Process minutes: 2018-12-03

Minutes:

Tri community facilitator's brunch 12/2/2018

GO CH

12:30-2pm

Present: Jillian, Olas, Patti, Elph, Lesli

AGENDA

1.Check ins

2. Announcements

3. Go round about what’s up in each community

4. Next meeting

2. Announcements

Patti, Mary King, and Sarah, are going to the cohousing conference in
Portland, OR in May! Staying in a cohousing community. Cool. Sarah and Mary
will be presenting.

Reminder that Jillian and Elph will not be able to throw a NYE party this
year, will be traveling.

Bob forwarded an email to Jillian from Skye of FIC, Skye would like some
photos of GO that they can use on their web site to advertise the new
documentaries. Jillian will look but if anyone has any photos to suggest
please do.

3. Go-round of what’s up in the communities

When we started this item, no other cmty but GO in the room so we talk
about this and that for a while. Last tri-cmty brunch we talked about
meeting planning and facilitation. ICC is also working on facilitation
issues. ICC has a modified consensus process so you can’t block, you can
only “call to reconciliation”, and there’s a very contentious proposal
right now. Some power dynamics going on. They vote on technical processes,
to “table” it they vote (it can come back). But now issues around what does
“tabling” it mean and how to bring it back.

Short discussion about Saturday meetings. Process had tried doing two a
season for a couple years now. A few GOers seem to like them, Process hears
from numerous who don’t. We don’t seem to have higher attendance and we
don’t seem to have different attendance, and its difficult to find people
willing and available to fill all the meeting roles. MONKEY: Process cmtee
to bring this for discussion in early 2019.

Last time we checked in on budget process for all three cmties, how it is
going?

Lesli - TS facilitators did a good thing with the budget this year I think.
Did our standard several meetings, but before we were going to consense on
the budget the facils put out a survey to the whole community. The group
had already listed concerns, cmtees had already reacted to concerns, and
then they put out the survey. They asked for each person to rank how
important each concern was to them, 1 to 5. Then they did a weighted
analysis, what was at the bottom, and facils proposed that they drop X
items from the bottom to reach a proposed level of budget increase. Had a
lot of stand asides, but that was ok, their voices were recorded in the
minutes, and did not stop the process. The process was quick. Last year’s
process was a bit murky, unclarity. So this year everyone had a voice that
chose to participate.

At TS are facils and budget leaders the same thing?

Our convenor for F&L puts together the budget, but more a technical role.
They take the cmtee’s info and puts it in spreadsheet. But the facils put
out the survey, prob about 20 items on the survey. Then facils tallied the
data and proposed where the “cut” should be made, and no one pushed that
line up or down.

Balance to struggle with is if people did not come to the budget meetings
leading up to the survey and did not hear the discussion, but then did the
ranking anyway.

For us on the whole it seemed to work very well, for us anyway helped with
some of our meeting dynamics. Challenge for me was with one item that was
lumped with other items, it was not split out, even though other items were
split out.

ICC - budget issues - a worry for me is we won’t have very well informed
champions leading the process.

On the GO side we tried a new thing at one budget meeting, with having
budget meeting leader being facilitator. We debriefed about it, seemed to
work well for the most part, but probably only because Mary King is both a
skilled facilitator and knows the budget issues inside and out - not sure
if anyone else could do it.

Discussion about attracting new facilitators.

Lesli - challenge thinking about taking on the energy-level work - scary to
people to think they would have to know how to deal with it. And some
meeting participants are able to set their energetic boundaries and others
are not able to do that.

Agreed that dealing with emotion and energy is challenging, the least
“routine” or least mechanical part of facilitation, and, I think it is part
of training and books about facilitation, it is learnable.

I think meeting ground rules can help address this, such as “expressing
emotion is ok but not aggression”, but discussing the ground rules
periodically and updating them to meet needs if you need to - maybe a
particular group needs more ground rules about emotion.

Laird’s two most recent blog posts - one on conflict and the follow-up was
on abuse, good relevant reading.

Agreement on Four step process for working through emotional charge - are
both cmties using it?

GO has it as an agreement but have not used it actively in a meeting in a
while. Probably good to review.

TS has tried it but is not firmly part of the culture.

GO does have an understanding that if a facil is triggered or is part of
the emotion going on they should step down. And if another facilitator in
the room can see the facilitator is triggered or involved in content and
the facil has not yet realized this they can ask the facil to step down - a
good way to do this is to ask if we can take a short break, and then
discuss with facil at break if the facil should step down.

Conversation about turnover and how that impacts meetings and facilitation.
Transitions happening, ongoing education needed about our agreements, and
then there’s culture and all the unwritten agreements and understandings
that need to be communicated too. New families afraid to do anything not
wanting to make a “wrong move”, not an easy position to be in.

4. Next BRUNCH

12:30-2 on Sunday Feb 24, Lesli host at TS. Jillian will send out reminder.
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