Advancement of Indigenous Opportunity
A movement for worldwide Indigenous solidarity
officially took root during a Wisdom of the People Forum, September 15-18,
2002, in Washington DC. Americans for Indian Opportunity www.aio.org
and the Advancement of Maori Opportunity www.amo.co.nz
convened leaders from a variety of backgrounds and geographical regions
to begin forging links of global Indigenous cooperation.
AIO and AMO share a commitment to grassroots
empowerment and two strong programs for achieving it. The first is their
award-winning Ambassadors program that enables existing and emerging Indigenous
leaders to be positive and proactive change agents. The rationale behind
this program is expressed by AIO founder, LaDonna Harris: “By empowering
leadership with a firm cultural identity, we can withstand the forces
of globalization and even more importantly, contribute our Indigeneity.”
The second, the Indigenous Leadership Interactive System (ILISTM),
enfolds computer interaction in a dialogue/design process that is congenial
to traditional Indigenous decision-making.
The challenge facing this Forum was to lay
the groundwork for an expanding web of transnational, grassroots Indigenous
cooperation. The leaders opened their deliberations sitting in the traditional
Comanche circle sharing their “medicine”—their sources of inner strength
and personal power—principally based on respect for the Earth, ancestors,
family, and peaceful co-existence.
Using ILIS, they then considered the obstacles that
stand in the way of worldwide cooperation and generated 89 barriers.
In structured dialogue and in the spirit of participatory democracy, they
identified not only the barriers that they deemed most important but also
those whose overcoming would exert the most leverage in overcoming the
other barriers. They identified a lack of Indigenous shared vision as
the deepest barrier to their worldwide cooperation.
Other barriers with deep leverage (identified
as needs to be addressed) were:
- To increase respect for Indigenous
peoples, cultures, and diversity;
- To understand the impact of globalization;
- To increase economic and political
participation;
- To increase asset and resource
base;
- For a coordinating agency in the
global context; and
- To overcome the reality that Indigenous
nations are in different places and spaces.
The leaders proceeded to identify actions
that would address these needs, to generate action scenarios in small
groups, and to draft an action plan endorsed by everyone for moving ahead
on transnational Indigenous cooperation.
This three-day Forum/Co-Laboratory was a collaborative
effort of AIO, AMO, and the Institute for 21st Century Agoras
(AGORAS). The W.K. Kellogg Foundation funded it. For a complete
report on this Forum, click: www.isss-conference.org; click
Resources and then A Wisdom of the People Forum. Future
Forums are being planned for El Salvador, Morocco, and Crete (during the
ISSS conference).
Honors for LaDonna
LaDonna Harris, board member, founder and
president of Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO) for 33 years, stepped
down as AIO Director in August triggering outbursts of appreciation.
At the grand powwow sponsored by the National Museum of the American Indian,
on September 14, she was given a special honoring ceremony.
Four days later, after the Wisdom of the People
Forum, at a Generations of Leadership Gala, she was joined by 300 of her
closest friends and supporters,
;)
government and Indian leaders from around
the country, who shared stories of her tireless commitment, energy, and
warmth. During the gala, a slide presentation ran showing her life and
her long involvement in Indian and human rights movements, including photos
with every first family from the Kennedys to the Clintons.
A short bio of LaDonna can be found at
www.isss-conference.org/committee.htm.
Crete 2003
The Institute for 21st Century
Agoras has close ties to the 47th annual conference
of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS; Crete 2003)
and its theme: Conscious Evolution of Humanity: Using Systems Thinking
to Construct Agoras of the Global Village. Our President, Aleco Christakis,
is also this year’s president of ISSS; our executive Director, Ken Bausch,
is co-chair of the conference along with Aleco.
People like Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Kenneth
Boulding, and Anatol Rappaport founded ISSS in 1954 as the Society for
General Systems Research. Its distinguished presidents are a Who’s Who
of the outstanding systems scientists of the 20th century,
including Margaret Mead, James Miller, Stafford Beer, Heinz von Foerster,
Harold Odum, Bela Banathy, Ilya Prigogine, and Ervin Laszlo.
The recently released
Call for Papers see www.isss-conference.org
reveals the very practical bent of Crete 2003. Three Co-Laboratories
are scheduled so far. In addition to the Indigenous Forum, there are
ones on “Dialogos en las Calles de Paises en Crises” and “Greek Culture
in a Global World.” One group has the theme “One Year after Johannesburg”
assessing movement toward sustainable development and advancing grassroots
ways to make an equitable, humane, and environmentally sound world society.
Another group is considering “Participatory design and planning: potential
and pitfalls for ethical governance.” In addition, Markus Schwaninger
and Allenna Leonard are leading Syntegrity sessions on “The Future of
ISSS,” thus taking to heart Mead’s long-ago suggestion that systems scientists
should “use their theory to predict the kind and size of the society they
wanted.”
A flyer describing Crete 2003 is appended
at the end of this message. Full details on the conference are available
at the above website.
Co-Laboratories
of Democracy
Co-laboratories streamline participatory democracy
so that it functions effectively among diverse stakeholders in complex
situations. They (like ILIS) are adaptations of the Interactive Management
(IM; also CogniScope) methodology, which has been refined and successfully
applied for over 20 years in corporate, government, and international
arenas. They simplify IM for the use of non-profit organizations and
community groups in sessions that:
- Authenticate every stakeholder/ participant;
- Elicit ideas and points of view from all stakeholders;
- Move toward effective consensus;
- Elicit and deal with the different priorities of stakeholder participants;
- Equalize power relations among the stakeholders;
- Go beyond identifying factors that are important, to specifying those
that are most influential in achieving goals.
Co-laboratories (and IM) generate focus, consensus,
and effective action. In two days, they move groups to higher levels
of functioning. In addition to their tangible benefits for people and
the organizations that serve them, co-laboratories provide full documentation
and transparency. We have on file hundreds of reports on successful IM
interventions. IM is the best design-making system that there is. AGORAS
makes it available to people who are trying to make a difference.
A brief summary of this process,
including a PowerPoint presentation can be found at www.globalagoras.com. Extensive documentation
is available at www.cwaltd.com.
Institute for 21st
Century Agoras
The Institute for 21st Century
Agoras (AGORAS) is a volunteer-driven 501(c)(3)
charitable organization that promotes vigorous democracy. It revives
the spirit of the ancient Greek agoras for the age of globalization.
With its Co-Laboratories of Democracy, it streamlines participatory democracy,
making it efficient and transparent. Its mission is to employ these co-laboratories
in complex situations with diverse groups of willing stakeholders to jump
start new or stalling democratic processes. In this way, it aims to spread
agoras around the world.
The immediate criteria of evaluation
are the abilities of co-laboratories to draw together the relevant stakeholders
of a situation, elicit a comprehensive list of responses to a well-devised
triggering question, generate consensus on the deep parameters of the
situation, and produce effective action plans. The mid-term results
are measured in the extent that participants and their constituencies
follow through on the action scenarios generated in the co-laboratories.
The long-term results are measured in the vitality of the participating
groups and their effectiveness in influencing problematic situations.
Co-laboratories require preparatory field work to
interview stakeholder groups and compose a paper presenting their various
views, to draft the proper triggering question, to obtain and set up the
proper meeting room, computer projection equipment, etc. They require
a minimum three-person team for two-plus days. They require a large expenditure
of time and effort from AGORAS staff, facilitators, and local personnel.
AGORAS works on a tight budget, but still needs $15,000 to $30,000 for
each co-laboratory, depending on the size and complexity of the situation,
travel, lodging, etc.
Grassroots organizations seldom have the resources
to cover that expense. For that reason, we seek sponsorship from foundations,
corporations, and individuals.
If your organization is having growing pains or is
faced with many complex problems all at once, you might want to contact
AGORAS. If you want to sponsor a favorite organization for rejuvenation,
we would like to hear from you. You might want to contribute to our work.
(You can contribute online and your donations are tax-deductible.) You
just might want to find out more. In any case, go to www.globalagoras.org. and click the
Get Involved menu tab. We would like to hear from you
47th Annual Conference of the
International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS)
Conscious Evolution of Humanity:
Using Systems Thinking
To Construct Agoras of the Global Village
On July 6 - 11, 2003, the world's systems scientists
will converge on Heraklion, Crete, Greece to face the following questions:
Are We in Control?
Is Globalization out of Control?
How can Humanity gain the Upper Hand?
In
papers, discussions, workshops, and co-laboratories, we will devise ways
to harness the multiple aspects of globalization and technological change
in the interests of democratic and open societies. We will interact until
we generate workable structures of democratic cooperation and coordinated
plans for our conscious evolution. For details, see www.isss-conference.org
and www.globalagoras.org.
This
will be hard work, and that is the way it should be! To share this ambitious
endeavor, join the party in Crete, July 2003.
Aleco Christakis, ISSS President
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