On Tuesday I hit a new record for me–three committee meetings in one day. When people complain about Dancing Rabbit, one of the things they say is “All you do is sit around in meetings!” (Okay those people are actually me talking to myself.)
Christina here, writing about the frustrating, inspiring, and good work of committee meetings.
Having spent most of my adult life teaching and then working at my own business, I guess I have very little experience with times spent in a room with groups of people trying to come to decisions–also known as meetings. I taught in a public school in Massachusetts with a strong union, and so we only had two meetings a month after school, and both of them had very firm end times. Time was not wasted for sure! (It was always entertaining to me to see a few veteran teachers get up to leave at exactly the end time, no matter who was talking or what was going on.)
Fast forward to Tuesday when I spent about four hours in meetings. I really only have myself to blame for joining so many different committees, but also there is something to me about doing this work. And I really did join each one for different reasons!
I helped to form IAAHC (the Integrity and Agreements Ad Hoc Committee) a few years ago because I am very interested in ways to get people to follow agreements that don’t only involve public shaming, gossip, or fines. I joined (and also helped to form, hmmm sensing a trend here) the Name Change Committee when I realized that on the Wikipedia page for the term, “Dancing Rabbit,” our ecovillage is listed above the broken Indigenous treaty of the same name. And then, after having these two very sort of complex and abstract committees, I decided that I needed something a bit more concrete, so I joined MARC (the Membership and Residency Committee), and because planning retreat is kind of like planning a big party I love party, I joined RPC (Retreat Planning Committee).
One thing you might notice about these committees is that we here love a good acronym (try saying IAAHC out loud–never gets old!). You might also notice that these committees exist to make changes, address a problem, or make things happen in some way.
And this is also what can be annoying about committees. Sometimes the things we want to make happen or change don’t happen or change, and sometimes they do, but it takes years. And also sometimes we have good facilitation and concrete agendas and move through policy and tasks in what feels like an efficient manner. When we do manage to make things work, it’s often precisely because we do take our time and work together–slow and collective wins out in the end.
Ultimately, this work is some of the most radical stuff we do. It doesn’t look great in a photo collage–no colorful pictures of a garden full of vegetables or people dancing around a Maypole or lifting a timber frame together. If you tried to capture a committee meeting with a camera, you’d see a few people sitting in front of their computers while one drafts an email, one fills out a spreadsheet, and the other one thinks quietly about a tricky problem. Hence the complaint that people are “just sitting around”–you can’t actually see a lot of the good work that truly is getting done!
But what makes it tough is what also makes it so great–it’s about working together, it’s about talking to people, it’s about trying to make the world suck a bit less, and it’s about the messy, complicated, essential work of self-governance.
Still, I spend a lot of time worrying about how things are going in the world and whether or not I’m really making a contribution that matters. I think about an image I saw of an elderly man standing alone on a street corner with a sign that says, “No guard, No army, No ICE in our cities” and that has been an inspiration to me over the past few days. There’s something about the power of a single, intentional action that stays with me. At the same time, it makes me wonder whether I’m doing enough–whether I’m really contributing in the ways I could be. When I was teaching, my impact felt immediate and visible. And while I don’t regret moving here, I do miss that kind of direct connection.
But here I am, and so I keep following the news, trying to learn what I can about what’s happening and why. Then I write out my weekly schedule, note the meeting times, and make sure I get there on time. Sometimes meetings are genuinely great–full of hilarious jokes, unexpected snacks, and work that feels like it matters. And sometimes those meetings are frustrating and feel like a lot of work for not much progress. I don’t feel sure it’s enough–but I show up anyway, ready to listen.
Christina Lovdal Gil makes it her mission to organize fun social events, like capture the flag, or a recent book swap.