Beyond budgets
As TCDI moves forward with our Naming the Moment project, there is something that needs to be discussed – budget. Using the word budget brings an automatic feeling of deficits and filling needs. All of a sudden discussions get focused on money in and money out as well as who we can sell our ideas to in order to get their financial support. Budgets are definitely a necessary part of the equation; however, they are not the emphasis of the work we do. Behaving as if budgets are the centre of the universe can suck the life right out of projects.
There are other ways of looking at things based on ideas of social accounting or popular economics. Social accounting puts an emphasis on what value is being added. It releases us from the yoke of feeling like these projects just eat up resources and instead empowers us to see ourselves and our work as adding value. Popular economics takes economic tools and principles and puts them into our hands so that we can look at what causes inequalities and injustices and then to take action to change them.
In short, taking the emphasis off of budget can create a feeling of abundance and power in understanding our place in community and change. In the coming months TCDI will be looking at NTM project using concepts of social accounting and popular economics. We hope to create a theory of abundance and attract to us partners who want to be a part of the work we will be doing.
How does change happen?
I am not sure how many of you are familiar with the Tom Robbins and in particular one of his novels, Jitterbug Perfume; however, it is one of my all time favourites. Within this book are a people called Bandaloop Doctors. These folks have managed to become immortal through the practice of controlled breathing and jumping. Yep, that is what I said. Breathing and jumping. One of my friends, Sophia, reminds me of the Bandaloop Doctors. She has pure joy and trust in life. Every day is an adventure she thirsts for like I search for a nice Belgium fruit beer on a hot summer day. She has very little fear of change. I think I am fearful of change sometimes because I am not sure how change happens.
So how does change happen?
I have been contemplating that very question for some time now. I have been told there are libraries of books searching for the answer to just that question. I am not searching for complicated answers. I am simply interested in how change happens for ordinary people in everyday life. There are no doubt some simple truths – like controlled breath and jumping that exists out there in the quiet moments in each of our lives. And if we understand the alchemy of those moments, we might get some insight in how to bring about larger systemic change.
As TCDI begins its journey into the Naming the Moment process, we are collectively thinking about how change happens. In the next entry I am going to post some thoughts of other members of TCDI about how they think change happens. I find it all so fascinating and I hope it inspires you to share some of your thoughts on how change happens.
I know that when I was thinking about introducing this topic I keep staring at a blank screen trying to figure out what to say and then BINGO there it was. Sophia had sent me an email and in it was a link to a beautiful piece of art. (The picture below is from the video.) It is a beautiful representation of how powerful change can be – and it captures the never ending cycle of change beautifully without words. Change happens with a flick of a wrist, the movement of grains of sand, or nations declaring war on each other.
Watching this short video took my post in a direction I had not anticipated. That is somehow poetic. Change often takes me on new adventures I had no idea were in the making.
Naming the Moment & Community Development
I thought i’d write a fresh intro to the Naming the Moment process looking at it from the point of view of community development.
Naming the Moment is a popular education method for doing social change and community development work.
There are two fundamentals upon which NTM is based:
- Creating just relationships (i.e. anti-oppression alliances, coalitions, etc.) for the long term necessitates making LEARNING a central feature of social change
- Change happens in society both incrementally (e.g. through institution-building, education, etc.) and suddenly when there is a conjuncture of various forces (political, economic, ideological, etc.) in a moment of crisis. (Naming the Moment sprang in large part from a process known as conjunctural analysis developed from the work of Paulo Freire, Antonio Gramsci and others).
Naming the Moment is a means by which people can learn to “read” these conjunctures (and the flows of forces that lead to them) and to predict to some extent the occurrence of and nature of such conjunctures.
Naming the Moment is a popular education method and thus a participatory and collective approach to learning that is based on social justice values and anti-oppression principles; it explicitly resists oppression and any unjust use of power; it seeks to build solidarity amongst individuals and groups resisting oppression; and it is a form of capacity-building for groups and individuals. It typically involves groups of people who share, in common, either geography, class, work situation, or some other form of identity (or set of these) and who therefore have the possibility of collective action to change the world in which they live. Popular education resists the structures of learning and teaching that create authoritarian experts and passive non-experts. Through democratic dialogue and using a diverse set of means of creating knowledge (e.g. talking, of course, but also including the use of art forms such as drawing, murals, ‘zines; popular theatre forms such as skits, sculpture, sociodramas, Theatre of the Oppressed; structured learning exercises of many kinds, etc.) popular education puts the tools of resistance into the hands of so-called ordinary citizens. It is a means of sharing power or practicing “power with” and of resisting “power over” as Starhawk suggests.
Naming the Moment has four steps or phases: Naming Ourselves, Naming the Issues, Assessing the Forces and Planning for Action. Each of these represents distinct goals and objectives for the collective work of sharing and analyzing experience and knowledge.
Naming the Moment is a dynamic process that grew from roots and connections between Canadian and Latin American educators. Developed within the Moment Project and led by Deborah Barndt (a ten-year effort within the Toronto-based Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice) it has continued to evolve as has its cousins in Latin America.
The Catalyst Centre, a popular education worker co-op in Toronto, has developed Naming the Moment by identifying and naming previously implicit steps creating a seven-step process dubbed Seizing the Moment. The steps include: Setting the Stage for Democratic Communication, Naming Ourselves, Naming the Issues, Crafting Meaning, Planning for Action, Taking Action and Evaluation. In Latin America – Mexico, Peru, Nicaragua, et al – a similar process has been developed and is called sistematizacion. A difficult word for English speakers and difficult to translate as well, nonetheless, the concept of systematizing knowledge is one that is also key to Naming the Moment.
Systematizing is a crucial aspect of popular, participatory processes that desire to have positive impact on the world, i.e to advance positive social change. The strength of popular education participatory processes is the success these have in drawing out people’s experience, sharing this in a creative and even compassionate manner and affirming the struggles that individuals undergo. Not surprisingly, this is also the weakness of participatory processes. A common mistake is to facilitate a wonderful sharing of experience and to leave it at that. This is called go-aroundism: everyone gets their few minutes, shares their two cents, it gets noted on flip chart and then the facilitator thanks everyone for coming and the meeting adjourns. Lacking here is the struggle to identify patterns in experience (allowing for agreements, challenges and dissent), to explain those patterns, critique them and then to negotiate and affirm those patterns that are consistent with our values and resist those we deem oppressive.
This identifying and explaining of patterns is nothing less than theory-making. However, to call it this often relegates this practice to the domain of academics and intellectuals. Popular education processes recognize that everyone makes theory all the time. Anytime we answer the “why” of things, we are venturing into theory-making. Popular education recognizes that theory can be made through dialogue (i.e. democratically, critically, creatively). But more than that, when we make theory this way, informed by social justice values, anti-oppression and anti-colonial politics, we make better theory! Finally, this theory-making need not happen only in the halls of academe, far from the messy and noisy streets of our lives, but can happen – in fact, MUST happen – in the midst of life.
This is what Naming the Moment and sistematizacion is all about: the making of transformative theory from the raw material of shared experience and collective knowledge and doing this within the messy challenges of life (including feeding each other, providing daycare, licking envelopes, making phone calls, providing assistance to those who need it in order to participate, and so on). Systematizing means that we do not simply accept everyone’s understanding of their own experience as the ultimate truth of that experience. If we are going to find patterns that connect and that can change things for the better, then sometimes we need to challenge each other’s understandings (even of our own experience). Doing this with compassion and respect is a fundamental popular education ethic. A key challenge is to move from the simple collection of anecdotes to the systematizing of that experience in order to tell the stories of those patterns that connect. Systematizing isn’t merely a fancy word for theory-making. It is democratic and participatory theory-making for social justice.
But, as noted, sistematizacion is a mouthful for an English-speaker. It’s not a word that runs trippingly off the tongue. Nor does conjunctural analysis help matters much. Thus the phrase “Naming the Moment” which has the advantage of being understood quickly in a common sense sort of way. But it also acts as a powerful metaphor and statement of intent: one goal of Naming the Moment is precisely to identify the patterns of change and to name what is going on such that it can be changed: name the moment, as it were.
The Catalyst Centre’s development of Seizing the Moment merely fills in some of the pieces, locating the original four phases of Naming the Moment in the more complete cycle from planning and preparation to implementation (of whatever actions were developed) and evaluation. Seizing the Moment also encourages a stronger action footing than “naming” suggests.
So what’s this got to do with community development? A popular education approach to community development has several distinct advantages and at least one very powerful (and often deal-breaking) disadvantage.
First, the disadvantage: it takes time. A popular education approach to community development takes a great deal of time. And the structure of society, the structure and availability of funding, the urgency and magnitude of the work that needs to be done, most often compels organizers, activists and agency personnel to seek faster more expedient solutions. Put quite simply, a democratic and participatory process of social change that treats with equal value the means and ends is one that needs time. Information can be shared quickly – and all the moreso in our hyperspeed, hyoer-wired world. Learning, however, takes time.
The advantages of this approach are numerous especially given that it accomplishes a number of things simultaneously: relationship building, collective analysis, theory-making, policy development, skills training, and much more. It is community development for the long haul.
One final thing to call attention to is the role of documentation in all this. Naming the Moment has always put great value on documenting the process well. This is important both for practicing democratic communication as well as preserving a collective memory over the years. Thus the documents that follow:
- Revisiting the Boats and Canoes by Deborah Barndt
- ‘Naming the Moment’ – – a participatory process of political analysis for action by chris cavanagh
- Seizing the Moment – 1-page intro
- Seizing the Moment – 2-pager
- Seizing the Moment and the Spiral Model
- A ‘zine about Seizing the Moment (print it double-sided and you can fold and staple it into a booklet)
Newsletters from the 1991-1992 Series of Naming the Moment Workshops:
Online Connectivity and Democracy
I find it interesting to see how different sectors are using the internet to connect with each other and to mobilize communities. In the last presidential election, the world saw facebook and twitter used to mobilize communities across the U.S. to support a candidate’s election. The Obama Camp was tireless in the innovative ways they used technology to connect a national machine to local grassroot activists.
When I attended a conference for International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), I learned of a project in Bristol, U.K. where municipal government is using what they call E-democracy to engage its citizens in consultations about government planning. I was excited by the idea of this type of relationship catching on here in Toronto and have stayed interested in learning more about online communities.
I have been involved with online discussion communities for a variety of reasons. I have tried online dating, writing groups, debate clubs and social movement groups. Each experience has been positive in some ways but overall not satisfactory. I keep joining and creating groups searching for a place to experience an A-HA moment where I can see the variables that will create successful online democratic and engaged community.
Recently a colleague/friend of mine posted an exciting project that he is starting. Joel Gordon will be creating a collaborative film with filmmakers, artists, marketing minds, broadcasters, innovators and about online social networking. The project, called Connect with me TV, will capture individuals’ experiences and thoughts about online communication and how it is changing the way these people work with each other and the kind of work they do. This collaboration will happen by using twitter, facebook and blog features and promises to be an exciting documentary in the end.
I met Joel Gordon in the making of a short documentary about the Families Are Important Resources project. During the FAIR project, I attempted to introduce parents, frontline staff and other community activists to the online world through the use of yahoo groups, facebook groups, webpages, blogs and internet research. Some of these attempts lead to individuals increases their skills and use of online communities but there was no EUREKA moment when everyone got it. The project had hoped to achieve a vibrant online community with community generated resources. That did not happen but my belief that online communities could be magic has not waned.
This year Toronto Community Development Institute (TCDI) used online registration for workshop presenters and conference participants and this fall we will be formally launching the blog. I wonder how the use of technology will impact on democratic participation and hope that it will continue to open doors and connect people in ways that are empowering and facilitate positive change.
Corporate Sponsored Community Campaigns
The [UK] Guardian Weekly for the 21st of August reports that the American oil and gas lobby, the American Petroleum Institute,plans to bankroll and organise a “citizens campaign” to put a “human face” on opposition to energy and climate reform. The campaign is to include 20 rallies staged in 20 states drawing on employees of member organisations. Their managers would,according to the plan, commit to providing “significant attendance.” We should probably expect more corporate organized and financed “community organization” efforts in Canada as the increasingly urgent need for reforms around environmental and poverty issues clashes with the corporations’ remorseless drive for profits before all else. An important element of these campaigns is the attempt to make them appear genuinely community based. ..Bob
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