Yesterday I wrote about the first two hours of Tamarack Institute's Deepening Community Edmonton. Today we'll launch into the next two, which will be entirely devoted to John McKnight's opening keynote for the three day gathering.
John McKnight. To get to be in his presence was a truly special thing. He is a great role model for having an impact through humility, care and intention. If you aren't familiar with his work, you can learn all about Asset-Based Community Development (ABDC) here on the website for the seminal institute on this concept. I wanted to focus in on the four mind and heart blowing moments for me.
- A program, project or strategy is not the answer. We must shift culture. Particularly, we must strive to create a culture that calls forth the aspects that encourage us to be kind. (Back to Dan Palotta's motto of Humankind. Be both). We must make space for communities to discover/uncover their own way of being and doing together.
- We create strangers through labels. We also don't have a pre-disposition for labeling people as their half-full version. Someone who needs treatment we are implying is broken in some way. What if we considered how to label these same people as their glass half-full selves? We can all have a glass half-empty version of ourselves and how often do we let others and ourselves tell that story of who we are instead of focusing on the possibility. To focus on what's working.
- Are you using the right tool? We need to concretely understand the purpose and power of institutions (formal organizations with people paid to do work) and associations (informal or formal, volunteer run groups of people). They are two important building blocks of making up a community, but they serve different purposes. One is a saw and one is a hammer. Which one will you choose to put the nail in the board? We are trying to make institutions do the work of associations and getting frustrated when our approach doesn't work. Tools are good and necessary, but they have a particular purpose. You need a saw and a hammer to build a house, we must be conscious to know their purpose and use it for that.
- How do we know when a community has gotten there?
- It's personal. People know one another.
- It's small. It doesn't scale. Resilient communities and their processes for getting to that proliferate organically.
- Time. They have time. They find this time by consuming less and creating more.
- Gifts. The culture sees everyone by their glass half-full. It calls out "we need you".
- It knows how to live with fallibility. Only when we accept this do we embrace possibility.
- Mystery. It rejects our addiction to certainty. It steps through the doorway to the unknown and is content.
And now we've made it to lunch on day one. The best part is there's still another 3 or 4 individual reflection sessions (aka blogs) to come from this gathering and I know those pebbles will continue to create ripples in my head, heart and hands for many moons to come.
Being a Force for Good 