The Garden: A Great Place to Organize

The American Community Gardening Association — who knew?!

Thanks to Local Matters, on Saturday and Sunday I participated in a 45-person, two day “Growing Communities” workshop here in Columbus. I figured I’d go to meet people and possibly pick up some training tips.

Well, it turned out to be just what I was looking for and wasn’t really expecting, a community organizing training for trainers! It took place in the realm of gardening, but was actually about organizing and training.

Day 1 focused on the philosophy of organizing, human and physical resources required for successful community gardening, asset based community development, successful teaching/training, and workshop creation. We spent a significant amount of time in exercises and small groups, including the final 2 hours where each of 4 groups planned a workshop to teach the next day.

Day 2 was mostly participant led, which was scary and exciting for most of us since few people expected it.  Each group led a 90 minute workshop: Asset-Based Community Development, Leadership Development, Communications & Outreach , and Grassroots Fundraising Basics.

Standing on a chair, offering an engaging way to show that 85% of nonprofit money comes from real people.

I spent much of the time in our small group noticing, learning about, and participating in our group process, while others were focused on what we could produce — I was particularly interested in fostering equal participation, collaborative decision-making, and new organizing and communication skills.

Basically, I was comfortable and confident enough to be a trainer-in-study. This was great because, as they say, you don’t really learn something until you teach it. I also got to try on and model good training in some fun full-group fundraising exercises.

People really stepped up, it was great! Folks helped each other, spoke in large groups, met new people during breaks, did tasks at home Saturday night, tried new things… I’m glad I went.

Going Deeper

That said, in my opinion the workshop could have been improved in a few areas. It feels particularly useful to get into this because I heard multiple mentions of overhauling the curriculum, so I offer this in an effort to make next time even better!

It’s tricky for me to pick it all apart, but I think many of the sections could’ve benefited from deeper analysis/foundations. Here are some specifics (some of which may only ring true for this particular workshop, and not for the curriculum as a whole):

• Why Organize?
  • Strength: We talked about the power of collaboration and we talked about self-interest.
  • Weakness: We neglected connecting these to realize that our greater self-interest is collaboration.
• Asset-Based Community Development
  • I liked this approach, but wasn’t sold on it. Why is it preferable to begin by focusing on what we have than be critical about what we lack? The ABCD method ignores some very real social power dynamics, and in my opinion risks solidifying ignorance and exclusion.  I want a nuanced power analysis to be paired with this approach.
• Diversity
  • Strength: Focus on inclusion, accessibility, and bilingual organizing.
  • Weakness: The workshop kind of took for granted this “diversity is good” understanding among participants.  It missed three key lessons: 1) we can only succeed if everyone is in, 2) oppressed people are more likely to understand social and material power dynamics, but often least resourced to do so, and 3) the human community functions like any ecosystem, only healthy when interconnected and dynamic.
• Leadership Development
  • Strengths: Focus on the organizer’s role in leadership development.
  • Weaknesses: Lacked the understanding and clarity of different types of leadership (strategic, ethical, process, etc) which goes beyond simple adjectives to describe leadership. Missed the key takeaways of making oneself obsolete, that functional grassroots groups are leaderful/leaderless, and that no individual possesses all the characteristics of good leaders so we need to work together in complementary ways in order to succeed.

That said, many people came to this with minimal experience or understanding in organizing, and left feeling inspired and confident. I think the workshop did a great job overall of meeting people where they were at and pushing them to grow.

Thanks to Local Matters and the American Community Gardening Association for making this possible! For more upcoming events, including seeding a garden, soil, mushrooms, and more, see the Growing Our Own workshop series.

Training: Strategic Campaign Planning

I was lucky enough to be asked to do a Strategic Campaign Planning training at the Ohio Student Environmental Coalition‘s winter retreat this past weekend.  This is a familiar topic for me, so I let some ideas rattle around in my brain before putting pen to paper.  WELL, with the aid of some green tea I came up with some great new stuff!

In previous similar trainings I’ve spent almost the whole time strategizing through a campaign some of the participants are working on.  Because I’m more often asked to do generic Campaign Planning trainings than to help with specific campaigns, this usually generates incomplete results that are applicable to a minority of participants.  So, in this version I focus as much on the reality of the process as the theory behind it — if focusing on a specific campaign, I would greatly expand the second half.

Enough said!  See what you think:

100 minutes

Goals:

1. Help participants experience and assess common planning methods in action
2. Demonstrate an effective and strategic campaign planning process
3. Establish common understanding of useful terms

Written Resources (wait to hand out #2-4):

1. Campaign scenarios (see below for mine)
2. Strategic Campaign Planning Worksheet [.PDF || .DOC]
3. Checklist for Choosing an Issue, by the Midwest Academy
4. Tactic Analysis, by Training for Change

1) Scenarios (40 min)

• Right off the bat, have the group count off randomly and split into groups of 4-10 people each
• 20 min: Give each group a different campaign scenario to work through
  • I used these three scenarios, inspired by real recent events in Columbus
• 10 min: Debrief WHAT — Ask each scenario group to report to the full group about what their scenario was and what they came up with.
  • Teaching moment: if useful, offer a power analysis and/or reality check for proposed actions
• 10 min: Debrief HOW — How did the planning process go, how did it feel?  What leadership styles, power dynamics, democratic mechanisms, roles, inequalities, etc. arose?  How did the time limit impact you?  Etc.

2) Introduce Yourself (2 min)

Yep, that’s right, I introduced myself halfway into the training.  Organizing origins, some campaign history, professional experience and interests, etc.  I wanted to push people right into the exercise, both to create a more real-life circumstance, and to give everyone a greater sense of ownership (or, avoid creating a dynamic of train-er and train-ees).

This was a friendly crowd, and I had interacted with enough people at that point to establish some credibility and trust.  It was an experiment, I think it turned out well this time!  :0)

3) Definitions (5 min)

Didn’t spend much time on this part, just a bit of teaching:

• Campaign :: People creating and leveraging power to get what they want
  • Power :: The ability to mobilize people and resources
• Strategy :: Effective, efficient, and clearly-defined method
• Campaign Strategy (all together now!) :: People creating and leveraging the ability to mobilize people and resources, using an effective, efficient, and clearly-defined method to get what they want.

4) Why Campaign Strategy? (8 minutes)

*Ask for a volunteer to scribe for this part.

Open questions to the full group.  Particularly in light of the scenarios and our ongoing work:

• Why campaign?
• Why strategy?
• What do our alternatives look like?  Any examples?

Teaching moment: The issue is not the issue.  We are building power, not simply winning victories.  Strong organizations start small, take on achievable campaigns, and grow over time.  They are also able to reach too high sometimes and bounce back even stronger with good reflection.

5) Anatomy of a Campaign (5 minutes)

*Ask for a volunteer to model these steps.  I gave ours a green hard hat for the occasion!

Draw and explain this picture (I’m not an accomplished artist, sorry!  That’s supposed to be brains in the noggin there.):

Anatomy of a Campaign -- should cycle through images of the 7 steps

Explain that these steps aren’t necessarily linear, and often cycle forwards and backwards.  Step 7 also feeds back into step one, and thus we have praxis!

**Teaching moment: A note on privilege: It matters whether you are “choosing” what campaign to work on, or whether the problem landed in your lap (like it did for the folks in Scenario 1).  This can be the difference between being on the podium vs. behind-the-scenes, setting direction vs. taking direction.  It is critical to each carry this understanding with us as we go.

6) Plan a Campaign! (35 minutes)

*Ask a volunteer to scribe for this part, and encourage people to take notes as well.

Explain that we are going to focus on step 2 of the Anatomy, Plan & Strategize, for the next half hour.

Use the Campaign Planning Worksheet I compiled (hand it out to everyone now!), or other materials of your liking, guide people through the planning process.  *Disclaimer: You can’t do much in 35 minutes.  My intention here was to give people a primer and work through a little bit of a real-life scenario.  A full campaign planning process can require significant prep and a few dedicated hours or a full day together.

7) Wrap Up (5 minutes)

• Describe and distribute any other written or digital resources you have.
• Ask for feedback using a “5-finger shoot” — participants raise their fingers with 1 being awful and 5 amazing.  Take comments from people on either end of the spectrum
• Thank the participants and offer them a way to stay in communication with you.

You like it?

Anti-Oppression: A Challenge, A Commitment

I wrote a few months ago about my experience leading a couple Anti-Oppression workshops at Midwest Power Shift.  They were pretty tough for me, for a variety of reasons.  I was uncertain about accepting the workshop request initially, but ended up thinking I could pull it off.  Here are some of the things that happened in the workshops:

• A visually challenged participant felt offended and left the room (read previous post for more)
• I let the conversation be dominated by a minority of people in the room, mostly men
• About twice as many people showed up as I expected, and was told to expect
• The experience level and general openness in the room was lower than I’ve had in previous workshops, especially in the second, more “advanced” session
• I let the conversation get diverted multiple times onto tangents which, although they were useful, were not what I intended and committed to do with the groups — it became dominated by a discussion aimed at probing the difficult emotions that accompany having (white) privilege, though it was by no means clear that represented the majority of participants
• The prep I did going into small group exercises generated some seemingly shallow and unfocused conversations
• I spent a lot of time thinking about the workshop, rather than being fully present in it

Yikes!

I started to think I wasn’t up for this task after all.  However, this was all confused by multiple participants being really productively challenged, making a point to thank me after, and even tearing up about their experience.  I heard this at least 7 times, with no specific criticisms mixed in.  How to negotiate this?

Well thankfully, I recently was forwarded some more critical feedback about the workshops, which really affirmed the problems mentioned above.  My socialization as a white guy limits my ability to understand and certainly train on anti-oppression — more could be said on this, but that’s sufficient here.  It really doesn’t work for me to allow and create oppressive spaces in a setting described as anti-oppressive.  So, here’s what I’m going to do about it:

1. Refuse “open call” anti-oppression workshops requests.  This is because I’m not a dynamic enough trainer to handle all the variables involved in this setting, I have training shortcomings as a white guy, I seem to be better equipped to work with people that come from privilege, there are other people out there who are simply better, and because I think “open call” A-O workshops are maybe just not a good idea in general.
2. Turn down a current inquiry for an “open-call” Anti-Oppression training.
3. Send a message to the Midwest Power Shift Steering Committee about all this, and ask them for feedback and to be more careful and critical when creating conference programs in the future.
4. (A commitment I made in the workshop itself): Clarify exercises with participants with disabilities ahead of time, and modify any workshop as necessary to include everyone.
5. (Already underway): Be in communication with the participant who walked out of the workshop.
6. Seek out other trainings for myself, particularly along the lines of ability and inclusion.
7. Seek out other trainers who are more capable of facilitating A-O workshops and work to support them, learn from them, and refer people to them.

And that’s where I need you.  I’ve got lots of questions!  What is your experience, really, of “open call” Anti-Oppression workshops?  What roles have you seen white men play in organizations and A-O trainings that have been really useful and generative?  What trainings do you recommend I consider for myself?  What trainers can I support, learn from, and refer people to when I get requests I can’t handle (especially in Ohio/the Midwest)?

It’s not that I’m not big enough to do this.  It’s that I’m big enough to know better.  I spent years supporting the work of some people of color-led organizations in the Energy Action Coalition‘s anti-oppression working group, have been lucky to experience the value and power of this work, and intend to keep going.

The Facilitation Generation

They will call us the Facilitation Generation.

I’m blown away:

Anti-Oppression Trainings at Midwest Power Shift

I facilitated the Anti-Oppression 1 and 2 workshops at Midwest Power Shift. It’s a commitment I take seriously, and in completing that commitment I’m writing up how things went and some advice for future A-O trainings.

 

I’m going to cover what’s “on top” for me here, because I think those things will be most of interest and useful to you. This probably goes without saying, but I invite discussion in the comments!

 

>>[For more resources and/or an introduction to what the heck I'm talking about, see Global Exchange's Anti-Oppression Reader]

 

photo credit: Ben Hejkal

Logistics

It was great to have a small to mid-sized room with mobile chairs. People learn more from each other than they do from me in these workshops, and pairs and small groups are critical. If the chairs are anchored to the ground, go somewhere else!

 

My workshops were offered to a conference of 400 people simultaneously with several other workshops, so I expected there to be a crowd, but I was surprised at how big they were – there were about 35 in the first and 50 in the second session (90 minutes each). Hooray, people want to go to Anti-Oppression trainings!… Uh oh, that means we actually have to train them!

 

Overall I think it’s appropriate to offer these workshops at the same time as other workshops (though it’s not acceptable to offer them simultaneously with big speakers or events). Because these workshops are most powerful for small to mid-sized groups, maybe 6-20 people, I recommend offering intro workshops multiple times in larger conferences.

 

A nit-picky thing: I submitted my workshops as Anti-Oppression 1 and 2, but they were on the program as 101 and 201. I prefer the way I put it originally, because the whole 101/201 thing suggests that there’s a quick advancement, that the content is consistent from one workshop to the next, and that there’s some sort of “end” to Anti-Oppression workshops, like you’re an expert once you get to A-O 501, which just isn’t true.

 

Workshop Planning

I under-planned, figuring we would create the second session as we went, because I didn’t know how many people were going to show up or what their interests or experience levels were. I don’t think that was necessarily a bad approach, and it didn’t cause any problems (in fact it left the full group space people were hungry for), but it did have me anxious in the hours leading up to the workshops.

 

This is a tricky dynamic when doing these workshops for open groups, rather than a specific organization with a specific goal in mind. Next time I do Anti-Oppression training at a conference I will limit the number of participants to a specific number in the workshop description, offer it multiple times in the agenda, and/or center myself on trusting the group (with my guidance) to take itself where it wants to go.

 

Multiple formats are totally critical!  We did lecture, creative hands-on, pairs, full group report backs, small groups, and open full group discussion. The more the better.

 

One thing I lacked this time was a training partner. There were a few times I was thinking about the workshop too much in the moment to perform 100% as the workshop leader. I recruited a participant before the workshops to help me de-escalate any problems, but I was lucky that someone I knew showed up and was willing and able to play that role.

 

Experience Gaps

Many people are tired of introductory Anti-Oppression workshops. A big conference like Midwest Power Shift is a great place to expose lots of people to this work for the first time, but not a great place to dig deep. Unfortunately, the A-O 2 workshop participants had far too wide a range of experience to satisfy those that wanted an advanced workshop, or to really provide a transformational experience for beginners.

 

I thought that people would be somewhat self-selecting for this workshop, that I would have a mid-sized group in A-O 1 and a smaller group in A-O 2. I also didn’t require that A-O 2 participants attend A-O 1, because I didn’t want to discourage people that had already had introductory A-O training elsewhere from joining in. Mistake! Only about 20% of the 50 A-O 2 participants had previously attended an A-O workshop. Next time I will write in the A-O 2 workshop description “Participants are required to attend A-O 1, or have attended a prior Anti-Oppression workshop.”

 

Accessibility

I made a big mistake early in the A-O 1 workshop. A young visually impaired participant walked out after volunteering for an exercise when I said I didn’t think they were a good match for the role. I did check in with them before the workshop and asked what I could do to help make it accessible for them (and they asked me to read written things aloud, describe visual exercises, and email any handouts).

 

When I asked for volunteers for an exercise, they stepped right into the circle. The problem for me was that volunteering required either sight or unpredictable touching, and I wasn’t able to explain that in a clear and concise way. This was a powerful example of able-ism on my part for the group to witness and process — it led to a real-life discussion and my explanation, apology, and commitment to take responsibility and be in communication with that person (which I have done) — but it’s not fair that someone had that experience, especially in an Anti-Oppression workshop.

 

In the future, I will check in with people that seem to be of differing abilities before any workshop I give, and describe each exercise that might be exclusive or uncomfortable for them ahead of time.

 

Impact

This was an awesome experience and made a huge difference for a handful of folks. Multiple people spoke about digging into ideas and experiences they had never been exposed to before, and I could tell they were really opening themselves to the complexities of oppression in social movements. During the evening and the following day I think 5 people told me that their friends thought it was a great and challenging and necessary workshop. We created a special space in both of the workshops.

 

This work is fundamental in any social movement building. At one point someone said “this is probably the most important workshop happening all weekend.” It’s worth investing the time and money needed for professional trainers and consultants to integrate Anti-Oppression into the actual structure of a conference, rather than adding it on as an accessory.

 

 

PS – Check out Midwest Power Shift backing up Occupy Cleveland (at 1:25):

Making a Meeting — Weinland Park Community Engagement and the 40% Rule

Most everyone is familiar with the feel of an unprepared meeting. It’s a bunch of people sitting around listening to one or a few people figure out what to talk about, having a series of small conversations in front of everyone else, and then feeling annoyed and overwhelmed when there’s little group input to or ownership over the outcome.

No thank you!

Thankfully, meetings can work. They can be a shining way to communicate, plan, delegate, get work done, and celebrate — it just requires a bit of preparation!

This week I had the pleasure of helping to plan and facilitate a Community Engagement Meeting through my work with the Weinland Park Food & Wellness Committee. In a neighborhood challenged on both sides (from the bottom: violence, poverty, arson, drugs // from above: gentrification, abandonment, over-policing, profiteering landlords), millions of dollars of federal HUD grant money may be available to develop food-related community infrastructure.

Amidst feelings of  division and mistrust, we’re working to establish legitimate and powerful grassroots involvement in how this will impact the neighborhood. Some people are concerned first about youth engagement and enrichment, some love the idea of a local foods market for its own sake, some see this as an elaborate move to help keep wealthy people from feeling guilty about gentrifying the neighborhood, etc etc.

With so many perspectives and such a level of both opportunity and risk at hand, this meeting surely needed a lot of preparation. As one of 10 facilitators, I attended two separate 2-hour facilitator discussion and preparation meetings (opting out of a third to plan the introduction to the event) and a final 30 minute final prep session. As a rule of thumb, a friend of mine spends twice as much time preparing a training as he does actually running one, and surely much more if it’s unfamiliar content.

The Community Engagement Meeting attracted about 80 people and lasted about 2.5 hours. I’m guessing that preparation through initial conversations, interacting with coalition partners, identifying and training facilitators, preparing materials, planning a budget, providing food, and setup & clean up probably took about 80 hours of work total, not to mention many side conversations and years of foundation-building that made it all possible.

So I’ll create a new rule of thumb here:

• There were roughly 80 people meeting for 2.5 hours — 80 people X 2.5 meeting hours = 200 meeting people hours
• 80 people hours spent preparing / 200 meeting people hours = .4 hours preparing for each hour of meeting
• If this can apply to other situations, a planning team should cumulatively spend 40% as much total time preparing as people will spend cumulatively at the actual event, in order to have a successful large event.

Yikes, 40%! Does that sound accurate? Overwhelming?

*Special thanks to Julia Orban and the all-resident facilitation team for all their work to turn this event into a real opportunity.

Mind Map meets Food & Wellness

Ever heard that term before, “Mind Map”? It’s an incredibly useful tool for group cohesion and shared understanding. It works like this: a topic and a prompt is introduced, and people say what they have to say about that thing. Simple! The art is in facilitating that conversation, and capturing it visually.

It is what it says, a “map” of our collective mind on a particular topic.

I’m a member of the Weinland Park Community Civic Association Food & Wellness Committee. At our meeting last month, our phenomenal group coordinator gave a brilliant intro about the need for folks to be on the same page, that nobody is “in charge”, etc., and gave a great prompt to open up the floor for residents to discuss the direction and niche of our committee. But alas, the conversation then carried on without a container, wandering here and there, bummer! So, we got our heads together and planned a little session for this month’s meeting, to provide a sense of a strategic plan for our group.

You see, we have, individually and collectively:

• VISION >> of the world we’d like to create
• MISSION >> of how this work will help make that happen
• GOALS >> in the form of projects that fulfill that mission, and
• TASKS >> that make up those projects.

These 4 put together, potentially along with Niche, funding, and others, make a Strategic Plan. Our committee tends to reside in the Vision (meetings!) and/or Tasks (hands in the dirt!) ends of this spectrum. With Vision alone, we are dreamers; with Tasks alone, we are blind workers. To bring the 4 levels closer together by filling in Mission and Goals, we used a Mind Map! The prompt was: “What is this Committee up to? What do we do that you’re involved in, and what don’t we do that you’d like to?” The blue roughly represents Mission, and the red is Goals. Tuh-duh!

A non-exhaustive Mind Map of what we're up to.

This is a popular education technique. I was first introduced to it by Rising Tide, a radical all-volunteer climate justice organization, and have also had great experiences with it thanks to the Beehive Design Collective. A mind map’s depth, clarity, and accessibility of information and analysis is pretty astounding.

All this has me asking myself: Why didn’t I use this before?!?  I’ll admin it, I’ve rarely used mind maps because I have a hard time giving up control as a meeting facilitator and a hard time trusting that a group will really take it on and create something great. Yikes!  That’s okay though, every exercise has its place.  For me, mind maps are most useful when you as the facilitator really. don’t. know.  It’s a blank slate for a group to create something all its own — in this case, they more predictable the exercise, the less useful it is!

One neat and unexpected outcome was the clarity of our blue “Mission” words (Connect Resources, Support, Advise, Outreach, Coordination, & Forum).  So, in addition to achieving a shared understanding at this meeting, we tasked someone with synthesizing a Mission statement/cloud/something for the committee using those words.  Bonus!

Three pieces of advice:

• Don’t be afraid to use this.  If you’re nervous, you’ll control it and it won’t really shine.
• Recruit a creative person to record ideas, and let them do it however they want.  The classic linked bubbles is a reliable approach, but there’s more there we can’t even imagine yet!
• To get people started, give a good prompt that you’ve thought about ahead of time, and then just get out of the way except to return the group to that prompt.

Doing Your Detective Work: Finding Out What a Group Really Needs When They Request an Anti-Oppression Workshop

by Nico Amador

Reposted from Training for Change

One of the elements of direct education, TFC’s training methodology, is a value on being learner-centered, rather than curriculum-centered. When we get asked to do a training, we do not usually rely on a pre-established curriculum that we use to teach the content we’re being asked to deliver.

In this article, I want to share some of the questions that I’ve found useful in my initial conversations with groups who are requesting anti-oppression or diversity workshops and what I’m listening for in their answers. The sequence of questions as they are here might be useful to guide the flow of the conversation, but I don’t always stick to this sequence as a formula, I think it’s better to be organic and follow the direction the conversation takes as it’s happening:

Continue reading “Doing Your Detective Work“

Board Nominating

I recently had the privilege of participating in the Board Nominating Committee for the the Ohio Alliance for People and Environment. OAPE is newly re-formed from Ohioans for Health, Environment, and Justice.  I consider them the legit grassroots statewide Environmental Justice organization here in Ohio, and was of course honored to help them do this foundational work!

My task: to find Board candidates in Central Ohio. Hmm, well, I’ve never done that before! Where to start? I checked out Boards from a variety of successful organizations I’m familiar with and was quite surprised.  The occasional grassroots activists and volunteers were predictable, but those were far outnumbered by lawyers, vice presidents, strategic planning executives, owners…

Who is the best at fundraising, niche building, and strategic planning in a grassroots organization?  Chances are, it’s actually not simply our volunteer base! But, we also wouldn’t entrust this to just any highly-trained corporate professionals.  Seems to me like Boards are at their best when they draw on many strengths: nose-to-the-grindstone volunteers, corporate executives, lawyers, fundraisers, legislative experts, authors, etc.

I got creative in my search, and am quite satisfied with the two nominees I offered to the OAPE Board.  Polluters and politicians, this is an organization to watch out for!

What have you seen work in Boards?  Any particular examples of success?

The Problem with Strategic Planning

Reposted from Social Velocity:

The term “strategic plan” has become so misused and abused in the nonprofit sector that it has almost become meaningless. So many organizations have undergone a poor strategic planning process that the idea of “strategic planning” has almost become laughable. But the fact remains that to be truly effective at creating social change a nonprofit organization MUST have a strategy for the future and a plan for how they will get there.

Continue reading: The Problem with Strategic Planning.