Red Dust Healing – Book Review

Imagine you are sitting in a yarning circle¹, a fire blazing in the middle. Maybe you are outside sitting around a fire in a desert in Western Australia. Uncle Tom Powell is telling stories. Uncle Tom’s stories have power – power to heal.

This imaginative fire and yarning circle is what it is like to read through Red Dust Healing: the One Day Workshop.² Tom Powell has been running Red Dust Healing workshops, seminars, and story-telling for more than twenty years. This delightful short book is a transcription of one of his one-day workshops.

Tom is a Warramunga man from the Wiradjuri Nation³ and brings 60,000+ years of accumulated knowledge and wisdom of his people into his workshops. He uses various tools, images, and metaphors to help workshop participants to heal their pains, traumas, abuses, and other forms of suffering.

The healing offered by Tom can be applied at personal, family, and collective levels. As Tom is wont to say, ‘It’s not your fault.’ Recognising that pain and suffering may have arisen in an abusive childhood, or from years of colonisation that Australian first-nations people have suffered, the tools for healing can be learnt and applied by anyone, including the descendants of colonisers.

Many of Tom’s tools and metaphors come from the natural world. Trees, fish, birds, kangaroos, and feathers are all offered as means towards remembering the lessons in his stories. It has always been this way – nature is our healer.

Tom is also known for his paradoxical one-liners, which he uses to further reinforce the lessons contained within his stories. Many of his one-liners are scattered throughout the book. A particularly poignant one-liner of Tom’s is, ‘Follow me, I’m right behind you.’ Tom states this with humility and graciousness. As he writes on the final page:

‘What I teach in Red Dust Healing is everything I’ve learned from my Mum and Dad. Everything I’ve learned from our Old People; everything I've learned I’ve learned from you. I get my strength from you. It’s true. I mean it and I wouldn’t tell you if it wasn’t true.’

Even the way the book acknowledges his authorship recognises this teamwork. The cover of the book does not state by Tom Powell; rather it states, with Tom Powell – you, me, and all those who participate are co-authors.

Tom’s sense of collaboration comes through in every page of the book, yet he always acknowledges the uniqueness of every participant in his workshops. Another of his one-liners summarises this well; ‘Scatter out and stick together.’

Tom relates stories in a kind, compelling, and humorous manner. This book captures that story-telling style well.

The book is only 80 pages long and includes many diagrams and graphics, making it very easy to read in one sitting, although you will most likely want to dip into it many times to connect with the tools and metaphors within.

Red Dust Healing is only available through the Red Dust website (https://thereddust.com/) It is available for A$50 plus postage. A phone number is provided to order a copy. For those outside of Australia, there is a ‘Contact’ form. I’m sure that if you contact Tom through this means he will be willing to let you know the cost of postage to wherever you are.

Notes:

1. A yarning circle is a process that comes from Aboriginal culture. It is where people learn, share, pass on knowledge, and build respectful relationships through a narrative format.

2. Tom Powell (with), Red Dust Healing: the One Day Workshop, Red Dust Healing Pty Ltd., 2025

3. The Wiradjuri Nation occupy land to the west of Sydney, Australia.

Sad and Depressed

We are living in a time when much of the world (human and other-than-human) is in pain. The phrase tears of the world has been applied to this time. The first use of this phrase seems to be by Samuel Beckett, in his renowned play Waiting For Godot. In that play Beckett has a character stating that ‘The tears of the world are a constant quantity.’

In his 1976 song Tears of the World, George Harrison applies this phrase to seeing warfare and pollution yet ‘All warnings fall on deaf ears.’

If we notice this constant pain and observe the unheeded warnings then we may respond in a couple of ways: prolonged periods of depression and despair or brief, albeit intense, bouts of sadness.

Each of these possible reactions offer quite different psychological and responsive pathways. Etymology helps to illuminate the difference.

Depression has Latin roots and literally means to press down. The image of someone pressed down, their face in the mud, possibly a knee on their back illustrates depression. In such a situation the person finds it difficult to move. It is utterly disempowering. Despair has a different lineage yet ends with the same outcome. Old French gives us de (meaning without) and the second part of the word arrives from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word spes meaning prosperity. Hence despair applies to someone without prosperity which has come to mean without hope in our modern-day language. Again the image of a person pressed down in a hopeless situation comes to mind. Neither depression nor despair leave any room for an active response.

The word sad however has a far more intricate and interesting lineage. The PIE word seto (meaning to satisfy) became the word sæd in Old English and originally meant to be sated, to have ones full. It sounds like an unlikely ancestry for our modern word sad doesn’t it? Following the chain of changes in meaning is revealing. The Old English meaning morphed into firmly established, set, and hard in Middle English. These meanings in turn gave way to ponderous, heavy, and full (both physically and mentally) all of which implied a sense of weariness. By the 1300s seto, sæd, and sad had come to be identified with unhappy, sorrowful, melancholy, and mournful.

But, critically, even though it contains a heaviness the word sad never suggested being pressed down and without hope.

With this exploration of the lineage and meanings of depression and sad we can begin to piece together the different responses we have to the tears of the world that each provides us with.

Pressing us down and making us immobile, depression closes in on us and collapses our circle of concern inward. All our energy and attention becomes focussed upon ourselves and may cause us to implode and become self-destructive.

Periodic sadness, on the other hand, widens our circle of compassion and empathy, and we recognise that our pain and sadness connect us to our common humanity and intimacy with the totality of life on this planet.

In 2015 two of the most notable spiritual leaders on the planet, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, met in Dharamsala (the Dalai Lama’s Indian residence) to explore the meaning and expression of joy. The meeting was recorded and published as The Book of Joy.¹ During that meeting much attention was paid to the emotion of sadness. Archbishop Tutu argued that rather than viewing sadness as being a challenge to joy, ‘it often leads us most directly to empathy and compassion and to recognizing our need for one another.’ The Dalai Lama referred to psychological research which showed that those ‘in a sad mood had better judgment and memory, and were more motivated, more sensitive to social norms, and more generous than the happier control group.’

It was also noted that sadness often lingers longer than fear and anger and hence may provide a more lasting basis for acting with compassion.

So, the next time you feel tears begin to slide down your cheek for no apparent reason it may be that you are shedding the tears of the world and mirroring the pain of many upon this planet.

Use this time of sadness to listen to the messages those tears hold. They may contain and fortify your compassionate response.

Notes:

1. Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, with Douglas Abrams, The Book of Joy, Avery, New York, 2016

Changing the World One Coffee at a Time

How do you change the world?  There are many emergencies that face us.  Whether the emergency that concerns you is a global one (climate change, refugees, war, famine etc), a national one (the crime rate, domestic violence, teenage suicide etc) or focused at a local level (green space for children to play in, urban development etc) then I suggest we all have a cup of coffee.

But this is not just any coffee.  Coffee here is a simple acronym that helps us think about how we undertake change in a complex, chaotic world.  COFFEE stands for: Creative Opportunities Flow From Encouraging Encounters.  Let’s tease out each of these words a little:

Creative.  To paraphrase Einstein, we cannot solve the world’s emergencies with the type of thinking that built them.  We will need our collective, diverse creative talents.  Creativity implies being open to new and unexpected thoughts, ideas and intuitions.  It is also worth noting that the idea of left brain – right brain is a myth; so we can all be creative.  The creativity we need is not of a technological nature either.  We need a creativity of spirit, a creativity of consciousness.  We need soul-centred and eco-centred creativity.

Opportunities.  The word derives from old Latin: ob = towards, and portus = harbour.  So, opportunity represents movement towards a favourable place.  It means seeking, being inquisitive and curious.  It means not accepting the status quo.  We can find opportunity in many guises, even in adversity.

Flow.  “Go with the flow” is a common phrase and here it has a similar sense.  Why battle the current?  Why not, as many Eastern martial arts practitioners advise, use the energy that exists.  It does not mean that we are always heading towards our goal, occasionally the flow may become an eddy, a whirlpool or cataracts.  As any kayaker knows, fighting against these flows will often end in disaster.  Going with the flow means staying in the now, the present.  However, it does not imply a non-thinking, laissez-faire, laid-back approach.  It is active.  Much like the kayaker, who knows that to stay in the flow they must keep paddling, making sure that the kayak does not get swept against the rocks or flipped upside-down by a standing wave.
  
From.  What we do emerges from our encounters.  Our actions are not pre-determined or planned by a far-away authority and then dictated to us.  Change starts with and flows from us, and it flows from the present; we are not dictated by the future.  This means that we must be wary of the cult of expertness.  Certainly listen to and use the knowledge of experts, but when it comes to decision-making, we all have a role to play.

Encouraging.  Who operates better when praised, acknowledged or congratulated?  Most of us think and create at a higher level when we are encouraged. This means that we are encouraged not just in our successes but also in our failures or mistakes.  There are many skills and techniques involved in being an encouraging person: creative listening, empathy, being present, building trust, speaking thoughtfully, appropriate use of humour, offering food.

Encounters.  In a world of complexity we need to embrace our diversity of experience, knowledge, skills, and wisdom.  This means we must encounter one another.  We must join in respectful dialogue, in circle discussion.  There are a myriad techniques for encouraging encounters (e.g. World Café, Appreciative Enquiry, Open Space Technology, Future Search, Citizen Juries ….)  Furthermore, our encounters are ones in which power shifts from the top to the bottom, from the centre to the margins, from hierarchies to interconnected networks.

Although I’ve just thrown out some thoughts about each of these six words, the power of the acronym is in its whole.  It tells us that if we create open, and caring spaces (Encouraging Encounters) then the solutions (Creative Opportunities) to the many emergencies we face are able to emerge (Flow From).

Thus, if we are going to overcome the emergencies that face us, we are going to have to embrace complexity, chaos and emergence.  We are going to have to meet one another, discover each other’s skills, share our collective wisdom.  Mostly, we are going to have to talk with one another (including strangers) over COFFEE.

You’ll notice that this acronym says nothing about applied techniques,  nor does it offer a step-by-step process.  Instead, it talks about a way of thinking, a mindset if you like.  This is deliberate.  In my professional work I have not presented solutions; rather I have sought to create spaces within which people can discover their own solutions.  I’m not about to change that here.  But I do have a challenge for you.  That is this: how can COFFEE assist in your own work for social justice and sustainability?

This acronym is at the heart of a book soon to be published.  OPPORTUNITIES EMERGING: Social Change in a Complex World goes into greater depth on each of the words of the acronym, as well as looking at the overall meaning of the acronym.  The book also provides a context within which complexity can be readily understood so that those of us dealing with complexity are better equipped to understand its nuances.  Check out the facebook page here.

Wasting Time and Energy on Politics (Part 1)

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We are now well into the 21st century and two observations about our collective human endeavour can be made.  First, if we do not collectively address the complex issues of now, there is little likelihood of human-kind continuing to enjoy a worthwhile existence into the 22nd century.

The second observation is that our collective decision-making institutions (governments) are either incapable or unwilling to address these issues in the manner in which they must be addressed.

During the 20th century representative democracy (that institution that embodied our collective decision-making enterprise) made some worthwhile and beneficial advances.  Women were enfranchised, many indigenous people finally obtained the vote from their colonial oppressors, dictatorial and cruel regimes were replaced by democracies (e.g. South Africa, India, Chile).  Two world wars were fought supposedly to protect democracy and freedom.  By the end of the century the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to suggest that representative democracy had prevailed.

But, also by the end of the 20th century representative democracy was showing clear signs of not coping with societal pressures, and the changes in technology, population and consumption that had been made since WW II.

Some Complex Issues

Climate change was beginning to be understood, but not taken seriously by politicians and global institutions.  Kyoto failed, Stockholm failed, and we continued to pump CO₂ into the atmosphere.

Violence continued to be the method-of-choice when it came to resolving conflicts.  Although it was reducing¹, the world still spent around $12 trillion (that's 12 million, millions) or more on its militaries in the final decade of the century.  At least two dozen wars were being fought as the century came to a close.

Social inequality grew at a staggering rate in the final decades of the 20th Century   The world gini coefficient² grew from 0.66 in 1980 to 0.71 in 2002 (one of the largest increases the world has ever seen).

Of all the animals that have become extinct in the last 500 years, 60% became so in the 20th Century.  In other words, the rate of extinction is increasing at an alarming rate.  Some scientists are so alarmed that they suggest that one-half of the world’s multi-cellular life forms will be extinct by 2100 because of “human-disruption of the biosphere.”

Opposition and Alternatives

Since the turn of the century there has arisen at least two major oppositional movements for social change.  One of these called for greater equality and was epitomised by the Occupy movement – along with it’s attendant slogan of “we are the 1%.”  The other is the opposition to those businesses that significantly fuel climate change (such as Big Oil and Big Coal).  At the forefront of this opposition are movements such as 350.org, Greenpeace and others.

Concurrent with these oppositional movements has been the growth of alternative approaches – often local, low-impact and non-hierarchical, yet highly innovative and inter-connected.

Many within these movements understand clearly that if change is going to be made, then it will have to be made by them.  It will not be made by politicians sitting and debating in parliaments, senates and congresses around the world.  It will not be made by high-level diplomats and government advisers meeting in summits, forums and conferences around the world.

These movements are implementing and proving the exhortation from Margaret Mead³ to:

“Never doubt that a small group of concerned citizens can change the world.  Indeed, its the only thing that ever has.”

Part 2 will question the efficacy of continuing to work for politicians and political parties if what we desire is better ways of making collective decisions and making decisions that will seriously address the issues we face in the 21st century.

1. Although world spending on the military did fall during the 1990s, it has been climbing again since the beginning of the 21st Century, The US is the biggest spender, contributing around 40% to the world spending.
2. The gini coefficient is an internationally recognised statistical measure of income inequality.  The coefficient is a number between 0 and 1, the closer it is to 1 the greater is the inequality.
3. Margaret Mead (1901 – 1978) was a highly respected cultural anthropologist who did much to make the insights of anthropology available to a wider audience.

Coming Back to Life: A Review

She’s at it again.  Joanna Macy is again asking us to wake up, open our eyes, take a look around and engage with the pain and joy of life.  She’s been doing it since at least 1983 when her first book, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age¹, was published.  This is her ninth book since then.  Here she teams up with psychologist, systems thinker and deep ecologist Molly Brown.  Together, they deal with how we can transform from an Industrial Growth Society to a Life Sustaining Society.

Macy has spent a lot of her life (she is now in her eighties) helping groups of people all over the world to understand their fears, their grief and their despair around social and environmental terrors.  Her methods are those that allow individuals and groups to tap into their head, heart and guts.  You don’t attend a Joanna Macy workshop to sit and listen.  You attend to participate, to be actively engaged in your own discovery and learning.

That is what is presented in Coming Back to Life²; a manual of dozens of exercises that enable people to move through the four stages of what Macy terms “the work that reconnects”: Gratitude, Honouring our pain, Seeing with new eyes, Going forth.

Macy suggests that there are three principal ways (“rivers” are her metaphor) by which we can awaken and engage.  Whether we do so from the river of personal grief, the river of new scientific insights or from the river of ancient wisdom matters little.  The three rivers are merging in our present time and beginning to flow together.

Macy uses knowledge, insight and wisdom from all three of these rivers in her workshops and in this book/manual.  This is one of the strengths of her approach; it is all-encompassing and inclusive of all experience and beings (yes, including the animals, trees and Gaia as a whole).

The exercises presented are drawn from all over the world and from a lifetime of practice.  It shows.  They are outlined in such a way that even just reading through the instructions it is possible to gain new ways of seeing, listening and understanding.

As with many books of this type, the benefit is not so much in the reading as in the putting into practice of what is read.  However, it is not necessary to wait for a workshop based on this book to be presented somewhere near you.  There are many exercises that a few friends could work through in an evening. 

Interspersed through the pages are quotations and poems that sitting by oneself can be contemplated and used as a way to see with new eyes.

So, no matter whether there is just you, a few friends, or a group of several dozen, there is much in this manual to help you through the work of reconnecting.  Macy does, however, recommend the use of workshops.  As she says: “A workshop is an island in time, where, removed from other distractions and demands, we can focus together long enough to explore our deeper responses...”

For anyone considering facilitating a workshop based on this book, Macy has provided expert guidance and suggestions in the book, including advice on when it is best to have participated in a particular exercise before attempting to facilitate it.

In a time in which we are bombarded by Hollywood blockbusters, hand-held video games and other distractions where we are more an external observer, it is good to find a book that actively welcomes and invites our participation and engagement in the world and its future. 

This is one such book.

1. Joanna Macy, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, New Society Publishers, 1983.
2. Joanna Macy and Molly Brown, Coming Back to Life, New Society Publishers, 2014

Building Freedom Prisons

Freedom was one of the major catch-cries of the 1960s.  Liberation was the name of the game: women's liberation, sexual freedom, civil rights.  The New World would appear before us once we were free.  A world of peace and equality was promised.

For awhile it did look promising.  Men began to discover their emotions, women began to discover the world outside the home and everywhere minorities were becoming full participants in economic and political realms.

Out of the call for freedom and liberation arose the Human Potential Movement.  Individuals were overcoming their low self-esteem, realising their potential and creating their own world.

So why is it that rates of depression are on the rise in the western world?  Why is suicide one of the big killers amongst youth?  We have greater choice yet less satisfaction.  We can spend ages in supermarket aisles choosing between essentially the same items.  We complain that there are dozens of channels on TV yet there is “nothing to watch.”  Why?


Did the promise of individual freedom only end in us having the freedom to build our own prison?
Oh, what a beautiful prison it is.  Instead of cell benches we have the latest designer lounge suites.  Instead of prison gruel we can taste exotic dishes from all over the world.  Instead of a bleak view from inside barred windows we can view the latest movie or watch a wildlife documentary at the click of a button.

Yet we are still trapped.  We are less connected with our fellow human beings than ever.  Oh sure, we have social media, we have instant connection via email, texting, iPhones and other such smart technology.  But, in general, individuals today have a smaller social network than they did a generation or two ago.

Escaping the Prison

To escape this prison we need to break down the walls.  We may also need outside help, which is where those with a commitment to community development come in.  If we are isolated in our prison then community is the means by which we break out.

If community is the answer, what was the question?  Perhaps that is the single most important tool that a community developer or community educator has in their toolkit – questions.  Helping people to understand the power of questions is a crucial step towards breaking down those prison walls.

One powerful question to ask is this:  Does our freedom equate with having more choice?  Many commentators on inner freedom and happiness suggest that the pursuit of our desires may be the very thing that inhibits us obtaining freedom.  It seems that the more choice we have the less free we become.

The ABCD of Agency Advertising

Do you notice that the adverts of aid agencies or those seeking support for work with disadvantaged communities often feature people who are impoverished in some way?  Perhaps it is the child in Africa without access to clean water?  Maybe it is the person in a wheelchair in a western nation who is dependent upon a carer to feed them?

Each of these adverts pull at our heart-strings.  The agencies then hope that this tugs our wallet out of our pockets and we donate to the charity.

Of course the agencies and charities need funding to be able to continue their work.  But ads like these will never help break down the structural barriers that mean that these agencies have to exist at all.

The message contained in the adverts is one of “look at me, I am in despair, I am at your mercy.”  The message we are given is that the person in the advert - and presumably hundreds of others - has no skills, no assets, no creative ability.

In community development there is a concept known as ABCD – Asset Based Community Development.  Briefly, ABCD begins with discovering what the assets, skills, talents and abilities of a community are, and works from that base.  This is different to that of a needs-based approach, where the deficiencies and lacks of a community are the starting point.  The problem with the latter approach is that it views people and communities as inherently valueless.  People in this approach bring nothing with them to the process of development, they are dependent entirely on the expertise, skills and knowledge of the outside developer.

But, people, no matter what their situation, have skills, knowledge and talent.  Why not acknowledge that?  Why not utilise that?

This is not to say that those who are on the margins of society or those in situations of disadvantage are not in need of assistance.  But, it is not for the expert to judge what that need is.  It is not for the expert to devalue the person or community by advertising the neediness.  People are of more value than that.

I have seen one advert that bucks this trend.  A young man who uses a wheelchair speaks about what he has managed to achieve, because of his abilities, with the help of others.  He does not present as needy or dejected or demoralised.  He projects himself as a very competent, engaging young man.  His story is very much one of “this is what I am doing.”  His parting words are: “How you doing?”

“How you doing?” indeed. 

The Myth of Commoner Non-Sense

Last weeks blogpost discussed the myth of the expert.  This week looks at the corollary of that myth: the myth that common folk lack the knowledge necessary to make public decisions.

Throughout the world, public decision-making is dominated by political and industrial elites, by men and women (mostly, men) who represent the rich, the powerful, the successful or the famous.  If we stop to seriously consider the representativeness of such public decision-makers we are left with the unhappy discovery that most of us, the common folk, are woefully under-represented.

Furthermore, if we critically scrutinise the decisions that these elites make then, again, we make an unhappy discovery.  The decisions have led us to more warfare, international hatred, increasing climate change, greater gulfs between the rich and the poor, less agricultural diversity and high levels of mental illness.

But, the accepted understanding is that in order to solve these issues, those making the decisions need to be knowledgeable, they need to be experts.  Furthermore, the ideology goes, such public decision-makers need to be leaders of industry, of business or at least, have succeeded in some public arena (such as sport or movies or music).

That is all a myth.

Being successful, having a business or policy background, does not guarantee a stranglehold on good decision-making.  What is missing?

Wisdom – that’s what is missing.  Specifically, common wisdom, or even, common sense.  How does common wisdom arise?

The Wisdom of Crowds

In the first decade of the 20th Century an elderly British scientist, Francis Galton, stumbled upon an intriguing insight at the West England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition.  One of the exhibits was a competition in which punters could guess the weight of an ox.  Up until that time Galton had believed that in order for society to remain healthy it had to be run by the select, well-bred, few.  His belief was about to be shattered.

The competition was open to all-comers.  It included a number of butchers and farmers who, in Galton’s estimation, would be experts and so be able to guess the weight of the ox much more accurately than the common folk.  After the competition was over Galton analysed the results.  What he found staggered him.  When he averaged the guesses of the common folk he found that they had guessed 1,197 pounds, just one pound short of the true weight: 1,198 pounds.  The guesses of the “experts” however, were much wider of the mark.

Galton had discovered in people the equivalent of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”  Common folk could indeed have a collective knowledge that surpassed that of the experts.  As Harold Fleming has so succinctly put it:

“The wisdom of the community always exceeds the knowledge of the experts.”

But, tapping into this collective wisdom is not as simple as combining the sum of the individual votes in an election and declaring that the person with the greatest number of votes is the representative decision-maker.  That leads to folly.

The Folly of Crowds

Just as crowds can be wise, crowds can also be foolish.  Just think of mob hysteria or the mass mobilisation that charismatic, yet despotic, leaders can mastermind.  In the book The Power of Collective Wisdom¹ the authors warn of two patterns that lead to collective folly.  One is where group members resist the ideas and input of others and accept only data that confirms their own beliefs.  The other is a move towards false agreement giving an appearance of unity.  This pattern relies on members choosing to conform.

How often do we see examples of these two patterns? 

Creating true Collective Wisdom

If it is possible for crowds to be wise and for crowds to be foolish, how do we facilitate the former and reduce the possibility of the latter?

Tom Atlee has written extensively on the power of collective decision-making.  He suggests that two capacities are needed to help make manifest the wisdom of crowds²:

1. The ability to include more of what is normally overlooked and excluded.
2. The ability to use diversity and disturbance creatively.

Briskin, Erickson, Ott and Callanan offer six principles³ upon which collective dialogue can be based allowing collective wisdom to emerge:

1. Deep listening.
2. Suspension of Certainty.
3. Seeking whole systems, seeking diverse perspectives.
4. Respect for others, group discernment.
5. Welcoming all that is arising.
6. Trust in the transcendent.

Yes, collective wisdom is possible.  It comes from ordinary people, from common folk.

One of the challenges for community development workers and others, is to enable people to recognise their collective wisdom and to find ways to allow that wisdom to emerge.  Note that the wisdom being discussed here is collective wisdom, not the wisdom of any one individual.  This is not to suggest that individuals are unable to become wise, rather it suggests that collectively we have a wisdom that far surpasses the expertise or wisdom of any one person.  It is that collective wisdom that we need to tap and allow to arise.

It is critical that we do so.

1. Briskin, Erickson, Ott & Callanan, The Power of Collective Wisdom and the trap of collective folly, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 2009. 
2. Tom Atlee, Collective Wisdom at the Fringes.
3. Briskin et al., op.cit., pp35f

Dynamic Facilitation Manual (Review)

I have posted a number of pieces on this site recommending greater empowerment of communities and a lot more public decision-making being put into the hands of ordinary citizens.

Throughout the world there are a numerous cases of these sorts of ideas being put into practice.  Citizen Juries, Wisdom Councils, Open Space Technology, World Cafes and even the occasional glimpse of demarchy (democracy based on random selection).

Such ideas and practices are vitally needed in a world that faces serious issues such as climate change, massive inequalities, reduction in biodiversity, increasing tension, terrorism and war.

One common objection to more ordinary citizens making public decisions is that ordinary citizens do not have the necessary political, diplomatic or dialogue skills to take part.

Appropriate facilitation and mediation are sometimes cited as doorways that can open up the wisdom and insight of ordinary citizens.  An exciting framework and technique arises when these two practices (facilitation and mediation) are brought together. Dynamic Facilitation is what Jim Rough names the process.¹

Source: Codice Tuna (Creative Commons)

Dynamic Facilitation could be described as an approach that sets up the conditions that allow for breakthroughs to emerge from the dialogue.  In this sense Dynamic Facilitation differs from more traditional facilitation processes in that Dynamic Facilitation seeks to create choice rather than a decision.

How to Manual?

How does a Dynamic Facilitator undertake their role?  Perhaps the best Manual that I have seen is that produced by Rosa Zubizaretta.

Rosa begins with a brief and useful history of Dynamic Facilitation and outlines some of the similarities and differences between Dynamic Facilitation and other facilitation methods.  She then goes on to describe the Dynamic Facilitators role and the stages of a Dynamic Facilitation session.
Rosa describes each aspect thoroughly using key points and anecdotes that help to fully explain the roles, purpose, process and skills.

For those of us who have used facilitation skills and techniques for many years there are some habits that we would need to unlearn in order to become Dynamic Facilitators.  The most significant of these is to let go the notion that the purpose of facilitating a group is to enable the group to arrive at a consensus decision.  Dynamic Facilitation actively seeks out divergence, diversity and complexity.
 
Graphically, traditional facilitation could be seen as slowly narrowing the discussion towards a “point of agreement”. Dynamic Facilitation, on the other hand, could be symbolised as broadening the dialogue widely and divergently thus enabling something new and creative to spontaneously emerge from within the space.

Usefulness

In today’s world and communities within it, everything is so inter-connected that no-one of us can hope to even get a glimpse of “the fullness of reality”.  We must discover ways to collaborate and that means that we must tap into our collective wisdom.  Dynamic Facilitation is a powerful technique that just might provide us with the key to doing so.

Rosa recognises this and in her Introduction to the manual states that “the challenges we face as a species in our world today call us to share our tools as freely as we can…”

He manual can be obtained from her website: www.diapraxis.com

If you can, get along to one of her, or Jim Rough’s, training workshops.  I’m keeping a lookout for a workshop Downunder.

1. Jim Rough has trademarked the term Dynamic Facilitation to ensure consistency of usage.

5 Inspiring Social Justice Campaigners

Social Justice as a concept covers a range of issues; economic, gender, race, identity and freedom from violence to name just a few.  Hence, it is difficult to pick out just five campaigners to highlight here.  Those that I have highlighted are by no means the most important or the most effective or any other form of “most”.  They are simply five that I have found inspiring.

You’ll notice too, that all of them are women.  I do intend posting a secondary listing at a later date of 5 More Inspiring Social Justice Campaigners who happen to be men.

In the meantime here are five women who have been an inspiration to many.  A couple of them are well known and a couple less well known, especially within the Western world.

Asmaa Mahfouz

This 27 year old Egyptian woman is possibly not well known in the West.  But the movement she began certainly is.  In January 2011, tired of the way in which the Egyptian people were being victimised by Mubarak, Asmaa posted a video on Facebook saying that she was going to protest in Tahrir Square.  She and four others did so and were surrounded by security forces and moved away.

Undaunted, Asmaa posted another video announcing that she would do the same again a week later.  “Never say there’s no hope.  Hope disappears only when you say there’s no hope” she proclaimed.

This time her video got uploaded to YouTube and went viral.  The next time she went to Tahrir Square there wasn’t just her and four others – there were thousands and thousands of people.  The Arab Spring had begun.

The video that began it all

Aung San Suu Kyi

Source: Wikipedia

By now the Burmese Nobel Peace Prize recipient and leader of the Burmese pro-democracy movement is well known because of the movie “The Lady.”  The 2011 movie tracks the life of Suu Kyi in her campaign to end the brutal military dictatorship that had ruled Burma for decades.

Suu Kyi’s father was Aung San, considered to be the father of modern Burma, who was assassinated when Suu Kyi was just 2 years old in 1948.

In 1988 Suu Kyi returned to Burma, to care for her ailing mother, after studying at Oxford University and marrying a British academic.  She soon became involved with the National League for Democracy.

Although a general election was held in 1990 the military dictatorship refused to recognise the results and Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest until 1995.  It didn’t last long, she was placed under house arrest again in 2000, released in 2002 and re-arrested yet again in 2003.  She was finally released from detention in November 2010.  In the 21 years from 1990 to 2010, Suu Kyi had been under house arrest for 15 of them.

In April 2012 Suu Kyi and other members of the National League for Democracy won parliamentary seats although her struggle for democracy within Burma still persists.

Although she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 it was not until June 2012 that she was finally able to deliver her acceptance speech.  One of her most famous quotes is:

"It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."

Germaine Greer

Feminism without Germaine Greer is as hard to imagine as Cubism without Picasso or Rock n’ Roll without Elvis Presley.  Greer was at the forefront of the resurgent feminist movement of the 1970s and her book “The Female Eunuch” (1970) became a feminist classic.

Born in Australia in 1939 Greer courted controversy from a very young age and continues to do so today at almost 74 years of age.  With a highly academic background (her PhD is in Elizabethan drama) Greer has lectured in Coventry, Oklahoma and Cambridge.

But it was her book, “The Female Eunuch”, that thrust Greer into the headlines.  The central theme was that society and in particular the nuclear family represses women sexually thus rendering women as eunuchs. Furthermore, she asserted that women were taught to be submissive and so considered themselves as inferior to men.  From today's perspective these sound rather exaggerated ideas, but in the 1970s the claims resounded with thousands of women (and some men).

Much of her thought was informed by Marxism and anarchism (and Greer openly states this) and so although she espoused many freedoms she was wary of institutionalising those freedoms.  In a television interview just four years ago she stated that she

“believe(d) in permanent revolution. I believe that once you change the power structure and you get an oligarchy that is trying to keep itself in power, you have all the illiberal features of the previous regime. What has to keep on happening is a constant process of criticism, renewal, protest and so forth.”

Dame Whina Cooper

Source: Wikipedia

If Dame Whina Cooper is known at all outside her native Aotearoa (New Zealand) it is as the figurehead of the large Maori Land March (hikoi) that marched the length of the North Island in 1975 to protest the continued theft of land.  By the time the marching protesters arrived at Parliament Buildings in Wellington the 80 year-old Cooper had 5,000 marchers behind her.  There, on the steps of Parliament she handed a petition signed by 60,000 people to the New Zealand Prime Minister.

But Dame Whina Cooper was well known within Maoridom well before this.  In 1951 she helped found and became the first president of the Maori Women’s Welfare League, a highly influential and successful organisation that improved the conditions of Maori everywhere, especially those caught in the rural-urban drift trap..  When she stepped down from the presidency she was awarded with the title of Te Whaea o te Motu (Mother of the Nation).  She continued to work for the benefit of Maori people at a more local level until her calling in 1975 to lead the Land March.

Although Dame Whina Cooper’s work focused on the conditions for Maori she became widely respected within New Zealand society and was given the honour of opening the Commonwealth Games in Auckland in 1990.  When she died in 1994 over a million people watched the live broadcast of her tangihanga (funeral) on television.

Rosa Parks

December 1st, 1955 was a turning point in the history of the American Civil Rights movement.  On that day in Montgomery a 42 year old African-American boarded bus number 2857 and sat down in the coloured section.  When a white passenger boarded she refused the bus driver’s order that she give up her seat in the coloured section because the white section was full.  Rosa Parks was arrested.

It wasn’t the first time that buses and discrimination had played a part in Parks’ life.  As a child she and other black students had to walk to school whilst white students took the bus.  As she recalled:

“I’d see the bus pass by every day… the bus was among the first ways I realised there was a black world and a white world.” 
 

In 1943 she boarded a bus, paid her fare and then had to get off the bus and move to the back to enter via the rear door because there were white people sitting in the front of the bus and she was not permitted to pass them by.  As she walked to the rear of the bus, the driver drove off leaving her to walk home in the rain.  Ironically it was the same driver that ordered her arrest on that day in December 1955.

On 5 December 1955 Parks was tried on charges of disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance.  The day before, a Sunday, 35,000 handbills were printed and distributed and black churches in the area announced plans for a Montgomery Bus Boycott.  Even though the day of the boycott was wet, African-Americans continued with the boycott and maintained it for 381 days.With dozens of buses sitting idle and the transit company’s finances being severely hit the city finally repealed its public transport segregation laws.


Rosa Parks (front) boarding the first desegregated bus in
 Montgomery. Source: "Through Zena's eyes" blogsite.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks refusal to submit to racial discrimination itself became one of the sparks that ignited the Civil Rights Movement in the US.

In her autobiography Rosa Parks refutes the allegation that she refused to move for the more mundane reason that she was “tired”. 

“I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Community Development, Empowerment and Voting

Martin Pettitt.  Creative Commons

I once had a fairly senior local authority officer tell me that “empowerment is all about voting … and nothing to do with community development.”  Really?  Empowerment has everything to do with community development and precious little to do with voting.

Anyone who has been involved with and understands community development will tell you that empowerment has been one of the most enduring and potent themes in the history and practice of community development.  Indeed, aside from the phrase community development itself, empowerment has been perhaps the most often defined term in the community development lexicon.  I’m not going to add another, just quote a couple so that we know what we’re talking about.

The World Bank defines empowerment as

“… the expansion of assets and capabilities of poor people to participate in, negotiate with, influence, control, and hold accountable institutions that affect their lives.”

Notwithstanding that you may wonder that the World Bank has not lived up to its own definition or that it has not been held accountable by the majority of the World’s poor, the definition is useful.

The next definition comes from the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2).  IAP2 has championed a spectrum of public engagement that passes from the least engaged stage of Inform, through Consult, Involve, Collaborate to Empower as the highest level of engagement.  The definition of Empower that IAP2 gives is:

“To place final decision-making in the hands of the public.”

So what have empowerment and these definitions got to do with my assertion that empowerment has little to do with voting?

A further defining feature of community development has been that it’s focus has always been on community and/or collective actions and programmes as opposed to an individual or family-centred approach.

Voting could be said to more readily exist as an individual rather than a community action.  One of the great rallying calls of electoral democracy has been “one man (sic), one vote".  Certainly there have been community-based campaigns around the right to vote; the suffragette movement most notably.  Nevertheless, once the right to vote has been won, or the community has been rallied to enrol, when the voter enters the polling booth it is very much an individual act.

Regrettably, under electoral democracy, once the voter has placed their mark upon the voting paper that is generally the end of their participation in public decision-making for the next three or four years.

Furthermore, when we look at the outcome of this process who do we see?  A mostly homogeneous group of career politicians drawn largely from the upper deciles of society, highly educated and articulate, confident not only in themselves but also in their opinions and beliefs.

Look at the backgrounds of most Western parliamentarians or local body councillors.  Lawyers, teachers, business owners, wealthy farmers, financiers.  You need to search long and hard to find hairdressers, motor mechanics, truck drivers or – unspeakably – anyone who is unemployed.

No, these parliamentarians and councillors are hardly representative of the communities in which community development seeks to work.  Very few, if any, are representative of the poor people in the World Bank definition above.

Empowered by Random Choice

If empowerment entails communities taking the final decision-making then electoral politics and the voting system are not routes towards it.  Is there an alternative?  What if there were a way to more easily ensure greater representation of the demographics of communities, cities and nations?

When making a decision what could be more simple or more fair than a random throwing of a dice, a flipping of a coin, or a drawing of names out of a hat.

Wait!  Don’t dismiss the idea as absurd or fanciful.  It’s been done.  The birthplace of democracy itself – ancient Athens – used the casting of lots far more often than they did a voting system.  Ahh – but that was over 2000 years ago.  Yes, but recent experiments and research have resurrected the idea and found that it has enormous merit.

The idea even has a name, in fact, it has a couple.  Sortition is used to describe a system whereby randomness is used to select people for some position.  When applied within a political setting often the term demarchy is used.

When we think of empowerment as a community goal then demarchy has much to commend it.  Randomly selected public decision-makers suggest a far more representative possibility than does our present system.  In order to be selected by lot one needn’t be rich enough to be able to campaign, nor does one need to be famous enough to be voted for by name association.  One just needs to have a name!

A further benefit of demarchy that has been found to occur is that once someone has experienced the practice of public decision-making they tend to apply and teach the acquired skills within the community from which they have come.  There is then the possibility of overcoming another of electoral democracies pernicious weaknesses – elitism.

If, as the World Bank declares, empowerment seeks to enable people to participate and negotiate so that they are able to influence and control, then demarchy provides some answers where presently our political institutions do not.

Yes, community development has everything to do with empowerment and it can empower communities using randomness.  Let’s not toss it aside, let’s toss our names into the hat.