A bunch of friends got together to think about how to change the world from a garage in Westown. Over three months of meeting once a week, we looked for inspiration: shared music, watched short videos by inspirational thinkers and activists, spoke about what matters to us and learned to listen deeply. We thought together about the world we want to live in and what each of us could do to create that world starting here and now. We learned about systemic change, cradle to cradle design, social innovation, open source technology and thought together about self interest and morality. We have applied these learnings in our own change projects.
The most important contribution any of us can make now is not to solve any particular problem, no matter how urgent energy or environmental or financial regulation is. What we must do now is increase the proportion of humans who know that they can cause change. And who, like smart white blood cells coursing through society, will stop with pleasure whenever they see that something is stuck or that an opportunity is ripe to be seized. — from “Everyone a Changemaker”, by Bill Drayton (2006)
The Taranaki ChangeMakers group has just finished this year’s four-month series of workshops on fostering more active citizenship in our community, in New Zealand, and in the world.
We have been keeping this “blog” of the activities of this local learning community over these winter months, and it is now being posted “live” to share with our friends.
This year, we have drawn a great deal of inspiration and food for our dialogue sessions from the series of lectures called TED Talks. You can view many of these talks straight from this blogsite.
Taranaki Changemakers is part of a new national initiative aimed at fostering more active citizenship amongst New Zealanders.
The local four-month learning community is designed to support and sustain our individual activities on community, political and environmental issues. The weekly evenings are an opportunity to take “time out” to look at the bigger picture surrounding the issues we are concerned about, and to be inspired and encouraged by fresh thinking and practical examples of people and projects that are making a difference.
Changemakers groups are following a 5-10-5-10 strategy of fostering active citizenship
5 -spend 5% of your income directly supporting citizenship action that inspires you
10 -do ten actions in the next year on your personal passion in citizenship action
5 - spend 5% of your time on active citizenship tasks
10 - join with ten other people to create a learning community to support each other’s work for change
We have found this to be an simple and generative framework for focusing our individual passions, while at the same time providing a framework for how we can support one another.
More information on ChangeMakers 5-10-5-10 can be found at
We listened to a Radio New Zealand Kim Hill interview with Chris Trotter, author of "No Left Turn". Some of us wanted to turn closer to home and to attempt to integrate some of the thinking that went on last week about aid and self -interest in a New Zealand context. We wondered if Chris Trotter would provide a starting point for a dialogue national issues.
"While the successes of those who came to this shore in search of power and wealth remain locked in bitter conflict with those who came in search of equality and justice, nothing of enduring worth can be constructed in this country." We found Chris Trotter's framing of political life as a battle between right and left a little simplistic and outdated. But we were inspired by his stories of the working class engagement with ideas and political awareness in thirties New Zealand. That voter turnout was 92 percent in the 1930's compared to 77 percent in 2005. We remembered how in earlier years New Zealanders had a strong record of sorting out their own social problems at a community level. For instance kindergartens, worker's libraries, Ironsides (mobility transport) were all community level initiatives. We recognised that the new underclass was not working. We wondered what it would take to change this class from being beneficiaries of welfare to becoming participants in a democracy. How could this most under-represented group be given a voice.
The work of Michael Young on the dangers of organising society on the basis of meritocracy was mentioned. Social mobility uploaded the most intelligent and articulate of the working classes into the ranks of the middle class where they are easily distracted by individualistic consumption and become alienated and therefore fail to represent their working class roots. This ensured that the system doesn't have to change since the ideology and hope is that the best of the poor rise up through the system. Then poverty could be seen as the fault of the poor....if you worked harder or had more talent you wouldn't be poor.
We asked ourselves if left or right labels were still relevant in political commentators since the turn of the NZ Labour party to the right in the mid 1980's. We wondered when does the right to pursue individual freedom turn into the right to exploit others for our own pecuniary gain? We decided that keeping 80% of the population relatively happy meant there was a significant vested interest in keeping things the way they are and made structural systemic change very difficult. If society cared about the whole 100% there would be changes made to housing, health and employment and perhaps our child abuse statistics might improve.
We finished with thinking about the value of ideas versus ideologies. Trotter's arguments are passionate and powerful but he engages in analysis of the past rather than in designing the future. We would like to ask him what kind of a future he would design? Encourage him to be generative.
We concluded that the TED talks had served us well since they present ideas rather than ideologies; there is space left to consider these ideas as ideas; they inspire and therefore create hope. De Bono was quoted from the Knowledge Wave conference. "Analyze the past. Design the future." I wanted to play Dudley Benson: It's Akaroa's Fault video from Youtube. Lynne
Nicky Hager reviews Chris Trotter's "No Left Turn" in the August 25th 2007 Listener and you can read the review here
We finished by listening to Trinity Roots play Aotearoa from their Home, Land and Sea album.
Here we were listening to Jacqueline Novogratz's plea for a chapter two to the End Poverty campaign of the G8 forum. Her chapter two is about the how to and the effectiveness of aid delivery. How to build viable systems on the ground that deliver critical and affordable goods and services to the poor which are financially sustainable and scalable.
We became very interested in her idea of scaling successful systems up and down. We could all think of resources spent on good intentions that had been absurdly useless in delivery, aid from a great height and delivered from the paradigm of the giver, without conversation or direction from the receiver. We thought about this in terms of community work: how to get people to step up: what do you want for yourselves and your children? How do you want to use these resources to be used? What are the businesses that could emerge from this set of needs?
We described this as a movement from the beneficiary approach to the participatory approach. It would cost less in the long term and would not create a class of professional helpers. One of our group had some examples of local social entrepreneurs coming up with creative and startling solutions in partnership with local people.
We then went on with a really engaging question of the place of self-interest in systems. When does enough resources become enough for us? When does getting and spending become a kind of addiction?
What could be achieved if community and social agencies developed better collaboration? Sought to solve social problems rather than organize them? One of us suggested that 805 of New Zealanders get their needs met and the other 20% miss out and get blamed for it. What if outcomes were adjusted to include the whole 100% of New Zealanders, having their housing needs, the education and health needs met. What if public servants saw themselves as paid to steward these outcomes? We create professionals to "help" our poor so we don't have to feel responsible or change our lifestyles. How could we create a system which changes beneficiaries to participants and releases creative responses to entrenched social system?
I have just completed an updated version of the ChangeMakers slideshow, and have now put it up onto the Slideshare website which converts PowerPoint presentations into flash files that you can imbed into your blogs!
We met for a 5-10-5-10 evening listening to Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” performed by Jack Johnson (with the Animal Liberation Orchestra) from the album “Endless Highway – the music of The Band” (2007). Each of us visited a highlight from the week: these included appreciation of Louise Nicholas at last finding some justice re. the suppression of evidence in the earlier trials; a good case being put to council for the interest of pedestrians and cyclists in local roading decision making; a wonderful week spent in wananga in Tauhara.
We decided to check in with progress on our 10 goals, and we also reviewed the format of our evenings and discussed the place of the 20 minute videos. We thought they were great for generating dialogue from us and also for keeping us aware of big picture thinking and the interconnectedness of work for the common good. Some of us felt there was less focus on our actual 5-10-5-10 projects this year and others reported doing a lot more for their projects than in previous years. It was generally agreed that the group was functioning well as a place to find inspiration, feel connection and think together. We heard about the activity of the national trust of Changemakers and the establishment of the national coordinator position. We need to attract more funding to make this position sustainable and we hope to generate more Taranaki contributions to this fund. If you as a reader are interested in contributing funds you can go to the Changemakers website or you can download the bank deposit details. Nationally there are a number of people wanting to start 5-10-5-10 groups and there is a lot of potential for this position to inspire change-making and even attract funding for social entrepreneurship projects. It is hoped to make this a young-person's position so we can encourage and educate the next generation of change-makers.
We also looked at and discussed this blog: the editing that needs doing to get it ready to go public; its role as a window into a local Changemaker group, the variety of issues we discuss and the types of work we are engaged in. We hope other Taranaki Changemakers might contribute a blog post on your projects and the progress you are making and what you are learning from the work you are doing. It would be great to see some local stories as well as the videos and our responses to them.
We talked about the future of Changemakers, the desire we have to engage other people and to find a way to include them and to transition from this group to the next one. One interesting suggestion was to finish our group with a weekend which could also function as an introduction weekend for the next group. We had in mind workshops on our local projects as well as perhaps revisiting the videos we found most compelling and useful. We thought perhaps a shorter group of maybe 6 sessions could be something that new comers might commit to more easily.
The Presencing Institute (PI) website has just been launched. The Presence Institute people describe the purpose of the website "is to feature ongoing action research and practical applications of the U process and other related methods and tools as well as to link practitioners and researchers that collectively advance these social technologies. Each month the site will feature a new project."
As well as links to the Presencing Institutes resources the site also features upcoming events, online courses and on-going projects.
A lot of my projects relate to either cycling or mountain biking but there are a few personal ones too.
Cycling Advocates' Network (CAN) Executive work: As part of being on the CAN executive, I have been given the responsibility for facilitating groups of interested people in writing up specific cycling related policies that are acceptable to the majority of CAN members. I have an aim of getting 5 new ones written before the end of 2007.
In addition I have an ongoing goal of being an effective member of the executive and contributing to the running of the network - it has one full time employee based in Wellington and two part time employees, one in Christchurch and the other in Auckland.
North Taranaki Cycling Advocates(NTCA)local committee work: I am the chairperson for the local cycling advocacy group NTCA. We have a committee of 7 active members along with a wider group of people interested in cycling issues that numbers around 80.
My projects are: Assit the Taranaki Regional Council with the development of its Regional Walkways and Cycleways Strategy. This was officially accepted by the TRC in July.
Assist the NPDC with the development of its revised Cycling Strategy. This was officially accepted at the last meeting of the full council on August 28th.
Sustain the NTCA committee and grow the number of active people willing to be on the committee. Have some fun together too! This is still work in progress!
Develop a NTCA website. Not yet done.
Facilitate one other from NTCA to attend the NZ Cycling Conference in Napier at the beginning of November. Work in progress.
New Plymouth Mountain Bikers committee work: My official title is "Club Captain" but no one really knows what that means. So I am just an active member on the committee.
My projects are: Organise and set up MTB skills courses for June and November. I applied to the TSB Community Trust for funding to run these courses and got a grant of $4000 in March. I then used the grant to heavily subsidise the courses. I arranged for MTB tutors to come down from Rotorua for the weekend to run them and develop the MTB skills of local riders.
The one in June was great and we had 16 people attend either on the Saturday or the Sunday. Still have to do some more promotion for the ones in November.
Develop more offroad tracks in the Mangamahoe forest MTB park. Parts of the park will be logged in the near future and where there are currently tracks, these will be gone when the logging is carried out. Have run two working bees in the past few months and there will be another shortly.
Mapping of the MTB tracks and making the maps available online. Check out the website.
Club membership growth. Have used the skills courses as a way of increasing the numbers by also using the TSB grant to reduce the cost of club membership for their first year.
Structural engineering work: I had a goal from a couple of years ago to publish a paper on how the current Structural Design Actions standard could be adopted for the use in the design of industrial structures.
The SDA standard is very orientated towards buildings that people live, shop and work in whereas the industrial structure is very much about supporting items that modify something usually under pressure. So I blithely started writing it up and it grew and grew. I presented a shortened version of it at the NZ Society of Earthquake Engineering (NZSEE)technical conference in Napier last year to see how it went down. Most of the adaption of the SDA is to do with the earthquake provisions.
I eventually got a draft off to the editor of the NZSEE technical bulletin in February of this year for review. He came back with +ve noises and I got the completed version off in May. It has been peer reviewed, accepted and is due to be published in the next edition of the bulletin. Hopefully it will be out this month sometime. What a labour of love!
Personal Projects: I have some personal projects to do with spending more time developing my digital darkroom and photography skills. Some of this was to become more acquainted with Photoshop, the scanner we have plus the colour printer. To do this I try and take some time off work each month so I can do this without interuption.
Judging by the crap photos I took of the eclipse of the moon the other night, I need to go back to school re the digital camera.
There were four of us in the garage for Barry Schwartz. At first the ideas seemed very familiar and consequently not very challenging. A psychological attack on capitalism and the free reign of individualism present in consumerism, the personal growth movement, more choice is more fun.
Then we started sharing stories of our frustrating forays into buying domestic items and how time consuming this could become when there were so many choices to make. We then got interested in “how” we choose and discovered a range of responses to the overwhelming aspects of choosing. Some made the first choice that looked like it might fit the bill in order to avoid the time-waste, others got very fine tuned into fitting their needs to the what was on offer, others used trusted friends or colleagues as a source of advice and just did what they did. Ask someone under 25 and a bit geeky to find out what virus protection you should put on your computer. A sort of delegation of the task of sorting the information in the ocean to someone who knows how to surf it.
We kept wondering how people choose and talked about desire and its infinite varieties and how connecting with our values helped limit the scope of our choosing, is this OK for me, for my family, for other humans, the species, the planet. One of us described how finding out about the lives of coffee-growers helped make it easy to buy coffee. She would always choose the fair trade variety and this made the process simpler.
I wondered about levels of choosing: a kind of reptilian response to our environment (if it looks good I'll eat it and as much of it as I can before someonelse gets there); a mammalian response (this is for my mate, me and our offspring, and possible the pack); a human response ( how can I best use this resource balancing the needs of myself, my loved ones and those I know who need it?); a change maker response ( how does this resource become sustainable managed and used to for the common good and to create systemic change in the whole system?)
Later I wondered if we could have thought about this more in relationship to Changemakers itself. How we choose our projects or the individuals and groups we support through financial encouragement.
We finished looking forward to our next meeting which is a 5-10-5-10 meeting.
Rives recaps memorable moments of TED2006 in a fantastical Mockingbird lullaby. Mixing the personal with the universal in free-spirited rhyming verse, he imagines using mockingbirds to redistribute the world's underappreciated sounds. "They listen and mimic and remix what they like / they rock the mic."
I chose this poem rather than a song tonight because I believe it represents some of what we are doing with our Monday night ChangeMakers - taking our own Mockingbirds out in to our worlds.
We watched a video about a book by Joel R. Primack, Ph.D., one of the world's leading cosmologists, and Nancy Ellen Abrams, a philosopher and writer. Primack and Abrams use recent advances in astronomy, physics, and cosmology to frame a compelling new theory for understanding the universe and our role in it.
I find writing up this evening more challenging than any of the others. Partly the cosmological context they describe is boggling but also the implications of how precious human life and our place in the universe is and how crucial the next decades may be for the continuation of the evolutionary journey of consciousness in human form is scarey.The images they created to help describe their views of the universe and our place in it were helpful and somehow also frustrating. I wanted to be able to comprehend the whole of what they were saying and there was so much condensed into so little. I'd been reading Lloyd Geering's summary of the I - Thou theology of Martin Buber and was excited by the idea that God or Love or whatevery is found in between us, in our relations with each other, a little like the dark dark matter of the universe described by these scientists as what holds apart and gives structure to the known light parts of the universe. It shouldn't be suprising to a psychotherapist that there is a lot more that we are unconscious of than what we know. If any of you others can remember our discussions or have points to make about this evening please help me out here. I think I need a bigger brain! Lynne
Their website contains links to the video and you can access The View from the Center of the Universe book here.
Author Robert Wright explains “non-zero-sumness,” a game-theory term describing how players with linked fortunes tend to cooperate for mutual benefit. This dynamic has guided our biological and cultural evolution, he says -- but our unwillingness to understand one another, as in the clash between the Muslim world and the West, will lead to all of us losing the “game.” Once we recognize that life is a non-zero-sum game, in which we all must cooperate to succeed, it will force us to see that moral progress — a move toward empathy — is our only hope.
Robert Wright — Non-Zero Sumness
Wright is an historian who, although pessimistic regarding the world today, maintains that civilisation is improving. He points out that several thousand years ago, people in one tribe or city-state didn’t even consider people in other tribes or city-states to be human. Nowadays, while racial and religious prejudice persists, it is not to the level of denying people their humanity and this is certainly progress.
Wright has created a model he calls Non-Zero Sumness that he maintains helps describe civil evolution. The opposite of Non-Zero Sumness is Zero Sumness, which is a description of win-lose, a system that balances to zero. In contrast, Non-Zero Sumness describes how both sides of an “equation” rise and fall in the same direction, they go either up or down together. He points to an example of an increasingly violent American foreign policy (trying to snuff out Muslim extremists in Iraq) to an equally rising and violent Muslim response to this policy.
Wrights major messages are that:
•because of technology, and global communication and interaction, everything that happens in the world has a radiating effect. Civilisation is now so complex and interconnected that parts of it can’t be isolated. We can’t expect interventions to remain localised.
•to improve the world (or to avert catastrophe) we need an improvement in morality.
•the pathway to improve morality is to appeal to people’s self-interest. This means, in Non-Zero Sumness, what is good for you is also good for me (as is what is bad for you is bad for me).
How do you promote improved morality? Wright says that understanding the “other side” or creating empathy is essential. If people act in their own self-interest, then explaining to them that (given the model of Non-Zero Sumness) it is in their best interest that the other side does well. Wellness begets wellness. Illness begets illness. He promotes learning about those with whom you are in opposition.
Our discussion:
How you go about creating moral improvement. Harnessing people’s self-interest, bringing them to realise we are all connected and what hurts “them” will be bad for “us” as well. This is true in all natural systems and it is only recently, now that we have the technical ability to see the interconnectedness of the Earth’s people is no different to any other living system.
To improve morality, people have to learn about those who are different, understand others so they can empathise, and recognise that our fates are intertwined.
Manipulation. We talked about ways to change people’s minds and behaviour. Is getting people to understand something a form of manipulation? Some of us thought yes. Some of us had difficulty with the term. Is manipulation a bad thing that is used by shampoo marketers to convince you of the benefits of buying their product? Isn’t manipulation also bringing people around to understanding something, isn’t it one way to describe teaching children? In the end, I think we agreed it was a matter of semantics.
Truthfulness. How does being truthful intersect with improvements to morality. Is speaking the truth self-evident? Is there a line between truthfulness and manipulation? Why would “the truth” carry the day, given that the truth may well be subjective and illusive?
Doing good for the sake of doing good. Does the idea that “people act in their own self-interest” deny that people do good for the sake of good? I think we came up with: perhaps some people do. But for a model about human behaviour, self-interest is a more reliable premise. We noted that religions, the things that promote morality, utilise self-interest (Christians and Muslims: do good and you will go to heaven. And Buddhists: all your acts of goodness improve your karma and you chances for a better position in the next incarnation) and is a good example of Non-Zero Sumness.
How to influence change. In relationships (personal or in groups) modelling behaviour can be an effective way of making your point, rather than telling. Modelling listening in a relationship can be effective because it: a) lets me hear what the other person is saying and therefore better informs my response, and b) informs the other person they are being heard and they will be more likely to respond in kind.
Perhaps the idea of morality is tied to leadership, that our leaders need to model morality. The value of raising morality can be communicated by our leaders in terms of enlightened self-interest— and Wright’s Non-Zero Sumness.
Dave
You can find Patty Griffin's "I Don't Ever Give Up" on Children Running Through and it is available on her website.
Crowded House's "Heaven that I'm Making" from the CD Time on Earth is available via their website
I found this Pop!Tech website and it includes many videos similar to the TED talks. Here's how they describe what they are about:
Pop!Tech is a one-of-a-kind conference, a community of remarkable people, and an ongoing conversation about science, technology and the future of ideas.
We started with an overview of how the Monday nights are going for us. We are enjoying having the focus of the video and all the richness and depth of the TED talks. We appreciated the connectedness between one week and the next and the weaving of ideas. We also acknowledged the way we are now thinking as a group and are practising a way of talking that is much closer to our collective understanding of dialogue than we have had in previous years. We all feel we can take responsibility for how the conversations progress. We talked about how group thinking has been proven in research to be more creative than individual thinking or two people in discussion.
Some believe the Monday nights are having a direct impact on their ChangeMaker activities in that they feel more sure about the type of work they want to do and how they are approaching it. Others find the learning friendships are more worthwhile to their 5-10-5-10 projects allowing them to focus on their already established plan of action. We talked about how all the seemingly small activities we are doing are actually capable of making quite a difference when you look at them collectively.
Some time was devoted to the exploration of systemic thinking. We talked about the difference between the band-aid approach to fixing a problem and really getting to the underlying cause of the problem. When we related this to our personal experiences we realised band-aids do have their purpose, it is just important to identify them for what they are. We talked about the things that encourage systemic thinking and they included being present, putting some distance between yourself and the issue and separating off your emotions. We saw the parallels between these ideas and the group thinking we are doing on a Monday night. Being present was very much like the intent listening involved. Distancing yourself from the problem was like creating a space for weaving of ideas. Separating emotions from the problem was like putting your preferences in front of you and acknowledging them.
We talked broadly about oppositional thinking, staying open to new ideas and the pleasure we have had when the Monday night videos had completely upturned what we believe to be true. We also discussed the social impact of the Pill and how the focus on the individual has only come about within the last couple of generations. We considered how having to care for children later in life impacts on your capacity for empathy. We also talked about whether the social impact of recent advances in the medical world has been given full consideration.
Finally Tom has a new bike called an Evolve, made by Ellsworth, which is very very wicked.
Bennett runs a design company, Ideo. He used an example of a hospital client asking for ideas on how to improve their patients’ experience. His theme began with the need to reconcile the big (what the organisation/system/country) wants with what the small (the individual) wants.
He started with “the blinding glimpse of the bleeding obvious” or noticing. There is great value in making ourselves conscious of those things going on around us that we often overlook that may be part of the problem and/or part of the solution.
We talked about the concepts Bennett brings to creating good physical design and what we could learn from these. We identified that we need to understand the overall intention — and keep that big picture objective in view. We concluded that this overall intention must be fixed. If we find that it changes (that it isn’t fixed) then we probably haven’t explored or defined it well enough. We would therefore need to go back and widen our view further and grasp the bigger system of which our problem is a subset. If we don’t have the biggest picture we are capable as a background we will probably end up addressing details that might not address the problem.
Bennett was also clear that once you have the big picture in mind, then start trying to solve the problem incrementally, rather than assuming you will find a powerful, single solution. An overall solutions will tend to be made up a many small solutions.
What we understood of Bennett’s design approach:
•observe what is happening (be objective with fresh eyes)
•consider the issue from the user’s perspective
•keeping the big picture in mind, consider each aspect of the problem and consider how to address that one, rather than striving for a big fix-all solution
•make use of what is already known — ask the people who have experience
In summary: keep in mind the big picture and look to a variety of small steps to fix it from the prospective of the user.
We also talked about Jamie Oliver and his food in schools programme that some of us had seen on TV. Oliver identified a problem (children eating unhealthy food at school) and thought he had some solutions. As he tried to apply these solutions he found his initial attempts didn’t work and that he had to keep trying different things. By trying different things he learned more and more about what underpinned the problem. In the end, he determined he needed to understand why people and children eat the unhealthy ways they do. To do this he needed the big picture, he needed to think systemically.
By questioning and listening, he identified that people were disconnected from their food, that they had no relationship with where it came from and how it was produced. Once he understood that this was the basis for their poor eating habits, he had something to work with and began to think about ways of connecting people to what they were eating, so they understood their food. Until he understood the systemic issues, he was trying to solve details that just wouldn’t be solved because his solutions didn’t address the fundamental problem.
Both of these are very good examples of systemic thinking. They aren’t contentious, in that we didn’t have significant disagreements as we discuss them. But they are revealing and useful to apply to our work and lives. Dave We played Karl Jenkins' The Armed Man - A Mass for Peace "Save Me from Bloody Men"
The Live Earth concert weekend was an inspiring planetary event ... 22 hours of music screened on C4 from Saturday evening to Sunday evening.
Al Gore was inspirational ... emerging as a hologram on the Tokyo stage to open their part of the concerts ... and then later appearing on the New York stage (after Melissa Etheridge) to personally deliver his seven-point pledge to work for change.
The other inspirational speech from New York was cut from the international broadcasts. It was a clear call from Robert F Kennedy Jnr to get involved in the political process. You can watch the speech here and read his full speech here.
I was also very much taken by Paul Kelly's group performance of his Aussie classic on the Gurinji land rights struggle of the 1970s ... "From Little Things, Big Things Grow". (Missy Elliot is the new Australian pop diva).
Richard Dawkins — Militant Atheism’s primary argument is that religious fundamentalism has become a major justification for war and inequality. But because it is ‘faith-based’ it is considered to be inarguable — and even unquestionable, even though it has no grounding in reason or fact. RD points out that religion, being faith-based rather than fact-based, sets itself at odds with science and denies physical realities. He is promoting ‘militant atheism’ to confront militant religiousity. He challenges people to publicly ‘come-out’ as atheists and support science, fact and the complexity of the world.
My interpretation of our Richard Dawkins discussion:
Some of us felt there is value in RD’s strident, militant approach because taking a softer line has resulted in the bulldozing of reason and blind faith leading to war and planetary degradation. In contrast, some felt that all people should be able to express their faith as they like. Those leaning more towards RD’s perspective felt that that approach makes assumption that those with ‘faith’ will play fair and allow others their own freedom of different religiosity or spiritualism. RD points out that faith-based people are not playing fair by requiring their leaders to also be ‘faith-based’, which denies science, fact and what might be called truth.
We argued whether RD’s extreme approach is an attempt to ‘correct’ the centre point of the argument. He believes (and supports with reasonable evidence) that he debate is well and truly skewed towards the faith-based end of the spectrum and that reasonable, fact-based points of view are portrayed as fringe by the faith-based.
Our conversation roamed over the people in our lives who are either activity faith-based or are actively non-faith-based. Some of us agreed that both extremes become dogmatic and either inarguable from the outset, or if debate takes place it will reach of a point of impasse. We acknowledged that religion and spirituality is something that is not widely discussed from a personal perspective, possibly (in part) because of this.
Semantics is an important part of this topic. One controversial point is the use of the terms God, god, atheist and agnostic. We looked these terms up in the (highly recommended) New Zealand Oxford Dictionary 2005. This dictionary was specific that ‘God’ is based around monotheist religions and ‘god’ refers to a superhuman being that has power over nature and events. Even so, some people have strong attachment to the term. Others are more comfortable with spirituality. We agreed that it is essential to clearly define words so people can begin to communicate. We also acknowledged that an oratory is more than the sum of the meaning of each word and that the combination of words and context (the space between) is where meaning lies.
We don’t think any of us considers ourselves non-spiritual but several of us say they don’t believe in god or God as defined in the dictionary. However, no one seemed to be comfortable to take on RD’s next step and saying they are atheist, or at least not a militant atheist. Atheism is a very confrontational term and has a sense of anti-social or at least anti-cultural bias to it. One has to wonder if this the flip-side or shadow of the cultural pervasiveness of faith-based God believers?
Someone pointed out how, as humans were developing around 2000 years ago, a number of ‘prophets’ emerged, all saying essentially the same thing: “treat other people like you would like them to treat you.” This was a significant departure from the brutality of the previous tenet that the strong survive and subjugate the weaker. Today’s big religions are built around these prophets. We also noted that religions are a product of their culture and those that promote them. It is possible that they lose their relevance, or become dangerous, if they remain dogmatic and unwilling or unable to change as culture changes.
Tonight's song "Kuna Kunungi" from Hukwe Zawose & Michael Brook is from the CD Assembly
I have started a Freecycle group in New Plymouth as one of my ChangeMaker projects. Here's what it is all about:
The New Plymouth Freecycle™ group is open to all who want to "recycle" that special something rather than throw it away. Whether it's a chair, a fax machine, piano or an old door, feel free to post it. Or maybe you're looking to acquire something yourself! Nonprofit groups are also welcome to participate too!
One main rule: everything posted must be free. This group is part of The Freecycle Network, a nonprofit organization and a movement of people interested in keeping good stuff out of landfills. Check out freecycle.org for other cities and info on the movement!
The Freecycle Network has just topped a membership of 4 million in the 4,140 local groups and over 75 countries! This now means that we are enabling over 400 tons a day to be kept out of landfills. Here's a link to a Freecycle article including a video featuring creator Deron Beal on Yahoonews
We gathered in our overcoats. There was snow on the mountain for the first time this winter.
Inspirations were excited science pupils, Wellington aiming for carbon-neutral, herons spotted at Kawaroa, wiser earth.org...Antona played us John Martyn's "He's got all the Whiskey" and "Excuse me Mister". We watched Jimmy Wales and talked about the radical aspects of an encyclopedia for everyone on earth and compared it to the big vision of William McDonough "for all the children, of all the species for all time."We attempted to comprehend the implications of "open-sourcing" and the wonder of having passionate voluntary contributers that create the entries "by a thousand tweaks." We were impressed that the veracity of wikipedia compared to traditional academic written encyclopedias which are so sonn out of date and so dependant on the views and vagaries of an individual writer compared to the collective wisdom of wikipedia. We wondered about the implications of copyright and how people might earn a living and make such enormous contribution. Only one wikipedia worker is paid. We thought about the level of commitment and the integrity it evokes when effort is collective and voluntary.
We revisisted "Don't reform unless you can reform with equity. Innovation is not reform" and we thought about how the contributors require that entries be reformed only if value is added and neutrality protected. We thought about these contributers as stewards of neutrality and the commons of wikipedia.
We laughed about Jimmy Wales retaining a monarchist position over a voluntary kingdom of wikipedia stewards in order to protect their creation from the attacks of democracy in the form of bloc voting by advocacy groups from the left or the right. What was his expression about this? We finished with a check out round and another bit of John Martyn.
Faure's Requiem was played. We talked about what had inspired us.
We looked at a model of how your 5-10-5-10 activity could be mapped. This led to thinking together about joining up the resources of time and money with your intention rather than seeing them as discrete categories. We talked about advocacy groups or social entrepreneur groups finding ways to be self-funding so they were sustainable without external backing. Some of us are still defining our projects. Others are well on the way with many more than 10 things to do on their lists. We identified working with joyfulness as a key.
I have started to get that when you are trying to make systemic change you need to be much more thoughtful about where the places you act on are and to really think through the consequences of interventions you make, to use your imagination to do this. That building relationships is a key part of it.
We talked for about three quarters of an hour on 5-10-5-10 and then we reviewed the new format with Ted's talks. There was a general agreement that the talks were going really well, that there was a high committment to and enjoyment of the evenings and the conversations.
We wondered together if we could deepen the experience of dialogue by listening better, by "suspending our preferences as well as our judgements" and by bringing an alive presence of sensation, feeling and mind to the conversation. We also decided it was important not to try and get rules for ourselves or get it right, that the eruption of frustration or mindless fizzing of first thoughts or someone taking the conversation in a new and unexpected direction was all welcome. Some people fizz, some people pop. It's all good!
We discussed the initiative of two members to create a blog that could be a way that our experience was captured for ourselves and perhaps as an example of what can happen for other Changemaker groups. We remembered the three legs of Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline: personal mastery, systemic thinking, and dialogue? One group member has already written a page for the national website on systemic thinking and others are planned on learning friendships, personal mastery. Changemakers as a learning community was suggested as a topic. One of us suggested that viewing the Ted talk on Monday sometime had helped her take in the content. We finished with another part of Faure's Requiem.
I have put the automatic payment details on the national website at www.changemakers.org.nz for our fundraising for a National Co-ordinator for the 5-10-5-10 Development Group.
As you know, we have invited Billy Matheson to take up the challenge.
We need about 100 people putting in $50 a month to reach our target of funding this position on a sustainable basis.
... sounds like something that can be fitted in to your 5% ??
The Automatic Payment Form can be downloaded from here.
We shared our social change inspirations and disappointments and were introduced to Majora Carter and her work greening the South Bronx.
We were impressed with Majora's ability to challenge the viewpoint of the mainly white audience with the need to reclaim and protect public park spaces in ghetto areas, that the inhabitants were as entitled to beautiful parks as residents of affluent areas. She asked Al Gore not to just give money to her projects but to ensure that people like her were placed in advisory and decision making situations. Our discussion identified the way she got people to see problems in a different way but identifying with her personal story and personal charisma.
Some of us wondered if the viewpoint she was presenting needed to be expanded to be more than just humanistic, that we would protect environments for their own sake, not just so human-beings could enjoy them.
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Einstein
At the end of the evening we created an agenda for our next meeting: discuss 5-10 projects, talk about systemic change, review the structure of the evenings and how it is serving our purposes.
Michael Franti and Spearhead's "Time to go" feature on the CD Yell Fire! available from Amazon.
"Take a Ride" by Brooklyn Bounce is featured on YouTube here.
I have put up a list of books onto the national website at www.changemakers.org.nz ... just to give readers a bit of a taste of the sort of ideas we are exploring with ChangeMakers 5-10-5-10.
There are lending copies of many of these books already circulating our group.
If you are interested in borrowing them ... do let us know at the next meeting.
We gathered with a visitor from Auckland. We listened to Mavis Staples sing Eyes on the Prize. We checked in with our inspirations and nasty surprises. We watched Charles Leadbetter on innovation. We thought together about innovation as incremental and collaborative; open source vs traditional closed systems. Schopenhauer was quoted re innovation and the way that new ideas are firstly ridiculed, then attacked and finally become self-evident. Changemakers have to tolerate this process and what it brings up for them. Leadbetter talked about creating a platform for innovation, giving tools, a little instruction, nurturing innovation, noticing it. I thought about neither abandoning or interfering with innovation. We wondered about fear as an obstacle to innovation. We asked ourselves the question - What if a Changemakers group produced the next round of social innovations?
We wondered about the loss of innovation in the Public Sector, how it had once been the platform for wonderful innovators such as Beebie. Perhaps there was a need for a fellowship for Public Service innovators.We talked about the difference between reformation and innovation and there was a quote from someone re "Reformation needs to be equitable. And innovation is not reformation."
Our learning friendship wondered what it would take to make Changemakers self replicating? What aspects would we want to have replicate? How do we enroll other change makers into learning groups? Do we use our own or do we start new ones? What's the difference between the worst kind of proslytizing/conversion seeking and giving other people the opportunity to use the tools we have discovered in their own way? How do we make Changemakers open-source?
The soundtrack Bobby with Aretha Franklin & Mary J. Blige & The Harlem Boys Choir "Never Gonna Break My Faith" is available from Amazon.
Also available from Amazon is We'll Never Turn Back feat. Mavis Staples and Ry Cooder "Eyes on the Prize"
We listened to SJD singing Beautiful Haze. We checked in with what was inspiring us or irritating us: David Bain, Earthsong, opposition to S59.......
We watched William McDonough speaking about Cradle to Cradle design from the TED talks. Our conversation included the beauty of his design brief for a tree, touching and smelling a copy of his book made out of plastic and opening to the idea that synthetic products could be infinitely re-cycled and/or designed to decompose without a blueprint. The challenge to the hippie in us.
We were taken with the simple way he opened up the complexity of choices in manufacture and purchasing, with the simple contrast of the toxic duck and the nurturing baby blanket. He seemed to make the problems and the solutions look more complex and more simple at the same time.
We got talking about the failure of environmentalists to create systemic changes. We started to understand what systemic change might look like. We talked about the reaction to the complexity of life by the hippies and by the neo-hippies being an attempt at a personal solution to a systemic problem and thus doomed to fail. We considered that a return to Eden philosophy, reduction of footprint and of consumption not solving or changing things at the systemic level and not being enough. We need "Think global, act local, organize systemic change" perhaps.
We loved "for all the children of all the species for all time." I hope we come back to this question of what is systemic change and what creates it. I suspect it's connected with Bill Drayton's vision of everyone as a changemaker. We were inspired by the idea that business success and sustainability can go together and the examples of the living roof and the 7 Chinese cities.
His utopia does not ask us to reduce our lifestyle but rather to fit it in with the earth's biosphere so it does no harm and may, like some of his building produce more clean water or energy than which they absorb.
There were lots more dimensions to our conversation but I've left it a bit late to capture them. We talked about veganism, and the impact on the planet of meat eating and a dairy culture. We wondered if anyone is working with technology to create a non-burping cow. We looked at the way he refutes the idea of a tragic response to the world's problems, that it's all going to go terribly bad and the inertia this generates. He certainly is part of the solution.
Lynne
You can download the track Beautiful Haze directly from SJD's website at http://sjd.co.nz/
Intentional Learning Friendships meeting fortnightly around 5-10-5-10.
Being flexible about the numbers so they remain a call to awaken rather than a whip with which to beat ourselves.
Starting each night, after the music with a quick check in, what inspires us, what we are learning, what we need.
TED talk video scheduled for 3 out of 4 nights. These nights open to other Changemakers. Circle sharing/dialogue to follow applying what we have seen and heard to who we are and what we are doing.
One Changemaker to arrive at 7pm to set up the space and play their choice of music and lead of the sharing.
An intentional finish, eg checkout with how we are or what's staying with us.
The 4th night to be about reflecting on the process and sharing more about our 5-10-5-10 projects.
Let's finish with a party or musical whaikorero rather than drift off like we did last year.
Notes from Changemakers Weekend held at Waimea Garage and at Oakura on May 4 & 5, 2007.
We met on Friday night at Waimea garage for a potluck dinner. We seemed glad to see each other and a bit sad about the drop-out rate from last year but determined to get started and also acknowledged the benefits of not having to accommodate so many people and adjust to new members.
The first chapter of Paul Hawken's new book, Blessed Unrest was distributed. I loved the final paragraphs:
Inspiration is not garnered from litanies of what is flawed; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, recover,re-imagine, and reconsider. Healing the wounds of the Earthand its people does not require saintliness or a political party. It is not liberal or conservative activity. It is a sacred act. -adapted from "Blessed Unrest" -How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming by Paul Hawken pub 2007 Viking
We also talked about the work of social entrepreneur Bill Drayton. I'm particularly inspired by his image of changemakers as white blood cells:
The most important contribution any of us can make now is not to solve any particular problem, no matter how urgent energy or environmental or financial regulation is. What we must do now is increase the proportion of humans who know that they can cause change. And who, like smart white blood cells coursing through society, will stop with pleasure whenever they see that something is stuck or that an opportunity is ripe to be seized. Multiplying society's capacity to adapt and change intelligently and constructively and building the necessary underlying collaborative architecture, is the world's most critical opportunity now. Pattern-changing social entrepreneurs are the most critical single factor in catalysing and engineering this transformation ...”— from “Everyone a Changemaker”, by Bill Drayton (2006)
We looked again at the Changemakers slide show and a few issues arose from this. One of us spoke about noticing his resistance to entering the group and realising that this was a normal part of starting a project and that anything worth doing brought about resistance. In getting on with it in spite of resistance something shifts and enjoyment follows.
Another talked about wondering if it was possible to stay in the group even if she were not able to manage a “proper” 5-10 project and as the group responded with encouragement to think small and stay in the group she opened up to the possibility of blogging. Her honesty seemed to open up a possibility of engaging creatively with 5-10-5-10 rather than experience it as a burden.
Someone else talked about the difficulty she had with using her professional knowledge as a basis for her 5-10 project and the issue of whether she should charge for it or not. The group helped her realise that getting on with it was what was important, and that she could think through the issues of what and who to charge. That being paid or not being paid didn't need to diminish the status of the work she was offering.
We all engaged with the 5-10-5-10 in some way disidentifying from the “should” aspect of them to allow what felt possible manageable and enjoyable in terms of the complexities of our current lives. For instance there aren't 10 of us this year and there is nothing magical about the number 10.
Two members spoke about the national picture and how it required support both financial and in energy to help co-ordinate and facilitate the starting of other Changemakers groups. It's exciting to hear of the national co-ordinator's enthusiasm and that he is introducing 5-10-5-10 to young people at the Hope gathering this weekend.
We all talked about our 5-10-5-10 projects as far as we had got with them. It was great to look forward to meeting on Saturday as well.
On Saturday we started to think about what we wanted from the group. One of us condensed the need to have evenings that were "inspiring, encouraging, refreshing." That there should be an attraction to look forward and that we could use Ted's talks downloaded from the internet to focus each evening. There was an element of resistance to this, lets talk about what we need to learn rather than opt for an easy option of infotainment. We discussed this a little and saw the need to have an attractor to the evenings and to acknowledge the limits of our own weariness after a day's work. After discussion we thought the 5-10-5-10 engagement could happen within the learning friendships and the evenings could start with a video and then be a discussion or dialogue following this. We got the idea that other changemakers from previous years or friends of changemakers could be provided with a list of these videos and could come if they wanted to. Every 4th night would just be for the Changemakers group and we could assess how things are going and tune in to our 5-10-5-10 projects and what support or skills we needed to learn for them.
Other things we discussed were the call to be intentional, where to put our money and energy and its centrality to the opportunity of Changemakers. That intentionality lies behind a to do list. Also being accountable as citizens to each other.
We discussed advocacy and pressure groups and how these were different from Changemaker groups in that we were trying to be reflective and active rather than reactive. That building and maintaining relationships was more important and made more difference that advocating issues.
We were given an image of changemaking not being about publishing your recipe but more about waking up to yourself as an ingredient in the recipe revealed by is in relationship with each other. Looks like mystery. Changemakers seen as a method of making Heart Politics more systemic to people's lives, to make Heart Politics more sustainable, how to create gathering less defined by who showed up to them.
5-10-5-10 could be adapted to other pre-existing groups. A good approach might be If you were to spend 5% of your income on a social change project what would it be, if you were to put aside 5% of your time to do 10 things what would they be, who would you like to meet with to support your social change work...etc.
We drew our Intentional Learning Friendship partners out of a hat.
We watched Larry Brilliant's talk at the World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship and were inspired by his story about eradicating Smallpox.
We realised we could get through the programme design with out meeting on Sunday but that we didn't have enough energy for a circle sharing so we talked about our responses to the video a little and checked out. It felt like we had been meeting together for a long time and had accomplished a lot in terms of re-designing the form Changemakers Taranaki will take this year. We completed tired but satisfied.
The main things I learned were to keep open to co-creativity in the structure and content of Changemakers so that we are forming a group, learning in the group and finding out what best serves the group at the same time. I became enthusiastic about recording the process in some way so I could reflect on it and that our experiment might be useful to other Changemaker groups that might follow. A vision starts to unfold of many kinds of Changemaker groups as each one engages creatively and tunes the resources and the precedents to their own needs and context.
Taranaki ChangeMakers is one of several New Zealand groups that have been developing a new style of community group which aims to inspire and support a greater citizen engagement on social, economic and environmental issues. Our group follows a 5-10-5-10 framework of active citizenship.
