Maceio Assentamento
Stanford Siver, our director of development, is currently working in Brazil. Here is what he writes:
I'm just back in Fortaleza, Brazil, after a seminar in a remote settlement called Maceio Assentamento. I met many amazing people and I feel blessed to have been able to go there and meet them and stay in their homes and learn together. Much appreciation to Raul with Janus Instituto de Consciência Global e Ecologia Social for making it all happen, for building the relationships, for finding funding, and for inviting me to come and for working in such a rich, powerful, and complex environment. So beautiful, Raul, to see what you do and the way that the people in the settlements love and relate to you!!!! And great appreciation for BNB, Banco do Nordest do Brasil, a government development bank, for their forward thinking, courage, support, and funding.
On the way to the settlement, just as we were leaving Fortaleza, a sign flirted with me. It said Dragoa do Mar, Dragon of the Sea, referring to a former slave who led a revolt against a specific task in the work that slaves were forced to do in Fortaleza. Slaves would no longer use their small sail boats to sail out to the slave trading ships and bring other slaves ashore. Slaves would not support slavery. It's a reminder that the region has been the stage for powerful encounters for a long time.
Up until 25 years ago the settlers had been living on the land for at least five generations while working for the landowners. After an intense process involving the police and military and a legal battle they, in their words, conquered the land. The government intervened and now owns the land and allows the settlers to live there. There has been a complex relationship process between the people, INCRA (the government agency that administers the land), MST (an NGO that represents people without land), and the former owners and business interests who have diverse ideas about the land.
Up until the time of this transition, the government was not able to allow or support the people to build modern housing because of the contested ownership issue. They were living in traditional mud and stick houses with thatched leaf roofs, no electricity, and no access to education. They now, most of them, have concrete houses with electricity, their own school, and a few satellite tv antennas and electric keyboards, etc. There are schools in the settlements now, so their children no longer have to be bussed long distances and some of younger people are proud that they have gone to the cities to get degrees. But there is a strong voice in the community trying to keep people from going to the cities. That voice understands that the cities are filled with trauma and crime and fears that, without better education and support, the youth are in danger of falling into these traps: drugs, prostitution, crime, trauma, extreme states. They want to develop locally the educational and economic resources that they need.
The sons and daughters of the settlers are not immediately granted settler status and there is a rank difference between "settled" and "aggregate" residents and this is one of the sources of tension that is beginning to split the community. They have had discussions about whether they should drop their collective association and work, farm, and live independently.
Some people admit that, to begin with, they didn't understand money and didn't know how to formal account for their resources and expenses. Many mistakes were made with the collective funds over the past twenty five years but they understand that they are learning together and have forgiven those who lost or misspent funds. The extent of their compassion and understanding allowed them to reelect one president who had reportedly mishandled funds based on his understanding of the need for change and efforts to create a committee steering the association. The community is learning and evolving. There is an enormous atmosphere of solidarity. They have been through a lot together and feel they need each other to protect themselves from many outside forces.
The goal of the seminar was to introduce process oriented leadership, development, and conflict facilitation concepts, such as Deep Democracy, from the WorldWork paradigm and to provide background training for an international video conference, scheduled for October 6th. This video conference will be facilitated by Arny and Amy Mindell from Portland, Oregon and include participants from the settlements, state and local government, Banco do Nordeste, business, universities, and non-government organizations.
In the seminar, after a brief theory presentation we held a series of innerwork and group processes exercises and the group broke up into small working groups to focus on specific issues that are troubling the community. During the seminar the people said a great deal both about their support for their leaders (many one of whom are well loved, one has been elected five times to 2 year terms of office) and about their sense that there is too much authoritinarianism, that there is no support for their own ideas and directions, and also that there is too much individualism. Hmmm... too much authoritinarianism and too much individualism? Such a strong polarity means that they are getting to know themselves, are developing their own visions for how to live together, and developing awareness of power...
Following the leadership of the seminar participants the video conference will focus on the isolation of the settlements and the problem that happens when young people come to the city. This is an issue that effects not only the settlers but many people and organizations in the city and throughout Brazil.
Raul and his team at Janus are working to invite people from state and local governments, BNB, the Human Rights Commission, universities, business, and non-government organizations to participate in the conference and the work that will continue afterwards. And DDI is considering to create an ongoing training program in Fortaleza. Looking forward to seeing where it all leads.
Here is a link to a few photos:
picasaweb.google.com/stanfordsiver/Brazil2009
And photos put to tunes played by local guitarists:
www.youtube.com/watch
DDI Europe - Elena Chopin is coordinating
Our DDI Europe endeavors are taking shape. We are lucky to have Elena Chopin working with us on this in Amsterdam. Elena is a coach and psychologist, and works with Expatriates in Amsterdam and in Paris in English, Russian, Italian, French and Lithuanian - yes, you are reading this correctly: 5 languages. We have known Elena for over 15 years, she is great!!! To find out more, see multilingual-netherlands.expatriatecounseling.com/Amsterdam.html or www.multilingual-paris-france.expatriatecounseling.com or contact Elena by e-mail elena.chopin@expatriatecounseling.com.
Our Nairobi Training
We are very excited about our upcoming training in Nairobi, Kenya, (www.deepdemocracyinstitute.co.ke) and have so far had the most encouraging contacts with many Kenyans in the midst of setting up our first workshop there. We chose Nairobi as the town for our 3 year leadership training in East Africa, because it is not only the largest and fastest growing city of East Africa, it is also the hub for many international organizations, and a point of reference for many of the surrounding countries and regions - but even more than all of that, we admit, for it's sheer beauty.We look forward to learning from the Kenyan spirit that we have met in our contacts leading up to this. On a pesonal level, we are thrilled to be in the country of Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Prize winner. We also hope to experience some altitude running. Florence, our Kenyan co-ordinator, was trying to sign us up for the Nairobi Marathon on the Sunday before the workshop starts :-) We would have loved to run with the world's best runners, but a day before the workshop seemed a little too much. Now Florence is suggesting that we run the Lakipia Half Marathon next year, at an altitude of 5,500 feet. It's the world's only race that happens in a game park with helicopters above the runners to chase away the lions, elephants and rhinos. I don't think we are in good enough shape to do it, also we can imagine running a personal best time to stay near the helicopters. If you want to find out more about our workshop, go to www.ddi-kenya.co.ke .
Vision and Relationship in Amsterdam
We are excited about DDI's first workshop in Amsterdam focusing on Leadership, Vision and Relationships. Check it out tinyurl.com/ddiamst !! Some of our students in the Ukraine, Africa and Palestine have urged us to create more possibilities for the DDI student community to connect to the European Leadership community, and we thought that Amsterdam, with its international and forward thinking culture, would be a good center for our West European activities. If it all works well, we hope we can offer an International Deep Democracy Diploma Program that is based in the Netherlands.
Crazy about Kyiv
In our seminar in January in Kyiv, the participants and us started to develop a vision and strategy to bring the world's attention to Kyiv (or Kiev in the old spelling) as one of the most exciting cities on the planet. We made a competition between 5 groups for who would come up with the most fun, deepest and most impactful message. We want to capture the spirit of Kyiv and give it a voice in the world at large. All five groups won, really, because everyone was better than all the others. We had some prize money on it, US $ 200 per group, but at the end, all the participants decided that the total prize money of US $ 1000 should go to creating an organization that helps to communicate the beauty and brilliance and inspiration of Kyiv to the world at large. That's how Kyiv-Crazy was born. Over the next months, you will see the groups working on their projects, in Kyiv on our website, which we just started, www.kyiv-crazy.com . Please pass this site on to other kyiv lovers.
Babuschka vs IBM
Anton Ermolenko, who lives in Odessa and is part of the DDI Ukraine has a great blog. One of the recent entries is titled Babushka versus IBM, an example from one of ours seminars, that shows that vision and a sense of being connected to a deeper process is useful independent of the size of an organization, large corporations or street vendors. Inspiration cannot be learned or manifactured, but only discovered inside oneself. Read his blog at www.ProsheProstogo.com and write here what you think about it. Use Ukrainian, Russian, or English. Many people visit this site from all over the world and use the google translator to read your thoughts.
DDI Program Evaluation Methodology
Josef Helbling, DDI's Director of Program Evaluation, and Ellen Schupbach, DDI's Executive Director, have incorporated the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) into DDI's evaluation methodology. The IRI (Davis, 1996) is the most widely used of the many methods for researching empathy. It assesses the complex and multi-faceted concept of empathy through measuring the following subscales: Perspective taking, Empathic concern, Fantasy, Personal distress.
We feel that IRI is well suited to evaluate our programs for a number of reasons. First, the close connection between the four distinct components of empathy with the defined core competencies of our program provides an obvious fit. The Index has been validated within a number of cultural contexts, suggesting a potential applicability for other non-Western cultures where DDI is active.
We have custom tailored this index according to the core competencies of our program. Although we plan to use this evaluation to gage the effectiveness of our courses and the development of the students in the specified areas, we will make an additional analysis and use of the results within the framework of our own training system.
The core of Process Oriented Leadership is the idea that disturbances are meaningful. Applied to this evaluation process, this means that we need to unfold the meaning of a low score and find out what is good or right about an apparent un-empathetic aspect so that it can be used consciously and effectively. We do not think of a low score as bad. A high or low score simply provides information that we can use to enhance the system and the individual learning process.
An example is a participant that scores low on the fantasy scale: the person does not have a propensity for fantasy but tends to stay within the practical, tangible world. We would try to discover the wisdom in this process for this individual. Maybe she or he lives in a high-pressure conflict zone in which you cannot afford to day dream, you must stay alert for the sake of survival. This quality is clearly valuable and needed. We do not want to get rid of this attribute. We want to help the person become conscious of it and use it more fully in her or his life. This might also allow the space for the opposite attribute, the ability to fantasize, to be developed and used as well.For our purposes, however, the significance of this scale is to create awareness around these defined processes of empathy. Our goal is not to create more empathetic leaders but to encourage self awareness about the component experiences of empathy and reactivity.
For additional information on DDI's use of the IRI please click here:
