Several years ago, Elinor Magnuson, a community leader and former Junior League president in Spokane, Washington, asked me to work with her on a day-long event that would bring together 150 community leaders. The gathering would take place one week after a bitterly contested mayoral election that had divided the community.
Elinor and I ran into one of the mayoral candidates on the street a few months before the occasion. She wanted both of the candidates to attend, so she told him about the idea. Of course, by the time of the event, one would be the victor and the other the vanquished.
The candidate said he would be there, win or lose. He said he liked the idea of an "envisioning meeting" and told us he thought some healing would be called for by then.
I thought to myself that I saw the day differently: as a forum for people to come together to find what they wanted their contribution to be to the community--perhaps even their greatest contribution. And I told him that.
The day would begin by listing all the community had going for it and each person's ambitions for the kind of world they wanted to live in. And then each individual would consider the specific contribution they wanted to make to foster that kind of society.
Why not come together to heal and to envision the future, as the mayoral candidate assumed we would? For starters, using "healing" as our framework focuses attention on illness and pathology.
More important, I've seen many people go through the exercise of creating a vision of the future of a community (or organization). And often the long-term results have disappointed them because the process left out the key ingredients: individual passion and commitment.
You've probably been at one of those meetings: People get together to talk about the future and it turns out they mostly want to brainstorm ideas for other people to carry out.
A few years before the Spokane event, I attended a large conference in Orlando, Florida, where some 3,000 people gathered to promote voluntary citizen action. The next day's newspaper quoted a participant who'd said it was a good meeting and he was looking forward to seeing what the government would do with their ideas. So strong was the default assumption--it's up to someone else--that neither the participant nor the reporter had caught on to what was supposed to have been the whole point of the conference.
In contrast, the design for the Spokane event grew from my belief that if people are going to aspire to something for the good of the whole, it's best if they begin with what they want to contribute. After all, ideas really come alive only when individuals commit to them.
Especially in the voluntary sector, how do we carry out a "good idea" that no one truly holds as their own?