have some problems with the methodology in that it uses a somewhat elitist process to refine data — but I think it has a promising, simple, fresh start. You ask people to notice what is significant about changes and then look for patterns and trends in their responses.

Someone recently forwarded an interesting article from a 2006 NonProfit Quarterly Evaluation for the way we Work. Michael Quinn Patter, the author, begins by saying The very possibility articulated in the idea of making a major difference in the world ought to incorporate a commitment to not only bring about significant social change, but also think deeply about, evaluate, and learn from social innovation as the idea and process develops. However, because evaluation typically carries connotations of narrowly measuring predetermined outcomes achieved through a linear cause-effect intervention, we want to operationalize evaluative thinking in support of social innovation through an approach we call developmental evaluation.

I’ve also been collecting interesting pieces of this and that for the last several years while this question has been bubbling in me including:

And many more. I’ve been collecting these for some time and finally have an opportunity to read and think about them. I’m very curious. What are others here finding helpful in terms of Evaluation and Measurement? What are you doing? What kinds of resources and documentation are helpful? What can you share here?

Filed Under: BC, emergence, evaluation, Measurement, most significant change, Resilience Tagged With: syndicated

Language of Listening

October 15, 2009 By Bob Stilger

Last night I was having dinner with an old friend, Francesca Firstwater. We were catching up on our lives and our work. Francesca is one of those remarkable people who has led a life of service. No drum rolls or trumpets — she just quietly shows up and discovers how she can serve. Right now she works as a child psychiatric nurse at a local hospital — when she is not tending the Buddhist stupa on mountainside near Spokane, or serving as a minister at a wedding or a memorial service. Our conversation turned to our work as listeners.

Listening to people is a key part of my work. Being fully present, listening with my whole heart and soul, noticing if there is a point at which something I’ve learned might be brought into the conversation as a question or a comment.

I remember a conversation I had last year with the person who had brought me to Queensland, Australia for a couple of weeks of work. I was able to spend time with four different groups of people working with people with disabilities. The National Disabilities Council in Queensland does fantastic work. They use a strengths based approach and they have done some wonderful recent work on Blue Skies Scenarios. More about that later. After two weeks of wonderful work I was having a final meeting with Valmae Rose, the DNS Queensland Director. Valmae starts to tell me about what she appreciated most about my work. I’m all pumped up after a number of very generative conversations and I’m looking forward to her saying things like the models you shared were just excellent or what you said about resilience was just brilliant. Valmae looks me in the eye and says, instead you’re a really good listener. My ego goes ouch, but after thinking about it for a while I’m pretty pleased. When we give people good listening, they learn what they already know. And most of us know a heck of a lot more than we think!

A couple of years ago I wrote an article about Listening. Ascent Magazine titled it Hear and Now and I think it gives a useful overview of this Language of Listening. A few years ago I came across a wonderful book Teaching with Your Mouth Shut which also speaks to the power of listening. Important territory!

Filed Under: BC, Bob, emergence, laguage, listening, Resilience Tagged With: syndicated

St. Luke’s Health Initiatives

September 8, 2009 By Bob Stilger

Yesterday I was preparing for a phone call with the St. Luke’s Health Initiatives in Phoenix. They’ve invited me to participate in their December annual conference as a “not-expert” giving a “not-keynote.” After reading through the notes from their recent planning meetings, my attention went to the website to deepen my understanding of what they are doing. And I was blown away. The first documents I came across was StLukesHealthInitiatives-Fall03. It is an amazing look at resilience in health. It begins with a suggestion familiar to many of us: what if rather than being the absence of illness and pathology, health is actually the harmonious integration of mind and body within a responsive community?

In the frame work St. Luke’s has been using, there are at least three central components of resilient social-ecological communities: diversity, redundancy and feedback loops. They go on to define community as group of people with diverse characteristics who are linked by social ties, share common perspectives, and engage in joint action in geographical locations or settings — and then go on and define what each of these things actually are. It’s a powerful report and the points directions for each of us to attend to our own health. The video to the right is a work in progress which illustrates some of this thinking.

So, after reading it, I head back to the St. Luke’s website for more. And quickly I’m led to StLukesHealthInitiatives-Fall08, the report five years later. Take a look at it. The quality of the work and the directness of the language is delightful. The report ends with 16 lessons learned:

FOCUS ON COMMUNITIES-AS-PLACE. We build healthy, resilient communities in physical, space-bound settings where we live, work and play. The siren song of communities of interest, practice and identity can enhance our ability to improve community health, but it can also direct our attention, resources and energy away from place-bound connections of social reciprocity and support.

START WITH SHARED CONVERSATIONS. This will lead to shared relationships and shared identity. These, in turn, will contribute over time to shared meaning, shared trust, shared motivation and shared action. The result is the adaptable, engaged community.

PULL, DON’T PUSH. ATTRACT, DON’T PROMOTE. Invite others in to build networks of engagement, involvement and shared action. Don’t treat people like consumers or clients. Attract others bymodeling the result you desire. Don’t promote an ideology or set of techniques everyone else has to accept.

TAP INTO INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY STRENGTHS. Use these to build tangible assets (housing jobs, infrastructure) and develop the knowledge and skills (education) that create the conditions for optimal health and sustainability.

DEVELOP AND EXTEND NETWORKS OF LEARNING, PRACTICE AND ACTION. Think associationally. Build up and out, down and in simultaneously.

BE A CONNECTOR. Channel and connect ideas, energy, resources. Everything flows from this.

SPEAK TO POWER. Find and encourage the community’s collective voice to connect with economic and political resources in ever wider circles of influence, investment and consequence.

CONSIDER THE AUDIENCE. Adapt your language and message frames accordingly.

MOVE FROM ACCOUNTABILITY TO LEARNING. Disseminate what you learn as widely and transparently as possible. Accountability will arise naturally from the shared learning (meanings) of the community.

SEED AND FEED. Start with a focused task or project that has a good probability for success. Build on success by scanning for new opportunities and sowing seeds. Pursue those that take root and start to grow. Not all of them will.

INVEST FOR LONGER TIME PERIODS. Seeds that take root do better with focused, longer-term investments of human and financial resources. Be watchful – but don’t be in a rush to hurry on to the next big thing.

TAKE TIME TO MAKE TIME. Community building is long distance and never ending. Get off the clock now and then. Replenish yourself and others. It always winds back around.

DRINK FROM THE WELL. Find, nurture and drink from community wells of trusted information, services and social connections. They are individuals and organizations alike. If you can’t find one, drill for one. Connect others to it.

PLAN TO ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE TO PLAN. Do both in pencil so you can adapt to change.

LISTEN, LEARN AND LET GO. People come from very different places. Let them speak. People learn in different ways. Give them options and time. Lead by example. We raise healthy children this way. Why would communities be any different?

FIRE, READY, AIM. In community building, clarity emerges from practice, not practice from clarity. Start with action (fire), refine your practice based on what you’re learning (ready), then develop your theory of change (aim). Use that theory and knowledge to inform further practice, and so on in a cycle of never-ending adaptability, learning and change.

This is good, solid thinking. What’s also striking about it is that it isn’t rare anymore. Of course, it would be a huge stretch to say it is common thinking — but that’s the direction.

Frequently these days I’m confronted by the fact that we know a lot about new ways of thinking and being. Many of us no longer have any particular faith in the ways things have been done in the past. We’re even beginning to develop common language. I loved it that these reports speak of using attraction rather than promotion, for example. In the Berkana Exchange community it was Unitierra in Oaxaca, Mexico where I first heard people talking about commotion rather than promotion. Exactly the same idea. Or Nipun Meta from Charity Focus talks about fire, ready, steady, but it is the same essence as fire, ready, aim in the report’s last point.

The question, of course, is what will help us all practice more consistently in the field defined by these principles, values and beliefs? What’s growing here that can be cultivated? How do we begin to create frameworks, processes and structures which help us practice and learn in this field rather than always being distracted and thrown off balance when someone comes asking for our strategic plan or pre-planned outcomes?

Filed Under: asset-based, BC, emergence, health, Resilience Tagged With: syndicated

Powers of Place

August 25, 2009 By Bob Stilger

One of the initiatives I’m currently working on is Powers of Place, developed by Sheryl Erickson, Renee Levi and a host of others with funding from the Fetzer Institute.

The Powers of Place Initiative is a partnership of individuals, organizations and sites catalyzing a new field of study and practice based on the premise that right relationship between people and the places they gather offers the potential for transformative action toward what is needed at this moment in history.

Our work includes:

Creating and supporting an international network of networks dedicated to the mission of the Initiative
Conducting seminal research and developing theory
Producing and distributing educational and outreach materials to support the work of people from a variety of disciplines and perspectives
A core assumption we’re working with is that the powers of place and our relationship with it, influences a group’s capacity to engage in transformative life affirming action

A calling question for our work is what becomes possible when we are in intentional relationship with the powers of place?

One of the early images we’ve used to guide our work is this:

You can get an overview in our introduction Powers of Place Introduction.

What I’m most interested in is how we use the power of place to increase our individual and collective resilience to navigate in these times. Whew — big words.

When I look out at the channel from Cortes Island at the northern tip of British Columbia’s Gulf Islands, I begin to settle. I begin to calm down. The same thing happens to me when I walk the trails of Windhorse Farms in Nova Scotia. Or when I watch a sunset from the big rocks of Kufunda in Zimbabwe. These places vibrate in my being and help me return to who I am.

While I was on Cortes earlier this week, at Hollyhock, I began thinking about Christopher Alexander’s A Timeless Way of Building where he develops the fundamentals of Pattern Langauge. He talks about how when we come into a room we know if it is alive. He goes on to speak of how it isn’t simply the existence of doors and windows and walls, but their relationship to each other. Thinking of this, I stood on the Hollyhock deck looking out at the islands in the foreground and mountains in the distance, with water closeby, and I started wondering if there are particular geographic features which begin to make some places seem more alive.

What’s the mixture here? How does the fundamental pattern of Hollyhock contribute to its aliveness? How much of the good energy of so many people who have been there contributes? And what of my own good memories of being there over many years? Why is it that I settle more easily and more quickly there than when walking the streets of downtown Seattle?

Filed Under: BC, PoPI, Powers of Place, Resilience Tagged With: syndicated