I make this request because I’m not interested in seeing the face of just one person added to the historical canon of “great men” who have changed the world. Don’t get me wrong, many of these people did wonderful things for the people they cared about, and they most certainly did help change history. However, they were only able to help make that change because they stood on the shoulders of millions of others who came together around a shared vision.

Yet the common belief is that the cause of social change still rests upon the individual him or herself as the most powerful force in shaping the world. If you watch this crazy shirtless man dancing on a hill and the TED talk by Derek Sivers about how a movement is more about the group than it is about the leader, you might reconsider the importance of the individual. The success of the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, the civil rights movement, India’s independence and any other movement depends upon the strength of the social bonds that bring people together for change. In other words, it is only through these invisible bonds, and the communities they create, that we can hope to transform our society for the better.

As pointed out in Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Revolution Will not be Tweeted,” social movements, especially those that are engaged in high-risk activity and are aimed at radically restructuring society for the better, are only successful when there exist strong relationships between the people in the movement. So what then is the role for the individual in a framework that emphasizes the community?

Simply put, the role of the individual is to connect. A network for social change can only continue to exist as long as the nodes, the persons, within that network are strongly connected to one another. So to readers out there I ask you to connect, and to connect passionately to the people who matter to you. Shake hands with community members, have them over for dinner, go out with them for coffee and remember their birthdays.

These acts seem small in light of such momentous events as the “I Have a Dream Speech” or Gandhi leading the people to the ocean to make their own salt. But the truth is that many of these smaller moments, where the world seemed to suddenly change, are not single momentous acts of revolution, just as they are not really led by individual revolutionaries. What we are seeing now is a moment in time that took years, and more likely decades or centuries to create.

And so I’ll continue to hope that if one day there is a photo that captures what the Occupy and Arab Spring movements mean, that it will have been taken from a distance. I hope that photo will show a sea of people creating change by creating community first.

Then, the gala “got back to business.” The mood shifted. A designated “ringmaster” challenged us to dig a little deeper so the event could reach a new level of support. Everyone had received a little transmitting wand that allowed us to enter donations and be recognized on two gigantic screens. “Oh look! There’s Jack and Sally Jones.” This was the culmination of the gala–a celebration of the donor.

Reflecting back on the eventing, two questions came to mind: Where does the “quiet” gift fit in this world of ours? As individuals and communities, where does the natural flow of our giving show up?

The two honorees’ work was within cultures of quiet generosity, community, care and shared commitment. They are a part of an ancient and sacred linage where giving is as natural a sunset, an apple, or the casserole delivered to an elderly neighbor. Berkana is experimenting with just this kind of giving culture. Shilpa and Manish Jain’s book, Reclaiming the Gift Culture, is a collection of writing that provides a wonderful variety of examples of quiet giving and introduces the term gupt daan or “undisclosed giving.” In Ladakhis Tibet, cooperation and mutual aid is inherent to their culture. Beverly Bell writes of the guiding principle in Mali which is: “Who you are is very much defined by what you do in relationship with other people. It’s how much you give to others.”

In contrast, there is the noisier way of giving. Our support provides recognition, benefits and status that can range from tax benefits to the gala take-away gift bags. More value and time are dedicated to the wealthier prospect and the larger donation. YES, we must pay the rent and make payroll, but at the same time we are diminishing the place of the “quiet gift”.

So how does the quiet gift (gupt daan or “undisclosed giving” in Sanskrit) seep back into ourselves and our communities? This question is an invitation for your own reflections and responses. I’ll start.

• Be mindful of your ongoing capacity to live out gupt daan. I send you an advance thank you.
• Teach your children and our youth the idea of gupt daan.
• Read and share Shilpa and Manish Jain’s book, Reclaiming the Gift Culture. Much of my writing has been inspired by this gem.
• Team up with your boss and colleagues to explore how your community can begin the welcome the gift culture as a value enhancement in the workplace.

For me, I try daily to be attuned and grateful for nature’s ongoing generosity… dancing leaves, sunlight brightening a brick building, breezes through pine trees. I want to try “7 days, 7 gifts”, a giving challenge. The idea around it is simple. In this practice, you are invited to give one gift each day for 7 days to friends or strangers.

If you have any ideas or stories about how to live out gupt daan, I invite you to share them here and welcome a conversation.

Dick Durning partners with individuals, teams, and organizations committed to increasing their own capacity and ease in securing financial support within a space of integrity, engagement, joy, and invitation. He offers practical skills and fundraising “Generous Space” methodologies through coaching, workshops, and hands-on applications. Learn more at Wisdom-Exchange.

We have begun a new journey in Nova Scotia, one that has challenged us to re-imagine, regenerate and reinvigorate our public health system. In December 2008, a group of practitioners and partners in public health from across the province began searching for new ways to bring people together to seek solutions that would benefit the public health system and improve the health of our population.

We recognized that to address the current challenges, we needed to tap into the wisdom of diverse stakeholders, and doing so required a different approach. One that fostered leadership, collective ownership, deep listening, and innovation. Our approach was rooted in participatory leadership, believing that change for the common good called for involvement, collective intelligence and co-creation to discover new solutions and wise actions. We invested in learning new ways of working together using participatory methods including Art of Hosting, Appreciative Inquiry, World Café and Theory U. We chose Theory U to guide our journey as it encouraged fresh ways of being and seeing the world and its opportunities, and uncovering solutions together.

I belong to a very mechanistic profession. I’m a dentist. Reduced to my simplest expression, I drill and fill teeth for a living. Not much meaning there… But because, like pediatricians and obstetricians, I see my patients more often than most other health professionals, I’m uniquely positioned to impact health. So a few years ago, somewhere between a meditative walk in the woods and a hard cardio workout, a wild dream was born: Shaping the Future of Dentistry.

A small group of five dentists and two professional facilitators now work at the nucleus of Shaping the Future of Dentistry on laying the groundwork for a journey to excellence for dentists and their teams in dialogue with one another, towards a higher level of engagement. We aim to help shift our awareness of health and of the nature of our responsibility in sharing oral health knowledge within and beyond our clinics. We convene in new ways that put a leader in every seat, we use well-crafted questions as containers for a collective higher purpose and we engage in conversations with an open mind and heart. The current project emerging out of Shaping the Future of Dentistry, “Dentists Leaders in Health,” is an effort to bring Art of Hosting methodologies into the profession of dentistry. I also have a dream of hosting a large scale participative leadership session using AoH methodologies at OSM, the annual Ontario Dental Association Spring meeting, one of the largest gatherings of Dental professionals in North America.

It all started when I responded to a general invitation for suggestions from the Editor of the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association, John O’Keefe, himself a man with a vision. I sent him a piece I had written for the Debate and Opinion section of the Journal, “Prevention: Dentistry’s Legacy for the Future.” During the same period, I began hosting World Cafe Conversations on Leadership, Oral Health and Education for small groups (20-40 people) in my community. All sessions were three hours in duration except the last, which was a whole day event that began with a World Cafe, continued with Open Space after lunch and concluded with a circle. Combining World Cafe, Open Space and Circle is pretty amazing. 

As a result of hosting and participating in meaningful conversations about health, I’ve noticed that my work style in the clinic has shifted from a surgical approach (drill and fill) to one of active prevention and risk management. My conversations with patients have changed. I am no longer afraid of saying that no matter how good my dentistry is, it will never match the engineering marvel that is a natural tooth. This type of upfront, honest talk needs to happen if we are going to effect sustainable changes in health systems.

Many people involved in social purpose work champion the idea that organizations need to become places where we can relate to each other not just as roles but as whole human beings. We believe that when we are free to express dimensions of ourselves that don’t fit neatly into job descriptions, our work becomes more engaging and our relationships more authentic.

I think this is true. But what is less well understood is that treating each other as the patchwork, unruly human beings we are, rather than the zippered office functionaries we pretend to be, is also the only way we can really come to understand, let alone affect, the larger institutional patterns we are trying to change.Why? Suppose we are interested in food security. We decide to create an innovative project that will help transform the causes and effects of institutionalized food systems. Our project will include a food bank, a buying cooperative, training in sustainable urban gardening and food preservation, health workshops, policy review and advocacy work, etc.

So far so good. But if we really think about the institutional patterns that are bound up in all of the issues related to food security, we are just getting started.  A complex theme like food security is woven from an almost endless series of institutional threads: economic paradigms, cultural beliefs, law, class, health, race, gender, education, religion, crime, addiction, socio-environmental interactions…

And this complexity would be true of any social issue we decide to address. Institutions are sedimented. They are layered one atop the other with such density and pressure it is almost impossible to analytically unpack them. Systems theorists are right when they say we can only understand complex systems by looking at the whole. But how do we do this?

• Communal authority via the asamblea (assembly) and the cargo system
• Communal territory
• Communal enjoyment via traditional fiestas (celebrations)
• Communal work via the tequio (volunteer duties done on behalf of the community)

At the start of the presentation Dr. Maldonado made it clear that comunalidad is an idea under construction. The way the concept unfolds is via a dialogue between the lived experience in pueblos all over Mesoamerica and a group of people¹ (researchers, anthropologists and historians) that continue developing the theory of comunalidad. The first thing Dr. Maldonado pointed to was the important role this latter group plays in naming or describing life in community here. Though the indigenous communities of this region have been living this way for millenium, comunalidad offered a means of expressing this lifestyle. He said that the ideology “offers written expression to an oral way of living.” “Interesting,” I thought, “naming is one of the four key elements of Berkana’s work.” (Learn more about how we work.) My attention was piqued.

The next thing that struck me was a comparison of indigenous movements in Southern Mexico based on comunalidad, with other social movements like the Cuban Revolution. The distinction was that in Cuba nothing like Communist society existed in the collective memory of the people. The revolution aimed to create a different mode of living, a brand new system and kind of society. Comunalidad describes a way of living that’s been around for centuries. Indigenous movements here are not constructing the new; they are naming, describing and identifying a living, palpable, vibrant way of being that already exists. As Maldonono explained, the work is to “create enough space for the old way to once again flourish.” This reminded me of some of the ways we talk about working intentionally with emergence at Berkana: creating the conditions or opening the space to find out what’s already present and accessible.

All of this really got the neurons firing. I began thinking about Occupy Wall Street since I know that many #Occupy groups are using assembly and consensus as an organizing system, two of the essential elements in indigenous communities in Mesoamerica. The message from the #Occupy movement seems to be: “We’ve had enough of this system, we want something different.” I’m guessing that #Occupy is about building a new system. But what if in this movement, we learned something from systems already in place, still working after thousands of years? Can we find a way to foster some version of comunalidad in our modern, urban, Western reality? Are we just too far removed from this kind of worldview, or is there a way we can make the space and go slow enough to tap into the deepest root of comunalidad: human interdependence.

Tibetan spiritual leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama congratulated the three joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize in handwritten letters. On October 13, he said: “We have an obligation to promote a new vision of society, one in which war has no place in resolving disputes among states, communities or individuals, non-violence is the pre-eminent value in all human relations. And for this, the role of women is crucially important.”

Along with Rosa Parks, Leymah Gbowee is on my short list of remarkable women we can all learn from. I learned of Leymah’s story through the incredibly powerful film, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. The story is one of simplicity, clarity, fearlessness and community. Leymah received a dream and through that dream, she created an invitation with other women to pray for peace in war-torn Liberia – working through the complexities of bringing together Christians and Muslims to take a stand and send a clear, united message for peace. It was the strategy and insight of using her self as a woman – joining with other women to confront a ruthless dictator with the clarity of focus (“we want peace”) – that made all the difference. She had a strategy for engaging the men, too.

This story challenges me and inspires me as I stand in the question, “What am I being called to do as a woman at this time in the world to create peace and healthy community?” In her remarks upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize Leymah called on Americans to become better activists and to focus on building healthy communities in their our own city. She encouraged us all to be more courageous, to bring the issues we care most about to the doorstep of those who are participating in creating them. She spoke strongly against the practices of objectifying women and girls in the media. And she acknowledged Occupy Wall Street as building momentum and multiplying across the continent.

Occupy Wall Street NYC has brought together people from all walks of life, across all ages, with many different concerns and and hopes. I’ve attended several of the rallies. During a rally on October 5th, I remember being so mindful of just being in Leymah’s presence. I wondered, “What role might women uniquely play in the discourse of this day?” I was with a colleague Lisa Caswell, who also received a dream to create a Congress of American Women to bring women together around our common ground, to share stories and to create understanding. We thought, “What would happen if we had made signs that read Women for Peace and Healthy Resilient Communities? Would we attract attention? Would others join us? Would men support us? Would we be as fearless as the women of Liberia?”

Lisa just launched her website with these words: The call for such a thing as a National Congress of American Women is rising out of hope, the fearlessness of real crisis, and an understanding of the unique role we play on the world stage. It is time to rise to the occasion. We are all rising to the occasion as activists, as women, as peace builders, as occupiers. Leymah Gbowee notes, “Every time a group of women decide they’re going to protest, the entire government is uneasy.”

Mighty be our powers and our love.

See also Meg Wheatley’s book, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time and the PBS series, Women, War and Peace. This is the first in a series of blogs by Nancy Fritsche Eagan on the role of women’s leadership in building peace and creating healthy, resilient communities. 

Leaving New York today. It has been an incredible four days here working with my good friends Kelly McGowan and Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Lex Schroeder, Anistla Rugama, Alissa Schwartz, and Aswad Foster. We were running a workshop called the Art of Social Justice in which we were investigating the intersection of participatory process and social justice work. Over three days we explored a framework that Tuesday has developed and investigated with Kelly for the past year. The framework includes and transcends the gifts and drawbacks of traditional social justice frameworks and of what we know about participatory process.

Tuesday is writing a lot more about this, but the essence of the framework is that neither social justice analysis nor participatory process are enough on their own to move us into the new forms of leadership that are needed in a world where social inequity and power are becoming increasingly complex, and where traditional forms of organizing are no longer reflective of the interconnected nature of global society.

A gift of traditional social justice analysis is the way it understands personal and collective power and privilege. This analysis concerns itself with transformation of both the personal and the social power dynamics in society, but it often contains within it an invisible current of control that runs deep in the architecture of social change process. It posits a social separation between those of us who are working for change in or allied with the struggle of oppressed peoples, and people in the system that are thought to be–traditionally–the enemy. Or it sets up a struggle between the system that perpetuates oppression and the people who are oppressed by it. In this world, in this time, that analysis is out of date. We are all connected to the entire system. As I showed in my last post, you can even discover how many slaves you employ. Even if you are heavily marginalized within the mainstream, you are connected to the system itself. As the sign said at Occupy Wall Street, “you are us.”

Those of us who are facilitators of participatory process often make grand claims about the power of processes like Open Space Technology and World Cafe to even out power differences. In a circle everyone is said to be equal and leadership can come from every chair. While participatory process does provide a useful methodology for decolonizing how we meet, it has several risks associated with it. For one thing, if we fail to take into consideration the context in which we are working, power can show up in participatory process in a dangerously invisible way. Some participants may be able to operate much more resourcefully because of their power or privilege by, for example, becoming the scribes for small groups and speaking for the group. Those who cannot write may not feel comfortable posting a session in Open Space, meaning that there is no way that their voices can be heard or their contributions incorporated. Furthermore, participatory processes, like all facilitation processes, heavily depend on the role of the facilitator. If the facilitators (and the process designers for that matter) are not aware of the currents of power and privilege within the context in which they are working, they run the risk of designing structures that keep marginalized people marginalized. If they come to the hosting role without awareness of and good practice around their own power and privilege, the social architecture that emerges can be very exclusionary.

Both of these fields of analysis have something to offer to one another and both have their own drawbacks. In Tuesday’s framework, she identifies a middle path, which she named co-revelation. It is going to take me a while to unpack this concept, but I can at least begin to see how it works. In the space of power-aware participatory leadership, the gift of relationship is active. As we move together through process, the emphasis on relationship is key and in working together relationship becomes more revealed. In the process, we treat each other with more and more grace and compassion, coming to see that as we are all interconnected both to each other and the systems in which we are working to change, we recognize that personal and social transformation is also both inevitable and required. In Saskatoon last week, one of our participants in the Art of Hosting was carrying the question “how do we collaborate with dictators?” as a way of trying to discern the limits of participation.

In several conversations over these last two weeks I have come to ask that question of myself, and reframing it as “how do I collaborate with myself when I am being a dictator?”. With that inquiry active, we may find that dictatorship behaviors are present everywhere, and we may also allow ourselves and others the grace to be imperfect in our lives and behaviors. This doesn’t excuse violence or oppression, but rather it gives us serious skin in the game in trying to address oppressive systems. If we are not a part of the problem we cannot be a part of the solution. And in being a part of the problem we need to treat each other with some kindness and latitude, qualities that are born in relationship, even relationship with people with whom we have fundamental differences.

Though the hands-on piece is essential, my passion for upcycling has extended beyond being just a lone practitioner. In 2008, The Berkana Institute launched a virtual Upcycling Portal for people to share ideas, resources, inspirations, as well as to spread the word to broader audiences. Following the launch of the portal, Berkana began seeing more and more people getting excited about using waste as a resource, and making the things they need rather than immediately going to buy them. We also recognized how important it is to begin creating the conditions for this movement to spread. Over time, the work of illuminating the practice of upcycling has become one of my life’s callings. This means connecting those who are already practicing upcycling in order to help inspire and motivate people to continue in their efforts. Until recently I’ve done this through the Upcycling Portal, first through the Berkana Exchange network, then through the engagement of practitioners in North America, Europe and Australia (like Haute Trash, Little Shiva and The Visible Trash Society, Ruby Re-Usable and Lady Smaggle).

In 2010 my focus shifted as I began connecting upcyclers and the general public by participating in local events where I live in Oaxaca, Mexico. My latest dream is the creation of a physical space–a collaborative workshop–for the elaboration of upcycled products in which practitioners can share knowledge, skills, tools and materials. We’ll host courses and workshops, and connect communities, schools and other organizations with upcyclers who want to share their skills. The other purpose of the space will be to spread the concept, practices and mindset related to upcycling to more and more people, in order to become a learning center for innovation related to the creative re-use of waste.

I believe that starting here, with local practitioners is the way to develop a project that is practical, grounded, serves a real need and has the possibility of spreading trans-locally to other cities, states, regions and countries.

As we lay the foundation for the Taller Colaborativo de Sobreciclaje (Collective Upcycling Workshop) we’re grateful to have the support of the Hub Oaxaca as an incubation space, as well as the ongoing support of Deborah Frieze and a community of local practitioners excited about the idea. The first simple step is calling and hosting small group conversations about the idea while engaging in upcycling projects together. Step-by-step, using a co-creative process, we’re hoping to open the doors of the workshop by Spring 2012.  Stay tuned for updates here on the Berkana Blog. We’d love to hear your thoughts or questions! Please share in the comment field below.

Aerin Dunford is is an artist, upcycler, urban farmer and yoga instructor with a passion for connecting people and creating the conditions for authentic collaboration and participative leadership. Contact Aerin at aerin@berkana.org.