The Gift of Good Process—All Delivered Before Xmas Morning

I'll be conducting a variety of courses from now through the end of the year, and I'm laying them out here—both because one or more may interest you, or people you know (and I'd be pleased to have your help banging the drum).

I. Facilitation Training

This is my signature two-year course, which I've been doing since 2003 and have delivered 15 times, reaching about 175 students. It will be conducted via Zoom (which I've experimented with the last two years and feel solid about, based on having conducted 15 training weekends and facilitated multiple group meetings via that medium).

The class meets for eight 3-day weekends (from Thursday evening through Sunday afternoon), spaced approximately three months apart. No prior facilitation experience is required—you just need a positive attitude, an open mind, and a reliable modem. In addition to teaching the basics, the course will cover considerable nuance about group dynamics in a cooperative setting—all of which applies just as well to leadership in cooperative culture.

In addition to receiving approximately 50 handouts, there will be a principal teaching theme for each weekend:

• Working Content
• Formats
• Conflict
• Consensus
• Power & Leadership
• Organizational Structure
• Delegation 
• Challenging Personalities

Half of each weekend is devoted to preparing for, delivering, and debriefing live meetings facilitated by students—as it's my belief that lessons are better grounded when facing live ammunition. The trainers (there will be three of us) will hold your hand throughout and be a safety net as you learn to fly.

Most students come affiliated with an intentional community, but that isn't a requirement, so long as you understand we are teaching you to operate collaboratively and inclusively.

While I am open to students from any situation and with any background, I want to make you aware of the potential this training provides when multiple people participate from the same group—it is much easier to digest and bring home the learnings when you have buddies, and much more possible to shift the culture and practices of your group when the inspiration comes from more than one voice. The benefits are geometric (that is, your group gets four times the boost when you double the number of students).

This is the most fun thing I do, passing along what I've distilled from four decades in the field. At a minimum, this course will make you a better facilitator or help you understand better what good facilitation is. At its best, it will change your life.

The new course is penciled in as follows:

Weekend I          Sept 22-25, 2022

Weekend II         Jan 12-15, 2023

Weekend III        Mar 30-April 2, 2023

Weekend IV       June 22-25, 2023
Weekend V        Sept 7-10, 2023
Weekend VI       Dec 7-10, 2023
Weekend VII      Mar 7-10, 2024
Weekend VIII     June 6-9, 2024

There is still room in this course for more students (we accept a maximum of 18). If we don't reach critical mass (12 students is the minimum) by next month, we'll postpone the start until January, bump back all the weekends and add a new date for Weekend VIII.

The cost is $450/weekend for full students (discounts are available if you pay up front) and $300/weekend for auditors. While both full students and auditors are welcome in all classroom sessions, only full students get to facilitate live meetings during class weekends, and receive detailed written comments about their facilitation. 

If you have questions or want additional details reach me via email: laird@ic.org

II. National Cohousing Conference • Aug 25-28 • Madison WI

Coming right up (next week!), I'll be traveling for work for the first time since March 2000—ending a drought of 29 months. (I used to travel once a month for work—my how times have changed.)

—Aug 25 (Thursday) • I am teaching an all-day (6-hour) intensive styled Consensus 301, aimed at helping groups who are struggling with consensus, to better understand how they might untangle and be get better results. I have been working with secular consensus for 45 years and have a deep understanding of both the problems and potential solutions. In six hours there will be plenty of time to get responses to individual questions.

Click here for details and the possibility of a one-day pass for this offering alone. I believe you can participate either in-person (best) or via Zoom (next best).

—Aug 27 (Sat) • I am offering a 90-min workshop entitled Consensus 101 (9-10:30 am), covering the basics of what you'll need to get off to the right start.

—Aug 27 (Sat) • I am offering a 90-min workshop entitled Participation (1:30-3 pm), unpacking the morass of issues that arise around non-monetary member contributions to the maintenance and well-being of the community. This topic is the single most requested that clients ask me to help with, because of its complexity. I'll lay out the key questions groups need to address in order to clear the fog.

Again, you'll have the choice of registering for just the workshops, or the whole megillah. Click here for your options.

III. FIC Webinars

Continuing an ambitious program of 10-hour online courses sponsored by the Foundation of Intentional Community, all of which have been offered once already this year, here are the ones being repeated in the months ahead. Each course will be comprised of 2-hour Zoom sessions, held at the same time of day and on the same day of the week for five consecutive weeks. For details and registration for each course, please click on the titles, which are hyperlinked to FIC.

—Facilitation (Tuesdays) • Sept 13-Oct 11

—Consensus 101 (Thursdays) • Sept 15-Oct 13

—Conflict (Tuesdays) • Oct 25-Nov 22

—Aging Gracefully in Community (Wednesdays) • Oct 26-Nov 23 (for this course only, I am part of a team of presenters, and I am only leading the first session)

—Membership (Thursdays) • Oct 27-Nov 23 (note that the last class will held on Wed, to avoid Thanksgiving—the rest will be on Thursdays)

In addition to the main entrées listed above, here are a couple of 1-hour appetizers offered free of charge:

• Facilitating Your Group Through Anything • Aug 23 • 2:30-3:30 pm Eastern

In this session I'll walk through how to handle the nasty stuff: topics that are complex and/or volatile. This is a teaser for the 10-hour Facilitation course listed above.

• Understanding How Consensus Works in Cooperative Groups • Aug 23 • 6-7 pm Eastern

The key focus here will be on essential communication skills needed to make consensus sing. This is a teaser for the 10-hour Consensus 101 course listed above.

I hope to see some of your smiling faces soon.

Remembering Lina

My friend and mentor, Caroline Estes, died July 13, passing peacefully after four months in hospice. She was 94 and had lived a full and impactful life that touched me deeply.

We first met in the spring of 1987. I had taken Amtrak's Empire Builder from Chicago to Oregon, fresh from the first board meeting of the newly reconstituted Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) at Stelle IL. I caught up with Caroline for a cup of coffee at Alpha-Bit, the magical bookstore/cafe/art gallery that her community, Alpha Farm, operated in Mapleton—a wide spot in the road between Eugene and Florence, on the sinuous banks of the Siuslaw River (of Once a Great Notion fame). 

I had set up the rendezvous both to put a face to the name, and to fill her in on what had happened at the seminal FIC gathering. She had a reputation as a tour de force as a community networker in the Pacific Northwest, and I aspired to strengthen connections with communities on the West Coast. As an added incentive, Alpha Farm was an income-sharing community—just like my community, Sandhill Farm—and there weren't many of us around with whom to talk shop.

We clicked immediately, nattering nonstop for a couple of hours, pausing only to inhale and to refill our coffee cups. (I knew right away that I was in the right place because Alpha-Bit served half-and-half in a small pitcher.)

She spent her early childhood in a privileged family in Texas, before moving to California at the age of 10. As an adult she became a Quaker, which was the grounding for her understanding of consensus. Her nickname as a child was Lina, and I am invoking that term of endearment in this remembrance.

Caroline as Grandmother of Secular Consensus

We didn't meet face-to-face until she was 57, and already well established at Alpha (15 years after she'd helped found the community in 1972). By then she'd already worked to adapt consensus as a religious practice to meet the needs of decision-making in community settings. In response to requests to share her methods, Caroline had developed a five-day consensus & facilitation training, and I eagerly signed up for the next round. It came at just the right time for me. I knew enough about cooperative group dynamics to have a slew of questions, but wasn't so settled in my ways that I couldn't shift my thinking or practice.

Together with her protégé, Lysbeth Borie (also a long-time Alpha member), the two comprised Alpha Institute, a subsidiary of the community that offered consensus training and professional facilitation. In addition to steady work in cooperative groups throughout Ecotopia, for a number of years they were the consensus trainers of choice among Waldorf schools across the breadth of North America.

The occasion of Caroline's passing weaves together a number of threads for me. Lysbeth was the person who broke the news to me, and I have a fond memory of my first gig as an outside facilitator in December, 1987, when Lysbeth and I partnered to assist Appletree, a fledgling income-sharing community on Cottage Grove OR. Caroline helped us plan the engagement—even pulling out a packet of precious frozen blueberries from Alpha's larder, so that we could offer Appletree members a memorable dessert as part of our time together. For Caroline, good food and good dynamics went hand in hand, and it was a signature element of her penchant for interweaving engagement and conviviality.

Caroline as Mentor

Caroline was both a friend and a Friend, who was able to retain the spirit of Quaker consensus without necessarily defining it as a pathway to knowing the divine. Under her deft touch, it was also developed as a pathway to divine what was best for the group, which was the field in which she and I walked together.

Among the lessons I absorbed from Caroline was the preciousness of facilitator neutrality, without lapsing into passivity. It is an art knowing when you've heard enough from the group to be able to float a proposal that might balance the whole, and facilitators need to be brave as well as disinterested.

Caroline taught me how to read a meeting—which is a subtle combination of listening deeply to statements, while at the same time tracking the energy that lay beneath and around the words. (Neither of which, BTW, is enhanced by today's increasing reliance on social media, which has significantly degraded both attention spans and the ability of people to hear accurately. Impatience and consensus don't play well together.)

As a master facilitator she was a rock. When managing large groups (100+), which she did on a number of occasions at the height of her career, she had legendary stamina (and erect posture), and was able to redirect obstreperous behavior simply through her presence, the judicious use of silence, and a raised eyebrow. When the number of participants exceeded her capacity to track each person, she learned to scan sections of the group for discordant energy, following that up with individual scrutiny as needed.

She taught me how to toggle one's attention when facilitating, alternately lightly between what was being said (and how that applied to the topic at hand), and where the energy was trending—two things that are not always aligned, yet need to be to reach the promised land.

Based on her genteel upbringing, it was hard for Caroline to express or to work directly with strong emotions—especially negative ones—which is something I've come to view as an essential skill as a consultant/facilitator working with cooperative groups. To be sure, she understood fully when feelings were in play, but considered it unpleasant, invasive, or ill-bred to expose them in group. Thus, she was never comfortable sailing close to the winds of distress.

Caroline's gifts were overwhelmingly offered orally and in person. She left behind a paucity of written material—very few articles or reports. If she wanted to communicate, she would dictate an email, pick up the phone, or write a letter (remember when people used to do that?). To my knowledge, she didn't participate in social media at all, which, as you might imagine, contributed significantly to her disappearing from the radar of folks in need of what she had to offer the last couple decades.

While it's my sense that there is every bit as much need today as there ever was for what Caroline could teach, in the 21st century she had essentially outlived the ability to attract clients, given the limitations of how she functioned. Contemporary marketing had left her behind—making it all the more important for me to honor my professional debt to her in this eulogy.

For two decades (1988-2008) Caroline was a regular participant in FIC, which met semi-annually for three-to-four days at a time to discuss strategies and reset the gyroscope. Caroline was at the center of the wheel and a significant voice in how the organization evolved. For many years, the two of us made a point of carving out one evening at each gathering to go out to a local restaurant for dinner. For three hours it would just be the two of us—catching up, musing, laughing, and strategizing about the road ahead.

Caroline as Communitarian

I consider Alpha to be one of the most beautifully sited communities I've ever seen, nestled into a finger valley of Oregon's Coast Range. Bordered on two sides by BLM land and Forest Service property, it even features a babbling stream that feeds into Deadwood Creek and is home to spawning salmon. 

Many years before the community landed there, Alpha was the site of an early post office, when European settlers first populated the Willamette Valley. Interestingly, operating a rural mail route has been a mainstay of Alpha's balance sheet, offering dependable income in an otherwise uncertain backwater economy. (While Alpha-Bit was a solid success when it came to local relations, it was never a profit center.)

Caroline was devoted to Jim, her husband of many years. He grew up in Mississippi and shared her sharp intellect, political savvy, progressive outlook, love of language, and the discipline of speaking with a civil tongue (a diminishing art these days). He worked as a newspaperman, and would recreationally edit menus while awaiting service at restaurants. When possible, they'd attend live theater and symphony concerts, especially the annual Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene. He predeceased her by nine years.

In 2008, while Jim was still with us, I took the train to Oregon following my niece's wedding in San Antonio to attend Lina's 80th birthday bash at Alpha Farm. It was a joy to witness firsthand the appreciation of so many people whose lives she had touched—both in the community and among the Deadwood neighborhood. (I don't believe I've ever cooked so much fresh asparagus in my life.)

Caroline was also stubborn—especially when it came to Alpha. She cared deeply about her vision that the community be a sanctuary of sanity and a beacon of light in times of darkness. She was loath to delegate significant authority without her oversight. She insisted on a complex olio of social justice, hospitality, environmental consciousness, and graciousness—all of which was both inspiring and exasperating for those who sometimes wanted to balance things differently… especially the budget. 

Impressively, Caroline lived to celebrate Alpha's golden anniversary. She was there for every one of the past 50 years, and it's a monumental testament to dedication and service that few can claim.

Goodbye Lina, my mentor and friend. Please know that I will continue my grieving by baking a cherry pie, with Montmorencies harvested from a neighbor's backyard, topped with locally churned vanilla ice cream (nothing low fat about it)—all of which I know would make you smile.