Memphis Democrat
February 4, 2008

Tony here reporting from Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage on a cold and foggy day. We got five inches of snow yesterday and hardly before it had settled to the ground the kids (big and small) were out making snowpeople, forts, and the biggest snowball I've ever seen - easily five feet in diameter. Of course with today's high in the fifties they won't last forever, but that snowball may be around for awhile.

Most of our time this week was spent in our annual on-site retreat, where we do planning and make decisions for the upcoming year and beyond. This year we added in three days of workshops on consensus, facilitation, and conflict resolution. We brought Tree Bressen in from Eugene, Oregon and her assistant Sky from Twin Oaks Community in Virginia to help with the workshops and with facilitation during the retreat.

Consensus is a form of democratic decision making that does not involve voting but instead seeks to find agreements that all involved can live with. It has been practiced by many groups throughout history, most famously by the Quakers. Consensus is different enough from what most people are used to that new folks at DR often need training to really understand how it works. Plus, even old hands at consensus benefit from a refresher, and taking a workshop together can help create a common understanding of how decisions are made here.

Consensus meetings are often led by a facilitator who helps the group stay on track, tries to balance group input, and helps the group find common understanding and hopefully a decision. The facilitator is not the leader of the group and does not have any special decision-making power, but serves the group, hopefully without bias. The task is not easy, as anyone who has ever run any sort of meeting can attest, yet the skills are learnable and our group will certainly benefit from the training that Tree and Sky gave us.

We also spent one morning working just with the question of conflict resolution. When humans interact conflict arises; the trick is how you handle it. In community, it is harder to just avoid conflict as we both live and work with folks and must learn to get along well enough even if we disagree. But with patience and practice we can learn how to hear and understand each other and to express our ideas, feelings, and needs in ways that others can understand. One morning workshop won't make us perfect, but hopefully it will nudge us further on in building our skills.

After the training we took on a number of topic including: goals and priorities for the next one, three, and five years; whether and how we want to shift from volunteers to paid staff; issues around kids and parenting choices, and clarifying expectations around our ecological goals and agreements. Our newly trained facilitators did a great job and we made good progress all around.

Speaking of kids, the kids had a great time during the retreat as they got the attention of a cadre of care takers who helped us out while the parents were busy. Much thanks to Alyson and Mark from Red Earth Farms, Stan, Gigi and Renay from Sandhill, and Sarah Martin from Kirksville who all helped out over the week. It was fun to see the kids outside kicking a soccer ball or playing with hula hoops, and on many occasions the adults went out to join them on meeting breaks.

We still have a few more days of follow-up meetings in a couple weeks but for now we can get back to staying warm and having some winter fun.

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