Back in October 2016 I wrote about attending the initial
SF Bay Area meeting of Table to Action[1]. I mentioned soliciting one or three of
my local interfaith colleagues who are Roman Catholic, Buddhist, and/or
Hindu. Unfortunately, I was
unsuccessful. A college professor
friend recommended a liberal Catholic at her institution, and introduced us by
email. I invited her and got her
in the loop for the next meeting in February. She responded that she was eager to come, but for whatever
reason(s) she did not attend.
Sponsored by Auburn
Seminary and Starr King School for the
Ministry, that second meeting was very like the first one. Table to Action had planned a longer
follow-up workshop to take place in April. It was an evening, followed by a daylong design
workshop. This is some of what the
invitation said:
From September 2016 through
February 2017, a multi-religious group of about thirty Bay Area spiritual and
community leaders have gathered…to form a community of resilience and
accountability and discuss common questions related to our struggles for
justice.
When we began…the questions before
us were related to our spiritual, emotional and physical sustainability in the
context of relentless demands and challenges and frequent setbacks. We approach the questions
intersectionally, both from personal and communal standpoints,
We asked ourselves what kind of
justice movement we dreamed of, one that would engage issues intersectionally,
respected our different social locations and histories and honored our bodies
and souls as we are in the struggle.
…
After the elections, we checked on
how our bodies and souls and our community fared in the midst of constant
multiple attacks on the values and communities we love. We asked ourselves how we could best
support each other across our different communities, and strengthen our
capacity to build a sustainable and resilient local community or resistance and
resilience.
This longer engagement culminated “with a DesignShop[2]
… [to] imagine together where we might want to reimagine ways to collaborate
for justice in the Bay [Area] in these times.” The title was:
“We Are Not Afraid to Reimagine[3]”
A Design Shop Intensive[4]
We gathered at City
of Refuge United Church of Christ in Oakland on the evening of April 23 and
all day on April 24. The
Hospitality Services of City of Refuge, an excellent venue, conveniently located
with plenty of parking and a small garden outside, catered our event. The food was great, accommodating
various dietary concerns, and the food preparers (all women, it seemed)
friendly and kind. They earned
several applauses throughout the two days.
The first evening entailed a re-acquaintance with other
participants, and for those who hadn’t attended the first two meetings, getting
to know each person. Again, I was
unsuccessful in recruiting either Buddhists, Catholics, or Hindus, although I
know that all three are active in interfaith, social justice, and environmental
concerns. To be fair, there are
few Hindus in my immediate area except for a Vedanta retreat, which is a member
of Marin Interfaith Council. However, there are plenty of activist
Catholics and Buddhists. And since
this was a Bay Area-wide effort and there are many Hindus in the Santa Clara
Valley (aka Silicon Valley), I found their absence worth mentioning. It wasn’t I who convened this group, so
I don’t know how wide a net they cast.
Regardless, I did invite Felicity Grove, an interfaith colleague from NCLC-CoG.[5] Surprisingly, among this group of about
thirty, there were four Witches.
One, Courtney Weber Hoover works
at Auburn and is part of the program, so she was an employee-participant. The other was local Witch Luna Pantera,
whom I’ve known for many years and knew of her involvement with NOW. I
had not encountered her at interfaith activity until now, although I’m now aware
that she attended the second MountainTop in Atlanta in 2015, as I did in
Nashville in 2013. I was glad to
see her taking the step of further involvement.
As in earlier DesignShop sessions, we gathered in small
working groups, where we were given a topic or a problem to address
collaboratively. The specific
configurations of these groups changed with each change of topic; all were
timed to 30 minutes.
An artist documented our full group discussions on
whiteboards around the room. I
described this here,
starting at the sixth paragraph.
“Get on the Bus”
Round One of this exercise involved teammates depicting “the
Bay Area’s movement work as if it were a bus on a journey…traversing any kind
of landscape.” Includes details
such as obstacles, challenges, landmarks, “as well as the nature of the
interaction on the bus…” After
this we walked around to see what others had been talking about.
“It’s easier to get from THERE to HERE than it
is to get from HERE to THERE.”
DesignShop Axiom
For Round Two, teams drew a bus that represented the ideal
Future State, three years from today, then chose a team member to report the
group’s final ideas to the whole gathering.
“Design a Home”
For this module we formed new teams in which each of us was
given a description of a specific person and assigned to enact that individual
in the discussion. We were five
people, each decidedly different from the other in terms of age, health,
economic situation, ethnicity, et al., seeking to share housing in the Bay
Area. We were to consider each
participant’s needs: cost; location; quiet hours or quiet area; rooms for
entertaining visitors; sharing food and/or meals or not; accessibility of
public transit; pet(s) or none; house meetings; levels of fastidiousness;
chores; need for yard or garden area; etc. No one knew who the other was portraying prior to the role-playing
discussion.
My role was that of a 52-year old gen X-er, middle class,
working in nonprofit, given to inclusivity, reflection and discussion, no rash
decisions. The names given to each
participant were not generally seen as being gender-specific. My name was Leslie.
“To add someone’s experience to your
experience,
to create a new experience, is possibly valuable.”
DesignShop Axiom
Then we debriefed for another 20 minutes, setting aside our
roles and reviewing what just happened in our housemate meeting. Questions we considered were:
1.
What process did you work out to make this
decision? Who took the lead? Was it an explicit process or did it
just evolve?
2.
What worked well and what could you have done
differently in listening to what was important to each of the other housemates?
3.
How did you balance incompatible objectives and
priorities?
4.
How was this scenario like some of the trade-off
decisions that have to be made in creating a more racially and economically
equitable Bay Area?
5.
What did you learn about design decisions like
this one that you can use going forward?
At the end of that time, we reported what we learned to the
whole gathering. I felt okay about
how this module went.
“Everything that someone tells you is true;
they are reporting their experience of reality.”
DesignShop Axiom
 |
| Designing a Game |
“Design the Sustainable Justice Game”
Beginning with the assumption that everything can be turned
into a game, we were tasked with designing a “sustainable racial and economic
justice game.” Colored paper,
beads, yarns, colored markers, and other game-making materials were provided. Both Felicity and I were in this group
together with two other people.
Questions we considered in devising this Sustainable Justice Game were: Choosing a game to model; the objective
of the game; what winning looks like; who can win and under what circumstances;
strategies leading to success or failure; what advances play or sets players
back; barriers/obstacles to winning and how to overcome them; resources/skills
players need and whether they’re easy to pick up or can be offered from one
player to another; who are the players and what are their roles and
characteristics; player interactions and powers, limits or constraints;
cooperation or competition; field of play; and rules. And importantly, what unique characteristics of the multifaith
movement for social justice can be built into our game?
We began by brainstorming a list of our favorite games. There was one game that neither
Felicity nor I knew anything about.
Both of us clearly expressed this numerous times. Nevertheless, time was
running out and we hadn’t settled on one game to use as a template that all of
us agreed on, so the person most invested in using the game she suggested took the lead and began
writing about it on our whiteboard.
We settled with doing the support work of making the board and the
pieces according to what the other two were telling us about how the model game
goes. Personally, I felt excluded
from designing the game and handicapped due to our ignorance of it. And I will say that this exercise was
not fun for me. Nor was it an
equitable collaboration.
Our result, ideally, was writing the rules, preparing the
board (or other field of play), pieces, and other elements so that another team
can actually play it.
“If you can’t have fun with the problem,
you
will never solve it.”
DesignShop Axiom
We then moved our tables together to hear what another group
designed and to share what we designed.
The other group created a game I really liked. It was a board game, with all roads leading to the
center. The object was to get to
the center, and for those who reached the center sooner to work towards
bringing along every other player.
I couldn’t hear their explanations due to the distance created by two
large tables pushed together, the acoustically “live” room, and the softness of
their speech. I did the obvious,
which was to request the speaker to speak louder because I wanted to hear what
they had to say but couldn’t. The
first time I said this, the speaker duly increased her volume. However, the next speaker again spoke
softly and again I said I couldn’t hear.
This situation was exacerbated by people leaning in to hear better and thereby
blocking my view. Of course, I
kept moving my vantage point so that I could see the speaker, but it didn’t do
much good
We concluded the day by gathering once again in a circle,
where Melvin Bray, the facilitator asked
that someone from each team tell us what they did. This is where things got dicey among four who participated in the game design segment. The facilitator did not extend our talk so that we could express
our frustrations and resolve our differences. Perhaps others didn’t see the tension and bewilderment on
our faces. I was
disappointed. Normally I would do
that myself -- speak up. However, we were at the end of the day
and there seemed to good way to deal with the problem without being disruptive. Instead, I spoke to another team member
one-to-one after the close, expressing that I wanted to clear things up. I have heard nothing more.
In hindsight, I see that we – or I, at least – participated
in a lower key, less take-charge way because we were conscious that we were viewed
as the seemingly privileged middle-class educated white folks, or using the
term I prefer in such circumstances, Euros, among a minority majority assembly. We tended to hold back more than we
usually would in service, I thought, of good behavior, not bullying or trying
to take over.
At each of the three Bay Area sessions, I met and talked
with several very interesting people, folks it’s unlikely I’d meet otherwise,
because they were primarily from the Abrahamic religions and I don’t usually
have occasion to attend Christian, Jewish, or Muslim religious ceremonies. At all three Table to Action events I
attended, I met several people I’d like to know better, and perhaps ultimately
either supporting each other’s efforts or perhaps collaborating. I would have enjoyed more socializing --
just in general, not specifically at these events. Because those of us to participate in interfaith (or, more
appropriately in our case, inter-religious) activities know that it is in
opening ourselves to and cultivating personal friendships that forge and
sustain our efforts. In order to
make this happen, we would need to be able to remain in contact so we could
deepen these connections to the extent that each of us was moved to do so.
So my primary frustration with this whole project is that we
have been provided no way to continue our conversations and to help with and/or
fortify each other and each other’s interfaith work. For some reason I was under the mistaken assumption that
this project was intended to forge alliances. Some of us did, individually, exchange contact information. I hope that a contact list is provided
at some point, although I don’t anticipate more sessions.
[1] Unfortunately the FAQs on the Table to Action
website appear to be in Latin.
[2] DesignShop is a method created by Rob Evans of
Imaginal Labs. Here’s a brief talk about it. You may recall my post about MountainTop in 2013, which I explained
as I experienced it. The founders
explain it here.
[3] “We Are Not Afraid to Reimagine” is a line from a
poem written collectively at the Table to Action dinner on September 20, 2016.
[4] “DesignShop is a methodology that puts participants
into interaction with one another to identify challenges, concerns, problems or
opportunities and to design together a way of addressing them. The future is coming, whether we are
ready or not. Our desire is a
future by design—that we shape toward justice—not by default.”
