Process minutes: 2011-02-23

Agenda:

Joint Process/CRC meeting
2/23/2011
7-8:30pm

Present: Gail, Kate, Jillian, Susan, Rod, Alex

AGENDA
1. checkins
2. Hear from CRC about how its been going since we last met together
3. Rotating in a new member
4. CRC creating a community meeting agenda item
5. CRC next meeting

MONKEYS:

MONKEY: Jillian will make sure the CRC docs are up on the Wiki in the
Process section ("What Do I Do if I Have a Conflict") and then will ask
Willie to add the CRC page to gocoho.org/my

MONKEY: Susan will look at some of the exercises she has for learning about
resolving conflict for a community meeting agenda item. Say a 30 minute
agenda item for March/April/May. Susan will get back to Process about that
by 3/5. (Or another option is a full alternative meeting in the next season,
which could be 90 minutes.)

MONKEY: Jillian will check in with Becky and Infoco to see if Becky and her
facilitator need any help planning her 3/2 Alternative meeting. Infoco
happens to meet on 3/1.

MONKEY: In the next few weeks CRC together with Kate Long will pick a date
in the last two weeks in April to meet. At that meeting CRC will continue to
orient Kate to CRC work, and will schedule additional face-to-face meetings
for the work season.


2. Hear from CRC about how it's been going

I think our last CRC/Process get-together was quite a while ago, may have
been late spring 2010.

Are people using CRC?

Yes. Nothing in the last six months has required a CRC response from all
three of us together, ie nothing "big", but there have been requests, emails
come in to the CRC list, one of us works on it, and then we do checkins
between CRC members about how things are going, support eachother.

CRC as a committee has not formally met in a long time but we are working on
the issues that come up.

Recommendations: maybe CRC needs to meet a little more frequently. Agreed.
The current set of people haven't had matching schedules, so it's been hard.

So if people have a concern, who do they ask?

They may send an email to the CRC list.

Do people know who's on CRC? Do the new people even know there *is* a CRC?
Maybe we need to remind people of this resource regularly?

How could we make it easier for the new members? Is CRC in the new member
packet? (Checking...) Yes, there is some material. Will new people be able
to process all that and remember months later? Unclear, but at least the
material's there.

Do buddies fulfill the role for new members? Do they make the connection to
CRC if there are issues?

What about including a thing in my.gocoho.org? "What do I do if I have a
conflict?" Good idea. Let's monkey someone to work up a page. MONKEY for
Jillian. Create a wiki page, ask Willie to link the "my" page to it.

Do members need mediation training? not necessarily--there's a range of
skills. WCC has a good set of workshops and trainings in related
areas--facilitation, active listening, etc. This would also be a reason to
have regular meetings--to share resources, ideas, experiences.

It's nice to have a functional committee, compared to [former community].

What makes ours functional? Being unbiased, being a good listener, being
discreet. Having a confidential email list is an avenue for the committee to
share questions, problems.

So, returning to the original question: you feel like you've been able to
work on things? Yes, things are happening and they've been going OK, no
really big issues.


3. Rotating in a new member

Kate is thinking of joining the CRC to replace Alex, who wants to rotate
off.

New work season starts in May. This is good because the schedule conflict
questions go away in April, so there will be some time to meet and help Kate
get acclimated.

What else can CRC think of to prep a new person?

Without naming names of course, can you give me an example of an issue and
how you approached dealing with it?

One thing that comes up a lot is issues around boundaries. All kinds of
boundary related stuff, involving adults, kids, pets. Feeling frustrated
about something you find intolerable or is well beyond your own personal
boundary, or something you worry about because you see it as a safety issue,
a moral issue, a threat of some kind. That you haven't been able to resolve.

What is CRC's process when a request for help comes in?

It varies a lot but there's a lot of talking involved. Helping people
clarify what they thought was going on and what they thought they wanted to
have happen. What each person wants, only they can define that. Do they want
to approach the other person face to face or not. Sometimes its not clear.
Acknowledge the request for help, and offer support, and ask some questions
immediately about what the right next steps are - put the ball in their
court to find out what they want.

My general way:
I see an email, respond back to them. Say thanks for the inquiry, what do
you need first? Do you want to meet with one of us in person? Is there one
of us in particular you want to talk with, or do you want to meet with all
of us to have multiple perspectives? By phone or in person? How urgent how
soon? And let them respond. And then go from there. Ok if you need this
right away, then give availability of each of CRC. (CRC has cell phone
numbers for eachother to find this out quickly.) Quite often, it's, "all I
want is to talk with someone, whoever is available first is fine". Then if
it's an issue with another person, then ask, would you like me then to
approach the other person first, and say we've had this conversation? Or
would you feel you are ready to go talk with them too, or does it need
further mediation before that can happen. You can help them with talking
points. Or maybe they want you to contact the other person. Then I inquire
of that other person, ask if we can get together for tea and it will go from
there. Sometimes (more rarely) it involves multiple CRC members sitting down
with multiple households, or it may just be one on one.

Alex - just because I'm rotating off CRC doesn't mean I'm not available, I
can still be a resource.
And there are others too, Catherine and Becky.

Minutes:

Aliica was not able to be here tonite but here's what she said over email:

I do think that CRC should meet periodically. The work is intermittent, and
often, specific requests don't even require (or would be inappropriate for)
involvement of all of CRC. I've fielded three requests from community
members in the last few months, but they were really of that nature that
just one person was necessary/helpful. CRC has, in the past, met more
consistently and I think we should meet quarterly or every other month to
discuss any ongoing issues AND to jumpstart discussion of proactive ways to
make GO a conflict-resolution friendly place to live.

On helping Kate or any new member - we should have an orientation meeting
including an overview of the Communication Pathway stuff, and engage her in
discussion of a few "case studies" of the types of conflicts that CRC has
worked through with community members in the past. I think after that maybe
it's useful if when there is a next conflict that lends itself to
involvement of more than one of us (or even if it's just one of us), that we
process that as a group (what the nature of the conflict is, what we did as
CRC to support, and what we think was learned/gained from our support). We
do some of this anyway, but, again, we have treated it case-by-case. We
don't necessarily talk about the conflicts that stay pretty contained and/or
are really about people seeking "a listening ear" - which is often what many
conflicts can amount to.

I hope that helps.

- Alicia

-------

Sounds good to me. When people have rotated on in the past we have had an
orientation meeting, talking about what's happened in the last 4 months
(without names) and also if there's anything we think you hshould be aware
of that might come up. And give an opportunity to pick our brains.

Maybe we can schedule an initial meeting in the 3rd-4th week in April.


MONKEY: In the next few weeks CRC together with Kate Long will pick a date
in the last two weeks in April to meet. At that meeting CRC will continue to
orient Kate to CRC work, and will schedule additional face-to-face meetings
for the work season.



4. CRC create a GO community meeting agenda item

I like that phrase Alicia used:
Proactive ways to make GO a conflict-resolution-friendly place to live.

Process has been carrying a monkey for CRC, that CRC was going to bring
forward a CRC-related community meeting agenda item. (That was not a
refreshing policy moment.)

What kind of ideas did we have last time we talked about it?
Ways to get to know eachother and learn about eachother, in ways we don't
usually do at dinner. Meyers Briggs was talked about.

Pam did some alternative meetings that people really liked. Telling stories.
One was about what was your first job. Personal narratives. THe more you
know someone, the stronger your rapport or your willingness to engage in
resolving conflict rather than just pulling back and isolating from that
person.

What makes GO "conflict resolution UNfriendly"? Why would someone NOT bother
to resolve a conflict?
Feeling isolated? Don't want to be perceived as a complainer or a problem
person? Fear about how it would go? Or if you don't feel a connection to
them at all it may not feel worth it to work on resolving...

For the conflict resolution process to work is has to START. That's what the
communication pathway is about is giving people an idea of how to start. But
for some people (or many people) its not easy to do.

It can feel like CRC is a hammer: "If you keep doing this I'll go to CRC" -
like its the nuclear option.

Susan - I teach intergroup relations. How to bring conflict into a safe
space where you can discover that you can do it, that resolving conflict is
not so hard, and learning to trust yourself to do it. There's lots of
exercises, activities, that allows you to see in a non-threatening way, the
experience of how you respond to a tension. You do it in a way where you
create a conflict that is not imminent to this moment. Hypothetical. A dry
run where you learn to trust yourself in the moment. All kinds of exercises
to do.

Can we do one of these exercises in a meeting.

MONKEY: Susan will look at some of the exercises she has for learning about
resolving conflict for a community meeting agenda item. Say a 30 minute
agenda item for March/April/May. Susan will get back to Process about that
by 3/5. (Or another option is a full alternative meeting in the next season,
which could be 90 minutes.)

Process has been talking about creating a culture of praise and
appreciation. My feeling is there may be a residue of unaddressed conflict
floating around. Idea that if we're not all that happy as a community is it
something we should work though as a group in the fall. Doesn't feel to me
like we're super happy as a whole group.

As you look at these exercises keep the Skills and Thrills weekend in the
back of your mind.

Do you think as a community we have collectively matured enough to do this?
I feel like I tried to do this a while back and met a lot of walls. Maybe
the community was not ready.

I don't know. There are some people who don't like "touchy feely stuff" so
that will be one reaction. And others will find it kind of threatening. But
we've done things like what Diana Kardia led, we explored how we felt about
things, I think people were happy with the results. So how its framed makes
a big different and if you can get people to go along and see the value in
it.

There are skills GO can learn. I don't want the disconnection to snowball.

Some people have cycles of involvement and it's also seasonal too.

Then we moved into a discussion about the next two Alternative meetings, and
discussion about the upcoming CH-related alternative meeting.

MONKEY: Jillian will check in with Becky and Infoco to see if Becky and her
facilitator need any help planning her 3/2 Alternative meeting. Infoco
happens to meet the night before the meeting.

Question, do we need a teddy bear talking stick session on, how is sharing
the common house with TS impacting you? What is the impact on you, how do
you feel about it.

Not to replace what Becky plans to do but at some other time. Would be a
whole meeting so we don't have to cut anyone off.

TS said when we made the CH sharing agreement, "We don't want it to be like
your brother in law just living on your couch endlessly" - but GO needs a
way to check in about it, maybe let off steam about it. And we don't really
have a sense when this is ever going to end so we need to talk about that.

5. CRC next meeting

MONKEY: In the next few weeks CRC together with Kate Long will pick a date
in the last two weeks in April to meet. At that meeting CRC will continue to
orient Kate to CRC work, and will schedule additional face-to-face meetings
for the work season.


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