OBJECTIVES By the end of this session you will be able to:
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Tasks for this session
Before the seventh class session, here is what you should do:
Read
Read pages 187-242 in Building Powerful Community Organizations by Michael Jacoby Brown (2006) 1h 20 minutes.
Activities
Activity One
In the sixth class meeting we will have a Zoom session / classroom meeting. If you attend the Zoom session or class meeting, make note of how long it takes, and subtract that time from 3.5 hours to determine how much time you ought to devote to the discussion board in Canvas. Post some responses to the discussion board questions, and respond to your classmates.
Activity Two
By this time I think it quite possible that you will be holding some sort of a social event with some people you know and some people you do not know well (the first experiential learning assignment). I assume such a meeting might require about 90 minutes of your time. But, there is time to put into inviting people and organizing for the meeting, planning what you will say, and so forth. And, after the meeting, you also must write done an account of what happened, and what you said, and what you learned from the experience. So, you probably should be working on the first experiential learning assignment this week.
Activity Three
You should be active working on your second experiential learning assignment this week . That is, you probably are interviewing or having conversations with persons you know who are relatively powerful or influential.
Activity Four
You should be active in whatever group you have joined or become more active in. Continue your involvement with the group.
Activity Five
Toward the end of the reading you do this week, there is an exercise where Michal Jacoby Brown has listed ways to run meetings to build an organization and ways to destroy an organization. (Quick Tips on pages 241-242). Read those lists of ways meetings can build or harm an organization, and add your own ideas for what makes meetings helpful or harmful to a group.
Activity Six
In preparation for an activity I would like to try in our seventh class meeting, please read the following scenario. You will be role-playing people at a meeting, and I want everyone to have some shared basic information about the simulation situation.
Mission:
This is a simulation of approximately 20 minutes of a development agency board meeting. The class is split in half. Groups will have two different styles of board meetings. Notice what happens. What works, and what doesn’t work?Setting:
You are on the board of a community development agency that is trying to improve life for residents in the area of town where there is more poverty and more African-Americans and Hispanics. Your agency has held many community meetings and surveyed people in the community. As a result, the agency has decided on three main goals. You want to open a community center, construct more high-quality moderate-income housing, and improve the quality of local schools.
In the community there is a large abandoned high school built by the WPA in the 1930s. The city helped your agency purchase this property. Your agency has planned to renovate one half of the school into tenant-owned affordable housing. The plan is to end the project with 16 two-bedroom apartments and 8 four-bedroom apartments. The other half of the school will be renovated into a community center. It will become a center for recreation. Many non-profit agencies will open offices in the community center. As the local school district has closed most after-school projects this community center could offer after-school programs.
Problem:
It is not clear how much money will be required to renovate the building, and there may be more affordable ways to create a community center and affordable housing.
A for-profit developer who specializes in buying and transforming old school properties would like to purchase the old high school.Should your agency:
1) sell the school to the developer, let them do their thing with it, and then use the money from the sale to build a community center and affordable housing elsewhere in the community?
2) keep the school and renovate it according to plan, refusing to sell it to the developer?
3) offer to sell the school to the developer with some sort of an agreement or conditions?
4) do something else?How to play:
Play your character however you like.
You don’t need to share the facts you know, your opinions, or your beliefs with the group. Do so if you want to, or if you feel it is appropriate.
Activity Seven
You should take your first elective course (any course you want to take) from the United States Institute of Peace. I assume you will take one of the micro-courses that require only three hours, but you are welcome to take a longer case if you prefer.
Session Time Budget
3h 30m |
Canvas Discussion Boards and Zoom Class Meeting |
2h 10m |
Reading Brown, pp. 187-242 |
30m |
Assignment related to 1st experiential learning task, hold a gathering of friends and persons you do not know well and guide the conversation at some point to a topic of concern where everyone shares a self-interest in seeing the problem addressed. |
30m |
Assignment related to 2nd experiential learning, contact and interview some of your most influential friends/contacts. |
2h |
Assignment related to 3rd experiential learning, be active in a group |
20m |
Read notes about meeting facilitation included in this session guide |
3h |
Do your first (1 of 2) elective course with the United States Institute of Peace. |
Discussion Board Questions (Activity One)
Go into Canvas, log in, and respond to the discussion questions for this session.
These are:
DQ 6-1: Check In
Check in for the sixth week of the semester. Tell us what is going on. Share something you have done in the recent days or weeks that you feel good about.
DQ 6-2: Reports from the Field
Share with us here some of your experiences in any of your experiential learning work. What have you see and what have you experienced and what have you learned?
DQ 6-3: Administration, Community Organizing, or Policy Practice in the News
Has there been anything in the news or any article that caught your attention that involves macro practice? Share it here, and we can discuss it.
DQ 6-4: Meeting styles
Meetings are necessary and important, but many people dislike meetings. What is your understanding of the essential tactics and skills a person can use to convene a meeting that is enjoyable and successful? What sort of things need to happen? What can the moderator or chair or convener do to help the meeting be productive and enjoyable?
DQ 6-5: Meetings, share your stories
Think back to some meeting you have attended where nothing seemed to be accomplished, and you felt frustrated in the meeting. Or, just think about any meeting or meetings you attended that you felt were terrible, really repulsive in some way. What made those meetings disasters for you? What didn't work? Then, in contrast, think of some of the best meetings you've attended, or one particular great meeting. From your experience, what did you notice about the good meeting or meetings? What seemed to work to make that meeting enjoyable or productive or engaging for you?
DQ 6-6: What is Leadership
What does “leadership” mean to you. There were some years when a slogan or motto around the UIS campus was “Leadership Lived” and I would like you to also try to imagine what that might mean.
DQ 6-7: The film you watched.
Which of the films did you watch, from the list provided in session five? Tell us a bit about the film and give us a general reaction to it. The films you could have watched for this point were:
- Amazing Grace (2006). A biographical movie about politician William Wilberforce and his work to end the British slave trade
- Lincoln (2012) A biographical movie about Abraham Lincoln and the efforts of his administration to see the 13th Amendment passed through Congress.
- Erin Brockovich (2000). A legal assistant helps a community organize to fight a power company that has poisoned the community
- Gandhi (1982). A biographical movie about the Mahatma Gandhi and the struggle for South Asia’s liberation from British colonial rule.
- Milk (2008) A biographical movie about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician to be elected in California (the USA?), and a martyr to the cause for gay rights.
- Selma (2014). A biographical movie about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement’s 1965 campaign to win passage of the federal Voting Rights Act
DQ 6-8: What did the film get right about leadership.
In the feature film you watched, what do you think it accurately portrayed about the qualities of good leadership, and what did it get right about the realities of working for macro-change in society or with large groups?
DQ 6-9: What did the film leave out.
In the feature film you watched, what did the film fail to show about good leadership, and what was left out of the picture of how macro change is actually made by groups of people and powerful leaders? Could the director or scriptwriters have done something differently to make audiences more aware of the realities of social movements or efforts to make change at the level of community or society?
Lecture on Meetings
Some ideas about meeting taken from Herbert and Irene Rubin's Community Organizing and Development (chapter 10).
“Developing Capacity through Participatory Meetings”
Holding meetings in Democratic ways help to increase peoples’ motivation to fight back.
Meetings help to share information, report on progress, or to provide a forum to question those whom the organization has targeted.
Decision making meetings: People work in a democratic way to determine what should be done, when and by whom.
Action meetings/Rallies: Activists give speeches, share their triumphs over oppression in ways that encourage people to continue to fight.
What is accomplished at meetings is important. Skillful facilitators ensure that participation and tasks are completed.
Characteristics of Good Meetings
A badly run meeting can negate all the work that has been done in mobilizing people.
A good meeting increases peoples’ confidence that their organization can succeed and that it is worth their time to stay involved.
Good meetings are exhilarating. They flow from issue to issue in a fast paced.
Members interact and learn.
Membership Meetings
General membership meetings enable overall membership to set policy.
Make sure to get members full information.
Show members and community what the organization has accomplished.
Agendas, Bylaws, and Rules of Procedure
Maintaining a tone of formality to encourage people to participate.
Maintain order and direction.
Agendas enable people to plan in advance what topics will be covered and in what order they will be discussed.
Bylaws govern an organization
The main goal is for everyone to have a say.
Focused Decision – Making Meetings
Set specific goals
Technical details must be considered before reaching a conclusion.
Stick to the agenda
Structuring Good Decision-Making Meetings
Orientation – takes place for those in the group discover each other’s personalities, strengths and weaknesses.
Formation – the roles of individuals are resolved.
Coordination - Negotiations occur between group members over the meaning the meaning of information and the priorities of the different goals.
Formalization – determine a course of action.
Traveling chair – This helps to prevent one person form dominating the discussion and the group.
Facilitators – facilitates meeting to run smoothly and democratically.
Generating a Wide Variety of Ideas
Can use a number of techniques to come up with ideas. Some are:
Brainstorming
Round robin
A structured go round.Nominal Group techniques or individual writing allows people to jot down their ideas on a piece of paper that are shuffled around before the idea is placed on the board.
Talking stick – Encourages critical discussion. People agree only to talk when they have the stick in their hand.
Devils Advocate – looks for weaknesses and reports back to the group later before any action is taken.
Watch out for Problems of Cohesion, Satisfaction, and Groupthink
Handling Conflict
Be prepared to deal with conflict.
Many conflicts occur because of frustration.
Individuals might disagree on assertions
The following notes are about the process of facilitation:
Facilitation
Chapter 1: Preparing the Ground
What is facilitation?
The process of how you do something rather than what you do.
• A facilitator is the process guide.
• You can facilitate yourself, another person, or a group. Groups come together to fulfill a particular purpose.
What are the beliefs behind facilitation?
• Full cooperation between all people is both possible and desirable – values of equality, shared decision- making, equal opportunity, power sharing and personal responsibility are basic to full cooperation.
• Our society has a democratic model, not a cooperative one.
• There is a continuum of decision making: autocracy – democracy – cooperacy.
• Democracy and autocracy are both very useful in decision-making.
The role of the facilitator
• Knows how to guide a group of people through cooperative processes, including collective decision-making, so the group can fulfill its purpose.
Key Concepts
• Individual Uniqueness: Each member has their own world view expressed through ideas, beliefs, culture etc.
• Baggage: This is everything that you bring to the group.
• Leadership: A leader can lead only with the active or tactic agreement of the group.
• Power: Power issues need to be identified and worked through. There are different kinds of power – positional power, assigned power, knowledge power, personal power, and factional power.
• Feelings: Members need to learn that they have feelings, rather than be had by them.
• Trust and Identity: These develop through sharing.
• Stages in the life of a group: groups have a life cycle and move through various stages before reaching maturity.
• Roles people play: Avoid getting stuck in a particular role. Some roles are constructive and some are not.
• Process and Task: Group process is about taking care of the group members as they fulfill their task.
• Group-assigned roles: A group will assign the roles of facilitator, recorder and timekeeper. Roles can be rotated.
• Group Purpose: Members need to be clear about its purpose, if not that group is purposeless.
• Ground rules: Are set to clarify and protect how it will operate.
• Being Present: Is an ongoing, moment-by-moment discipline. You are partly unconscious most of the time and so not fully present to yourself and others.
• Speaking and Listening: Being in a group is about speaking and listening, but especially listening.
• Withholding: Is not saying things which need to be said to have a fully present group. People withhold out of fear.
• Conflict: Is normal in groups. It needs to be tended to and worked through promptly.
• Collective (or consensus) decision-making: This means that everyone agrees on every decision.
Facilitating Yourself
Facilitating yourself is about going on a journey for life that will help you to know who you are. It's about self awareness.
The first step in facilitating yourself is to be with yourself. A few questions to consider are:
• Are you comfortable with yourself the way you are right now?
• Are you comfortable with your body?
• Are you comfortable with your feelings?
• Life is a process of covering up and compensating for your own “not-okayness”.
• Before you can facilitate others you have to make sure that you accept yourself and continue to work on this.
Empowering yourself
• Is coming into your own unique place of power where you are most truly your own self.
• You may most be in your power when you are feeling most vulnerable.
Passive and Proactive
• Self -Facilitation is about empowering yourself.
• Passive self- facilitation happens when you put yourself into a situation where things will happen to you which you believe will be empowering.
• Proactive self-facilitation occurs when you consciously choose to alter your behavior – to interrupt how you normally do things, believing this can benefit you.
• Self- facilitation as a training tool
• This is essential for facilitators-in-training.
• You cannot usefully facilitate others if you don't facilitate yourself.
• Think about these questions:
• To what extent am I responsible for my own actions?
• Right now can I choose my own thoughts?
• Observe yourself and keep observing yourself as often as you can remember. Think about what you are choosing for yourself. Are you choosing to be well? Are you choosing to be loved? Etc.
Free-Attention: The part of your awareness that not caught up with thoughts, feelings and body sensations.
Upset: Are set up for you to grow.
• Often come from early childhood, when you are most impressionable.
• You need to develop on-going practices to help you avoid picking up more upsets (baggage).
Facilitating Others
One-to one facilitation
• Is important in training for facilitating groups.
Facilitation is not giving advice
• This is more easy that facilitating yourself.
Giving advice
• Wanting to tell other what you think he or she ought to do. Is often not helpful because it fails to take into account that everyone is different and unique and will choose different experiences and learning.
• Facilitation recognizes that each person is perfect just the way he or she is.
• Facilitation calls forth people's best intentions.
Being with another
• Facilitating another person requires being able to be with him or her.
• It involves being with yourself.
• It involves being with another, being comfortable and at home with him or her. Ask yourself the following questions: Am I comfortable being with (name)? Am I comfortable with his or her body? Etc.
• You are ready to facilitate others when you are not wanting to change make them better or different.
Living in a different worlds
• Every view of the world is different.
• Everyone lives in different worlds.
• Your way of experiencing the world is the way the world is to you.
• You perceive others to be in that same world, otherwise how can you understand them?
• Consider the possibility that you can never fully understand other people.
• The mix of life's experiences will always differ from your own.
Projection
• It is important to be conscious about how you project your wold onto other people and situations. Something that people do all the time.
• This is the way you make sense of and interpret the world.
Listening
• Communication is 80% listening and 20% speaking.
• Listening powerfully is a skill and a way of being with people. Out of this comes facilitative speaking.
• Train your listening skills.
Interrupting disempowering conversations
• Our first step to upset is usually to blame or discount ourselves or others.
• Facilitative speaking will interrupt the conversations that disempower the speaker.
• A facilitator does not blame, but notices blame and encourages the other person to move through.
Encouraging lightness
• Humor is another way to interrupt disempowering conversations.
• It helps you to see the lighter side of a problem.
Coaching
• Can be directive and includes confronting another person when requested.
• Sometimes is is appropriate to to offer coaching, but may also be asked for.
• It is a contractual agreement. Without agreement it is potentially abusive.
Facilitating a group
• Understand that a group is an entity in itself.
• There is an emotional, intuitive, intellectual and spiritual bond among group members.
• Being in a group can be threatening for most as it brings up our fears of losing our own identity and autonomy.
The facilitators relationship to the group is different from a teacher and class or parent and child relationship. The facilitator is responsible and accountable to the group and to self.
Guidelines for a facilitator
• A group is capable of more than any one member thinks.
• Trust the resources of the groups
• Honor each group member
• Keep the group space safe
• Stand in the group purposeless
• Be adaptable
• Remember that beginnings are crucial
• Take everything that occurs as relevant
• Work with conflict
• Be awake
• Be yourself
• Stay clear
• Develop discernment
• Get the job done.
• Don't be attached to your own interventions
• Use questions and suggestions
• Negotiate and contract
• Be culturally sensitive
• Improvise
• Acknowledge and affirm
• Use humor
• Keep intervention to a minimum
• Monitor the energy level
• Seek agreement
• When in doubt, check it out
• If you don't know, say so
• Invite feedback
On the Edge of the Sword
The art of intervention
• The facilitators job is to make it easy for the group to achieve its purpose and to empower the group to tap into its full synergy potential.
• How does a facilitator know what to say?
• You listen for what needs to be spoken to facilitate the group.
• Facilitation is an improvisatory art.
Intervention training includes
• Climate and culture setting
• Managing time
• Getting participation
• Being present and awake
• Creating a future
• Drawing out issues
• Keeping on task
• Shifting levels
• Cutting through patterned behavior
• What's not being said
• Completion
Working on Different Levels
• Groups operate on a number of different levels
• The physical level
• The thinking level
• The emotional level
• The intuitive level
• The energy level
• The ritual or spiritual level
• The synergistic level
• Notice the level changes it will forward the groups purpose.
• After noticing the changes, it is important to share them with other facilitators to develop a fuller and more developed sense of the subtleties involved.
Getting to Agreement
• Collective decision-making is based on an agreement to reach agreement by the whole group on all decisions made.
• All members have the right to choose to participate or not in all decisions.
Barriers to reaching agreement
A major fear is wondering how you will get everyone to agree. Some barriers are:
• Making one another wrong
• Not being proactive
• I have nothing to contribute
• Getting stuck on one particular outcome
• Negative and stuck energy
• Cheap closure
• Not taking responsibility
Cutting though Conflict
• It is normal and inevitable in a group
• It can range from mild disagreements to angry outbursts
• Much can be avoided by attending to group maintenance issues
• A highly creative group or an issue-related group is likely to have a higher degree of conflict that some others
Sabotage
• Is a behavior which undermines the group fulfilling it purpose.
• It usually happens on an unconscious level.
• It occurs by an individual acting out of their distress, getting tripped up by their own baggage.
Blaming and Scapegoating
• Scapegoating occurs when one person is consistently blamed for things going wrong.
• The basis is powerlessness and lack of self-esteem in the blamer
• Blaming puts ones own failures onto someone else.
Group factions
• The formation of fixed alliances
• Factions are the norm within majority decision-making structures (democracy)
• Is “us” and “them” thinking
Group think
• An intergroup level “us” and “them” behavior is expressed through this phenomenon.
The following is taken from the Story Circle Network:
What Makes a Good Facilitator?
If you have participated in reading or writing groups, you probably have a pretty good idea of the importance of the facilitator--a person who helps members get the most out of the group’s activities. This person might be a group member whose turn it is to lead, or the person who organizes and leads the group.
A good facilitator is just that--someone who makes it easy for each woman to participate in the group to whatever extent she chooses, whether that means active contributions or passive listening. A good facilitator
• provides a comfortable structure for orderly group exchange (both "comfort" and "order" are open to various definitions, depending on the group)
• gently encourages participation without forcing it, urging shy members to speak while helping more talkative members to share the limelight
• keeps the group focussed but does not limit the focus to pre-planned topics or force the discussion to go in certain directions
• responds encouragingly to new ideas and directions offered by the participants, even when they are a little off-topic or out of focus
• offers ideas and suggestions for additional reading and writing and encourages others to contribute resources
• is sensitive to the tone of the group, whether it is joyful or sad, enthusiastic or reflective, and modifies her facilitative style to that of the group
• is sensitive to the needs of individuals but does not let one needy individual dominate the group’s attention
• plans each meeting so that the group has adequate time to cover the material
• plans several meetings ahead so that the important material is adequately covered (this important area is often overlooked when there are multiple facilitators)
The facilitator may also be responsible for finding a place and arranging times for meeting, for coordinating food and refreshments, and for contacting members. Some Story Circle facilitators also gather writing selections and reproduce them so that members can have copies of one another’s work, or they develop reading lists to broaden the discussion.
In the experience of most Story Circle members, the facilitator is key to the success of the group. Group leadership is like leading a choir: bringing out the best in every voice, urging some to sing out and others to be less exuberant, and reminding everyone that while they are distinct individuals, they are also part of the same choir. The facilitator is also largely responsible for the tone of the group, whether it’s casual and friendly, scholarly and academically-oriented, or emotional and sometimes dramatically charged. And the facilitator is crucial to maintaining the group’s energies, and keeping everyone focussed on the work at hand. An active, vigorous group engaging in reading, writing, sharing, and supporting is a delight for everyone--including the facilitator who helped to make it happen!
The following is taken from 101 Ways to Make Training Active by Mel Silberman and Karen Lawson:
1. Paraphrase what a participant has said so that he or she feels understood and so that the other participants can hear a concise summary of what has been said.
2. Check out your understanding of a participant’s statement or ask the participants to clarify what he or she is saying.
3. Compliment an interesting or insightful comment.
4. Elaborate on a participant’s contribution to the discussion with examples, or suggest a new way to view the problem.
5. Energize a discussion by quickening the pace, using humor, or if necessary, prodding the group for more contributions.
6. Disagree (gently) with a participant’s comments to stimulate further discussion. [This is a controversial suggestion; it may be appropriate in certain types of meetings - EJOHI]
7. Mediate differences of opinion between participants and relieve any tensions that may be brewing.
8. Pull together ideas, showing their relationship to each other.
9. Change the group process by altering the method for obtaining participation or by having the group evaluate ideas that have been presented.
10. Summarize (and record, if desired) the major views of the group.
Thought for the week:
Collaboration and networks are “best practices” in mental health, child welfare, working with justice issues, and so forth. Broad-based collaborations are also required for the exercise of political power to change laws to help the poor. However, what about coalitions and systems of care for the poor? Do those improve services, and help persons in poverty move out of poverty?
Interesting Stuff To Explore (optional stuff)
You may find some of the following articles and websites of interest:
The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation. This is a neighborhood group in San Francisco. During this semester we will explore a scenario modeled on a situation this group faced.
When community organizing goes virtual: NWSP continues efforts amid pandemic. by Emma Brauer. July 9, 2020. LISC Milwaukee.
A History of Labor Unions from Colonial Times to 2009 by Morgan O. Reynolds. July 17, 2009. The Mises Institute (!). The Mises Institute is hardly a friend of labor, but this article is a good short introduction to the history of labor unions, despite the bias of the author and publisher.
Seattle’s Civil Rights Organizations as described in historical perspectives by The Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project.
Real change takes community organizing , By Frances Wattman Rosenau. June 20, 2020. Presbyterians Today.
Come to the next class ready.
Our next session (7th session) is only on discussion boards, so prepare for the simulation of a meeting in our 8th session. In our seventh sesssion, on the discussion board, you will want to discuss the USIP courses on non-violent action and your elective course experience.
Come ready to talk about the film you watched and how it portrayed leadership.
Come to class ready to participate in exercises to help find shared self-interest in any issue.
Come ready to discuss the iron rule of organizing and its corollary rules about accepting help.