July
The Necessity of Collective Action in the Green
Movement
The power of the collective action: a missing
element in the Greem Movement.
Amish farmers, working in Lancaster, Pa, are
following a centuries old tradition of collective
action going back to Western European roots. The
good news is this was last year. The bad news is
that 99% of the action of barn raising or home
construction or any kind of neighborhood
construction is done by paid experts.
The individual owner of the building lacks
emotional and spiritual ownership because he is
excluded from the task. The larger problem is that
we have turned over our health care, nutrition,
child care and financial independence and our
marriages to the paid experts. The paradox
here is that while cherishing our individuality, we
have dis-empowered our selves by turning to experts
to handle many domains of our personal
existence.
Richard Niebuhr and his brother Reinhold
Niebuhr, two of the most prominent Protestant
theologians of the 20th century, wrote extensively
about the problem of individualist
overemphasis. They considered it in the
big four sins of Western culturealong with
racism, militarism and economic imperialism. My
experience as a writer on enviironmental causes for
thirty years and two years in the Transition
Movement is that the greens by and
large are tone deaf and visually impaired when it
comes to seeing the absolute for collective team
action. More recently the books of Scott Peck,
especially People of the Lie, address this issue in
contemporary culture.
There is a huge briar patch out there which is
thorny and hard to navigate. Four primary parts
making up this briar patch of difficulty s are the
following:
FIRST, the breakdown of inter-generational bonds
within each gender line making cooperation between
older and young males more difficult. The same is
true to a lesser extent for women.
SECOND, is the tension and distrust between men
and women which makes corporate team action by men
and women working together on a team more
difficult. This is the residual shadow of feminism
and a still partially unresolved patriarchal
culture.
THIRD, is racial distrust and vast cultural
differences. Denver, for example has a vast Native
American population. I am told there are 30,000
Navajo in the Denver metro and many Lakota people
and other tribal groups. The engagement of these
populations within the green movement is almost
non-existent.
FOURTH is the fear driven quest for maintaining
middle class life styles which cuts the nerve of
volunteerism and financial giving to non profit
causes.
Notwithstanding all of these briar patch issues,
there is no way into the future without corporate
action. I say this in light of the darkening clouds
of our future rooted in depletion of oil and gas,
climate change and accelerating economic
instability.
What I mean by corporate action is a team of men
and women showing up on the ground at a specific
day and time. They are on the same page. They see
the need and they do the deed. They share the same
core values and they are friends in the best sense
of the word. In past essays I have addressed the
issue of movement building. See
transitioncolaroado.ning.com/members/forrest craver
for numerous blog essays on Building the
Movement.
Not only the transition movement but many
nonprofit and voluntary groups do the first stage
of movement building Awakenment fairly
well. New people come to an event and see a new
paradigm image for sustainable community and they
get excited.
But then the local green group fails to step
into stage two of movement building
formation. FORMATION is about forming people
into task forces, committees, pods and work teams
formed through personal affinity that is the
people self select their specific mission for
future engagement. People work together mainly
because they enjoy and like the people they are
working with. In the awakenment process, the
standard wisdom is that openings
close.
In other words, if awakened individuals are not
followed up with, they turn away and find something
else to engage their time. In the Gospels, Jesus
alludes to this issue by saying if he casts out all
the demons, and the person, previously possessed,
does not step into the New, and embody the New
Paradigm of transformed living he then ends
up worse off than before.
I often tell the story of Lifespring, a training
group across the USA which did in depth
consciousness trainings. Lifespring had 800, 000
grads of weekend, six month and other trainings.
And two years ago they filed for bankruptcy. My
wife, son and I did the entire Lifespring process.
And my wife, Susan was on the national board of
trustees of the Lifespring Foundation.
What happened with Lifespring is illuminating
for the Green Movement and for the trainings on
heart and soul the transition movement is now
doing. The breakdown in Lifespring which led to its
extinction, is that everything was always about
Lifespring. Unlike Rotary International which turns
outward and takes on eradicating polio and smallpox
worldwide, Lifespring always made their mission
about recruiting more people to take their
trainings. They never got to the third stage of
movement building DEMONSTRATION.
Demonstration is about putting an inclusive
model on the ground in a specific neighborhood
where people can come and see the New. The majority
of middle class folk in our country will not go
dark green unless they can see the new
model of human settlement, the new and better way
of living, the new and healthier way of growing
local and buying local. Your neighbors have to see
your retrofitted house, your hoop greenhouse where
you grow thousands of seedlings to plant with your
neighbors.
They need to get a personal witness from you
that you are saving money on your fuel bills, that
you are eating better and healthier with your
backyard organic garden, that your children are
engaged with you and the entire family in planting
and harvesting wonderful veggies, fruits and herbs.
Nothing can ever replace the power of direct
personal experience. This is the key learning from
the field of accelerated learning, open space
technology and leadership groups from the field of
organizational development
So then what can we do about reclaiming
corporate action in our time. I believe from forty
years as a volunteer, participant and consultant to
many social movement groups that the answer is
already present is we are willing to heed the
wisdom of the past. The four keys to building
corporate action come from great social movements
and from the fields of group social work, marketing
and fundraising.
THE FIRST KEY IS RECENCY. This principle means
that your activity and productivity on a team is a
function of how recently you have been involved.
People who are creating a community garden are most
motivated if they are currently engaged in the
work. As the weeks go by without their engagement
they become much less motivated. I was part of a
national mens organization which studied
attrition and fall off in hundreds of our groups.
We found that groups meeting weekly had the very
highest retention rates. The rates dropped for
groups that met twice a month. And most groups that
met only monthly went out of being within three
years.
THE SECOND KEY IS FREQUENCY. This principle is
highly correlated with recency. It means that the
more frequent your engagement in a local green
group, the more likely it is that you will deepen
your engagement in on the ground action, in
participation on task forces and in giving money to
your local group.
THE THIRD KEY IS SEASONALITY. Earth Day USA got
this right by picking April 22nd for its thousands
of local earth day celebrations. People give the
most money to causes between Thanksgiving and mid
January due to Easter and other religious and
cultural celebrations. People give the least money
from June 15th to Labor Day when most of us kick
back, put our nonprofit mailings aside and go on
vacation. In the green movement with its focus on
being outside growing food, retrofitting houses,
the spring, summer and early fall are the very best
times to advance the movement.
THE FOURTH KEY IS SEGMENTATION. Did you know
when a new book arrives at Borders bookstore; there
are two and sometimes three or four different and
distinct book jackets. The publisher is using
segmentation and testing of the marketplace to see
which book jacket attracts the larges number of
buyers. Within the green movement, segmentation
could be used to build task forces based on
affinity for example middle school children
and their teachers and parents creating a school
garden. Or another example would be creating a task
force of women on Preserving and Canning fruits and
vegetables. Segmentation relies on affinity
birds of a feather flock together. A
good example of this is African American worship.
Although racism has been significantly reduced in
religious denominations, the reality is that even
in highly integrated neighborhoods, most African
Americans prefer to worship in black churches led
by black pastors. Style and culture often seem to
us to be invisible but they are as hard as
steel.
In conclusion, how is your local green group
showing up in terms of attendance at meetings?
formation of task forces? and sustained engagement?
How are your team members doing in terms of
enjoying working together? Are you retaining
loyalty of volunteers and financial donors to your
cause? Your comments and feedback are welcome. Send
them to forrestecraver@gmail.com. And good luck as
you move forward in building the movement for a
better world.
©2010, Forrest
Craver
* * *
Man becomes great exactly in the degree to which
he works for the welfare
of his fellow man. - Mahatma Gandhi
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Forrest
Craver has been doing mens work for more than
20 years. He was senior interviewer for Wingspan:
Journal of the Male Spirit for many years. He has
led or co-led more than 40 retreats or workshops
for men including The Mankind Project, Men in
Recovery, and regional clergy retreats for United
Methodist and ELCA denominations. He is a lawyer
and a nationally recognized fundraising consultant
for nonprofit groups. He is the author of a short
book of Spiritual Poetry entitled This Well
Has No Bottom and is finishing a book about
intergenerational breakthrough approaches for boys
and men in American culture. His websites are
cravercreativeservices.com/and
transitioncolorado.ning.com/profile/forrestcraver
or eMail.He
lives and works in the Denver metro
area.
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