Learning from the margins of your organization

Who are the people on the margins of your organization, or your community? The people who used to participate, but left? Clients who don't have input into decisions about the organization? Maybe those who are mentally ill, homeless, or refugees? Those with different political or religious beliefs than the mainstream of your group?

How do you move toward people on the margins and learn from them? In my work with organizations, I find that the wisdom and energy needed for groups to shift in positive directions often can't happen until the group learns from and incorporate the leadership of those on the margins.

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"You seem like a white, middle-class suburban guy with no problems. What do you struggle with?"

My friend Walter asked me this question. He had recently come out of a long period of homelessness and addiction, and he was always very open with me about his past and current struggles. Walter also testifies to everyone around him about how God turned his life around. I wanted to be as honest with Walter as he was with me. My relationship with Walter challenges me to stop pretending that I have it all together. Walter challenges me to allow myself to be changed in relationships, to be changed by God. In response to his question, I talked about the depression and suicides that have been around me throughout my life, and my struggle to move from withdrawn, numb places to being alive and engaged. We talked about lust and other forms of addiction that can take me away from God and myself. I also talked about the many privileges and comforts I've had throughout my life. As we've gotten to know each other better, I've started to challenge Walter more, about ways his spirituality might deepen with more listening and seeking out the spiritual truth that others have.

This fall Walter and I are going to do a series of presentations about "Spiritual Friendship Across Differences." One of those presentations will be at Twin Cities Friends Meeting (1725 Grand Ave., St. Paul) on December 12 at 9:45 am. We invite you to join us.

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Connecting the mainstream and margins

This fall I'm serving as the interim executive director at City House, a nonprofit who has a mission of "connecting the mainstream and margins for mutual spiritual growth and transformation." I have volunteered with City House for several years, and I met my friend Walter through this volunteering. At City House we are asking how this practice of spiritual friendship across difference might be more fully unleashed in our communities. If you are drawn to this question, I invite you to an evening of discernment about the future of City House on Nov. 18. You don't need to need to have experience with the organization, just an interest in the questions we are asking.

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In your life, organization, and community

We each have ways that we are in the mainstream of groups, and ways we are on the margins of groups. Within your organizations and communities, how are those mainstream/margins lines crossed for mutual learning and sharing of power?

I offer facilitation in organizations to increase clarity, consensus, and commitment, to help build more just and sustainable communities. I'm especially interested in helping design and facilitate inclusive, proactive processes that engage people who haven't traditionally been a part of organizational decision making. Please let me know if there are ways I can support organizations that you are connected with. I'm also grateful for your ideas, challenges, and suggestions.

Tidal Wave Coming: Is Your Organization Ready?

There is a tidal wave of social change coming. Our relationships with the economy, the environment, energy, and each other are in the midst of major shifts. Will your organization be lifted up by this tidal wave or engulfed by it?

Supporting the Great Turning

I'm increasingly drawn to do work that intentionally serves the Great Turning, "a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization." (Joanna Macy) I want to support organizations as they discern how they can best contribute to this turning. I made the diagram above to express some of the key elements I see in this turning to some groups I'm working with. Joanna Macy and David Korten have written in depth about the Great Turning. The background image is "Pinwheel of Star Birth" from the Hubble Telescope.

Do you see this Great Turning happening? How are you engaging with these shifts?

How to dream big and attract others to the process

The world is shifting quickly. Most organizations want to dream and act boldly so they can respond to and inform these changes. Yet most organizations struggle with how to do this well.

I want to tell you about a visioning process that an organization that I'm working is using. Next month I'm facilitating a summit that Olney Friends School in Ohio is hosting. Here are seven suggestions for how your organization can dream big and attract people to that process, with examples from this high school's visioning and discernment process.

1. Connect your organization's questions with pressing global and regional questions. A guiding question for Olney's visioning is, "How can Olney be of service in the creation of a new green economy in Appalachia?" The school is combining bold questions about transitions in the broader society with questions about the future of their school. They are entitling their summit, "People, Planet, Place: Case Studies in Organizational Transformation: A Summit on the Future of Olney Friends School." This kind of broad thinking can make it easier to challenge the status quo patterns of an organization and open up powerful new possibilities for carrying out the mission of an organization.

2. Invite participation in personal and creative ways. For Olney's summit, they are inviting everyone that is already connected with the organization (students, alumni, parents, etc.), but also people they admire who are working on environmental and economic sustainability in their geographic area and professional fields. Olney has worked hard to make the summit a beneficial time of learning and reflection, even for those not invested in Olney itself. The summit will include presentations, music, and films about innovative ways people are working for environmental and economic sustainability.

3. Ask for support for the visioning process. Olney received grants from four Quaker funders to support the summit. They are also structuring classes this fall to integrate the summit process into student life this fall.

4. Make multiple ways for people to engage in visioning. Olney set up an online database of ideas for the school's direction that people can add to. People can also participate in-person at the summit. Summit participants will be able to sample hands-on experiences connected with the school, such as planting garlic and touring the farm on campus. During the summit, we're planning interviews, writing, small group and large group ways for people to give input.

5. Set compelling and bold topics that are both specific and open-ended. Olney's Board defined two broad dreams, "A new green economy in Appalachia" and "Sustainable independent schools," and they are inviting people to fill in the details of those dreams. They provided some direction so the visioning process wasn't too overwhelming, while resisting the temptation to plan all the details themselves.

6. Gather, gather, gather... and then let go and notice what emerges. Olney will be gathering oodles of ideas for how the school could carry out its dreams, and we'll ask everyone at the summit to help us process and absorb those ideas. But the core element of Quaker discernment involves holding all those possibilities lightly and settling into a place of inner stillness to listen for the possibilities that have the most life and sense of calling. In that process, entirely new directions or combinations of ideas might arise. Olney's process is based in Quaker practices, but adapted to welcome and include broad participation.

7. Connect dreaming with doing. I encourage groups that I work with to have a period of prototyping, where they can quickly test out ideas from their vision so they can fail often and learn quickly. The energy and learning of the visioning process can be carried into this phase of experimenting and learning. When a large group of people help shape a vision, many of them will be eager to help implement it.

Olney's summit still has space for people to participate, October 28-30 in Barnesville, OH. All events are free and open to the public. It would be fun to have some of you there!

The focus of my consulting work is facilitating visioning and discernment, to help build just, sustainable, and healthy communities. I'd be happy to talk with you, at no charge, about how this might work in your organization.

Six ways to convey the spirit of your work with video

In my work, I often use video making as one way to express and cultivate the spirit of an organization or program. Here are a few ways you can use video to further and deepen your own work. Increasingly, if you are not using video to illustrate and invite people into your work, you're missing a large percentage of your potential audience.

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1. Ask leaders in your field to do a video interview about how their work relates to the ideas at the core of your work. Post the video on YouTube and share it with your network. People who are searching for the interviewee will also get exposed to your idea, and you'll also have an opportunity to build more of a partnership with the interviewee.

My previous post of an interview with Diana Whitney about Appreciative Inquiry and Whole Systems Healing is one example of this.

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2. Videotape stories from the people most impacted by your work. Group the stories in themes that show the range of outcomes from your work. Post the videos on your website and use them to tell your organization's story.

I've had the privilege of consulting with the FATHER Project for past year and a half, supporting their planning and evaluation. This summer we videotaped several participants as they told their own stories about how the project has impacted their lives. We linked short video clips from these interviews to the logic model for the project, so a personal story illustrates each intended outcome.

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And a few more tips:

3. Embed videos within email newsletters and updates, giving people another way to receive your message.
4. Invite children that are connected with your work to write their own stories and make these stories into movies. The process of making and showing these movies can be a great community builder. I'm doing that this week with East African children at high-rise buildings in my neighborhood.
5. Envision the future of your organization and community by making videos that combine images and sounds that express the vision you are working toward.
6. Get started. You don't have to be an expert in movie making. Experiment, post it online, and ask for feedback.

I'd be glad to do a free consultation with you about how you could effectively use video in your organization. More examples of videos I've made with organizations are on my website.