The author Shivaji Shiva isn’t talking about the furniture we sit on but rather the leader of board meetings. The section on the role of a clerk is very useful, covering sections like “Humility,” “Contributions and ‘air-time’, and “Navigating conflicting views.” He concludes:
If some of these approaches are less familiar to you, why not find out more about Quaker business methods and how a governance tool kit used for more than 350 years could work for you?
Rhiannon Grant asks: what’s the opposite of a Rumspringa?
So my questions for Quakers are: How do you ensure that adults are trusted to be adults even if they are under 30? How do you make sure that people are given opportunities to take responsibility without feeling that they must perform especially well because they are representing a whole demographic?
Here in the U.S., the trick to getting on national committees while young (at least when I was trying it in my 20s) was having a well-known mom. As someone who kept knocking and kept getting turned away it blew me away when I heard Quaker-famous offspring complain how they were always being asked to serve on committees. But then I realized it was the same tokenizing phenomenon, just in reverse.
So our work isn’t just looking around a room and ticking off demographic boxes, but really digging deeper and seeing if we’re representative of multi-dimensional diversities. And if we’re not, the problem isn’t just that we aren’t diverse (diversity is a fine value in and of itself but ultimately just a crude tool) but that we have unexamined cultural practices and selection systems that are systematically turning away people from community participation and service.
Over on Medium, consultant Jim Ralley looks to Quakers for the origins of the facilitator’s check-in:
The ‘check-in’ is a fundamental element in the repertoire of a facilitator. There’s no better way to start a session and get everyone present, and there’s no faster way to discover what’s going on under the surface of a group. It’s such a simple an effective process tool that I figured it must have a rich and well-documented history. But it’s proved quite tricky to research, partly because its name is shared with the hotel and airline industries, but partly also, I suspect, because of its simplicity.
Where to start? With such a basic human process, the line through history will surely be tangled and confused. But, for the sake of starting somewhere, I’ll start with the Quakers.
I’ve left a comment on the post with missing links. I’ll leave a version of it here. Regular readers will predict that I’ll start with Rachel Davis DuBois, the New Jersey-born Friend who put together racial reconciliation groups in the mid-20th century. She later turned some of the process into “Dialogue Groups” in the mid-1960s and traveled the U.S. teaching them; these evolved into modern Quaker worship sharing and clearness committees.
Those late-60s processes were picked up by the younger Friends, who (no surprise) were also into antiwar activism and communitarian politics. They were codified and secularized by the Movement for a New Society, which started in Philadelphia in the early 70s but had communities all over the Western world. Much of their work was focused on training people in their style of group process and a lot of our facilitator tools these days are disseminated MNS tools. Many MNS’ers were involved with Quakers and many more filtered back into the Religious Society of Friends in later years.
A lot of this relatively recent history has been forgotten. Many Quakers will tell you these things all date from the very start of the Friends movement. There’s definitely through-lines and echos and inspirations through our history but I’d love to see us appreciate Rachel Davis DuBois and the people who made some very useful adaptations that have helped Quakers continue to evolve and (almost) thrive.
This week we unveiled the next slate of themes for Friends Journal, one which takes us all the way through the end of 2020 (I can’t get over how much further away this feels than the calendar says it is). This is the sixth round of themes since we introduced the format back in the beginning of 2012. We’ve kept the pattern the same – nine themed issues a year, with two non-themed issues for more eclectic material we get (
Before 2012, the mix had been flipped for years: two annual special issues, with the rest a catch-all from the incoming submission slush pile. I feel that more frequent themes have helped us steer clear of the rut of repeating the same articles on a too-frequent basis. We’re also seeing more articles consciously written for us (as opposed to be shopped around to various progressive publications). Most importantly from an editorial perspective, the process also forces us to reach out to people, directly and on social media, to encourage them to write. One of my never-ending, never- reachable goals, is to always be encouraging new voices in the magazine. This is one tool to help get there.
We’ve already started getting feedback from individuals that their favorite cause isn’t covered in this latest list. I’m okay with that. We don’t cover everything every round. Core concerns of Friends get covered on a regular basis in the non-themed issues. Some authors are also really creative in finding a hook to bring their cause into seemingly unrelated topic. Also, I think we’ve covered all of the major topics in the last seven years — sometimes multiple times — and those articles are still be read and shared and commented on.
Many of these themes come from reader suggestions. Others come from more random conversations we have. One of my favorite this time is the issue on Gambling. That was inspired one late-January 2018 morning when a new Friend called in to ask us if we had any articles on the topic. Apparently, she had been chastised at meeting that weekend for suggesting there should be a prize for whoever guessed the correct number of valentine candy hearts in a jar. She wanted to understand the Quaker testimonies. Much to my surprise there hadn’t been much in recent Friends Journal articles. I randomly asked on Facebook whether we had “essentially dropped” our testimony on gambling. The resultant Facebook thread quickly made it obvious that Friends have an issue-worthy amount of feelings on the topic.
Have fun looking over the list. If you have suggestions, let me know (I will write them down and remember). If you want to encourage people to write, please please do. Also, send me a message if you want to get on a monthly email list in which I promote an upcoming writing deadline. The next coming up in for March’s issue, Outside the Meetinghouse.
This week’s featured article over at Friends Journal is Peterson Toscano’s “A Reluctant Minister.”
Satire and irony, especially when it is subtle, done in character, or relies on tone can be misunderstood when taken literally. Friends can get so caught up in the words that we miss the point. It is never fun explaining a joke to a Friend, but even that interaction is part of the work of presenting performance art for Quakers. We are committed to fairness and love. Comedy can be used to hurt others or to make light of serious issues. Unpacking a joke can lead to rich discussion. I seek to use comedy to shed light on important issues. Still, some Friends prefer the straightforward message over the comic performance.
I really appreciate the care and honesty that Peterson has put into defining his work. It would be so easy for him to label his performance art as ministry and wear it as a cloak of respectability. Much of his work does indeed act as ministry and he uses a clearness committee as a Quaker discernment tool. But he wants to keep a space open for what you might call artistic confusion and so describes himself as a “theatrical performance activist.”
When the pendulum began trend toward re-embracing the ideas of ministry within Liberal Quakerism some years back, many forms of public work started being labeled ministry. It might be a sign of the incompleteness of our follow-through that few of the people coming forward with ministries felt comfortable calling themselves ministers. I like the idea of keeping middle-ground spaces that we don’t try to artificially kludge into classic Quaker models.
Chris Hardie’s semi-viral manifesto championing the open internet isn’t about Quakerism per se, but Chris is a Friend (and one time web host to everything Quaker within a hundred miles of Richmond, Ind.). Since the rise of corporate gate-keeping websites and then social media, I’ve worried that they represent some of the largest and least visible threats to the Quaker movement.
I use it all as a tool, for sure. But there are many ways in which we’re increasingly defined by corporations with no Quakers and no interest in us except for whatever engagement numbers they can generate. Look at the nonsense at many of the open Quaker Facebook groups as an obvious example. People with limited experience or knowledge and relatively fringe ideas can easily dominate discussion just by posting with a frequency that involved or careful Friends couldn’t match. Facebook doesn’t care if it’s a zoo as long as people come back to read the latest outrageous comment thread. Just because the topic is Quaker doesn’t mean the discourse really holds well to our values, historical or modern.
Add to this that Google and Facebook could make any of our Quaker-owned websites nearly invisible with a tweak of algorithms (this is not hypothetical: Facebook has dinged most publisher Pages over the years).
The open web has a lot of pluses. I’m glad to see a Friend among its prominent champions and I’d like to see Quaker readers seeking it out more (most easily by straying of Facebook and subscribing to blogs’ email lists). From Hardie:
Of course, there is an alternative to Facebook and other walled gardens: the open web. The alternative is the version of the Internet where you own your content and activity, have minimal dependence on third party business models, can discover new things outside of what for-profit algorithms show you, and where tools and services interact to enhance each other’s offerings, instead of to stamp each other out of existence.
https://chrishardie.com/2018/04/rebuilding-open-web/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
L.A. Kauffman’s critique of consensus decision making in The Theology of Consensus is a rather perennial argument in lefty circles and this article makes a number of logical leaps. Still, it does map out the half-forgotten Quaker roots of activist consensus and she does a good job mapping out some of the pitfalls to using it dogmatically:
Consensus decision-making’s little-known religious origins shed light on why this activist practice has persisted so long despite being unwieldy, off-putting, and ineffective.
All that said, it’s hard for me not to roll my eyes while reading this. Perhaps I just sat in on too many meetings in my twenties where the Trotskyists berated the pacifists for slow process (and tried to take over meetings) and the black bloc anarchists berated pacifists for not being brave enough to overturn dumpsters. As often as not these shenanigans torpedoed any chance of real coalition building but the most boring part were the interminable hours-long meetings about styles. A lot of it was fashion, really, when you come down to it.
This piece just feels so…. 1992 to me. Like: we’re still talking about this? Really? Like: really? Much of evidence Kauffmann cites dates back to the frigging Clamshell Alliance—I’ve put the Wikipedia link to the 99.9% of my readers who have never heard of this 1970s movement. More recently she talks about a Food Not Bombs manual from the 1980s. The language and continued critique over largely forgotten movements from 40 years ago doesn’t quite pass the Muhammad Ali test:
Consensus decision making is a tool, but there’s no magic to it. It can be useful but it can get bogged down. Sometimes we get so enamored of the process that we forget our urgent cause. Clever people can use it to manipulate others, and like any tool those who know how to use it have an advantage over those who don’t. It can be a tribal marker, which gives it a great to pull together people but also introduces a whole set of dynamics that dismisses people who don’t fit the tribal model. These are universal human problems that any system faces.
Consensus is just one model of organizing. When a committed group uses it for common effect, it can pull together and coordinate large groups of strangers more quickly and creatively than any other organizing method I’ve seen.
Just about every successful movement for social change works because it builds a diversity of supporters who will use all sorts of styles toward a common goal: the angry youth, the African American clergy, the pacifist vigilers, the shouting anarchists. But change doesn’t only happen in the streets. It’s also swirling through the newspaper rooms, attorneys general offices, investor boardrooms. We can and should squabble over tactics but the last thing we need is an enforcement of some kind of movement purity that “calls for the demise” of a particular brand of activist culture. Please let’s leave the lefty purity wars in the 20th century.
I must admit I’ve been thrown off my blog reading by the demise of Google Reader, closed July 1 with only a few months warning. I remember when Google’s was the newest member of the RSS reading options. Its simple interface and relatively-solid performance eventually won me over and its competitors gradually stopped innovating and finally closed.
In the last few months other services have taken up the challenge of replacing Reader, but it’s been a chaotic process and a gamble which would be rolled out in time. One of my go-to programs, Reeder, now works for the phone but not the Mac app. It runs off of the Feedly service, which I now use in the browser to access my feeds.
I rely on these blog reading services to keep track of over 100 blogs. RSS may not be sexy enough to be a mass-market service but for those of us whose temperments or hobbies run toward curation, it’s an essential tool. As the new systems mature, I hope to keep up with my Quakerquaker reading more thoroughly.
