From: Corrina McFarlane
To: Earth 4 All Life System change policies
System change policies
Dear kindred spirits in Earth 4 All Life,
I am writing to you from California, enrolled in MIT's U.Lab along with a handful of my work colleagues from different U.S. states and Europe (Austria and Britain). Your URL of course is a primary link included in U.Lab resources.
I read eagerly through all your envisioning and initiatives. I'm getting hung up on Citizens Assembly seeming to be front and center to Earth 4 All systems change policy. I am hoping you could have a conversation with social capital wizard, and former director of Austria, Vorarlberg's [state-sponsored] 'Office of Future-related Issues,' Manfred Hellrigl, or any number of other numinous characters in the field to get bounced into a whole 'nother level of nuance that is reshaping micro and macro policies and structures, at a pace we had only dreamed of prior to this quantum leap.
Manfred will tell you that Vorarlberg did run a Citizens Assembly but there was no way that they, as a small province with their budgetary constraints, could support the expense of such a structure. They kept up their earnest search, scouring the world for proven participatory democracy models and they found the citizens Wisdom Council Process [USA conceived, out of Center for Wise Democracy non profit in Port Townsend, WA]. Manfred and his colleagues orchestrated a pilot study with citizens Wisdom Council for their state government. He described the results as phenomenal, the model as "lean" and "nimble" and "elegant"... They ran the model as it is designed to be run, randomly selecting 12-16 citizens periodically, 'dynamically facilitating' them (Dynamic Facilitation IS the operating system of the wisdom council; elicits shifts and breakthroughs in thinking). The Wisdom Council is conducted over the course of two days, whereupon the Council delivers what is essentially a synthesis of where the Process took them and where they arrived together; their emergent resonant statement faithfully delivered to the broader public and elected officials, the Conversations ripple and bubble on. The Council disbands; done.
So far, this model has become a constitutional amendment in both Vorarlberg and Salzburg, with state-sponsored randomly selected citizens Wisdom Councils convened twice-yearly, and more if a citizen submits 1,000 signatures on another pressing subject (which means to date, in recent years, at least 3 per year, state-sponsored).
The stories about what they have addressed and resolutions they have distilled are truly heartening. But think; it began with an intention to address the widening gap between the government and the governed which was being exacerbated in part by rapid increased diversity in the region, with first Turkish and then Syrian refugees pouring over their Western border. The Wisdom Council was tasked with addressing this changing 'climate,' threatening to destabilize the region.. Then also, the governor of Vorarlberg had wanted to know,"How do we become the most child-friendly state in Austria?".... Or, a lakeside treasure of a resource to the Community that was almost sold off to developers; it was the randomly selected citizens Wisdom Council that was able to 'see" and say, Wait! We don't want the developers to have the lakeside, they should be at the back of our urban space! Hence the blueprint was flipped and the joy and beauty of the lake-shore preserved for the Community.
Elected officials in Vorarlberg have said citizens Wisdom Council is the "wind under their wings" and that the Council can say stuff they could never say as elected officials but that they can act on what is being proposed once it is clearly understood to be what the people want.
Manfred Hellrigl says, "Show me a model that yields such results, in 10 years I have not found it." And Austrian Sustainability director, Patrizia Nanz, has said, what they found in Vorarlberg was something they had not seen elsewhere; "an emerging culture of participation," and that the randomly selected citizens wisdom council, on refrain, was serving to raise the caliber of civic discourse in the region.
From the Wisdom Council exit interviews we know that people commonly feel forever changed by this experience of participatory democracy; "the most profound experience of democracy I have ever experienced." Also common, worth noting, many times people report, having received their random selection invite from the government, they are inclined to be thinking, why me, what do I have to offer, to share.., what do I know? And that, over and over, it is a spouse, or a sibling, or a friend, or their grown-up kid, who presses on that person; you should go, they want you for you, they want you because you are you, they want your voice in there because you have a unique perspective. And so they are persuaded or encouraged by a loved one for the best possible reason; the recognition that there is an innate wisdom in each of us, and that our world is in sore need of it.
Last to tell you, through Covid lockdown, many of us, participatory democracy practitioners in the field, were getting together online through those long months. In one such convergence a Voralberg wisdom council facilitator had said, of course I know we are lucky in our region, to be running wisdom councils two and three times a year but, honestly, we could be running them every two weeks, there is so much grist for the mill.
Dear Earth 4 All, please check out these links and if anyone would like to have a live conversation with any of the characters named herein, that could easily happen. I have included below a range of notes and references for you to see the scope and depth of the work that has already been done with this model.
FYI, the founder of the model, Jim Rough, currently has a blog series running on Stanford's MAHB platform, Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere, 'A Holution to the Human Predicament.'
Best,
Corrina McFarlane,
Santa Cruz, California
To: Earth 4 All Life System change policies
System change policies
- "Open conversations with citizens via government-sponsored citizen assemblies on what economic systems change they want to see."
Dear kindred spirits in Earth 4 All Life,
I am writing to you from California, enrolled in MIT's U.Lab along with a handful of my work colleagues from different U.S. states and Europe (Austria and Britain). Your URL of course is a primary link included in U.Lab resources.
I read eagerly through all your envisioning and initiatives. I'm getting hung up on Citizens Assembly seeming to be front and center to Earth 4 All systems change policy. I am hoping you could have a conversation with social capital wizard, and former director of Austria, Vorarlberg's [state-sponsored] 'Office of Future-related Issues,' Manfred Hellrigl, or any number of other numinous characters in the field to get bounced into a whole 'nother level of nuance that is reshaping micro and macro policies and structures, at a pace we had only dreamed of prior to this quantum leap.
Manfred will tell you that Vorarlberg did run a Citizens Assembly but there was no way that they, as a small province with their budgetary constraints, could support the expense of such a structure. They kept up their earnest search, scouring the world for proven participatory democracy models and they found the citizens Wisdom Council Process [USA conceived, out of Center for Wise Democracy non profit in Port Townsend, WA]. Manfred and his colleagues orchestrated a pilot study with citizens Wisdom Council for their state government. He described the results as phenomenal, the model as "lean" and "nimble" and "elegant"... They ran the model as it is designed to be run, randomly selecting 12-16 citizens periodically, 'dynamically facilitating' them (Dynamic Facilitation IS the operating system of the wisdom council; elicits shifts and breakthroughs in thinking). The Wisdom Council is conducted over the course of two days, whereupon the Council delivers what is essentially a synthesis of where the Process took them and where they arrived together; their emergent resonant statement faithfully delivered to the broader public and elected officials, the Conversations ripple and bubble on. The Council disbands; done.
So far, this model has become a constitutional amendment in both Vorarlberg and Salzburg, with state-sponsored randomly selected citizens Wisdom Councils convened twice-yearly, and more if a citizen submits 1,000 signatures on another pressing subject (which means to date, in recent years, at least 3 per year, state-sponsored).
The stories about what they have addressed and resolutions they have distilled are truly heartening. But think; it began with an intention to address the widening gap between the government and the governed which was being exacerbated in part by rapid increased diversity in the region, with first Turkish and then Syrian refugees pouring over their Western border. The Wisdom Council was tasked with addressing this changing 'climate,' threatening to destabilize the region.. Then also, the governor of Vorarlberg had wanted to know,"How do we become the most child-friendly state in Austria?".... Or, a lakeside treasure of a resource to the Community that was almost sold off to developers; it was the randomly selected citizens Wisdom Council that was able to 'see" and say, Wait! We don't want the developers to have the lakeside, they should be at the back of our urban space! Hence the blueprint was flipped and the joy and beauty of the lake-shore preserved for the Community.
Elected officials in Vorarlberg have said citizens Wisdom Council is the "wind under their wings" and that the Council can say stuff they could never say as elected officials but that they can act on what is being proposed once it is clearly understood to be what the people want.
Manfred Hellrigl says, "Show me a model that yields such results, in 10 years I have not found it." And Austrian Sustainability director, Patrizia Nanz, has said, what they found in Vorarlberg was something they had not seen elsewhere; "an emerging culture of participation," and that the randomly selected citizens wisdom council, on refrain, was serving to raise the caliber of civic discourse in the region.
From the Wisdom Council exit interviews we know that people commonly feel forever changed by this experience of participatory democracy; "the most profound experience of democracy I have ever experienced." Also common, worth noting, many times people report, having received their random selection invite from the government, they are inclined to be thinking, why me, what do I have to offer, to share.., what do I know? And that, over and over, it is a spouse, or a sibling, or a friend, or their grown-up kid, who presses on that person; you should go, they want you for you, they want you because you are you, they want your voice in there because you have a unique perspective. And so they are persuaded or encouraged by a loved one for the best possible reason; the recognition that there is an innate wisdom in each of us, and that our world is in sore need of it.
Last to tell you, through Covid lockdown, many of us, participatory democracy practitioners in the field, were getting together online through those long months. In one such convergence a Voralberg wisdom council facilitator had said, of course I know we are lucky in our region, to be running wisdom councils two and three times a year but, honestly, we could be running them every two weeks, there is so much grist for the mill.
Dear Earth 4 All, please check out these links and if anyone would like to have a live conversation with any of the characters named herein, that could easily happen. I have included below a range of notes and references for you to see the scope and depth of the work that has already been done with this model.
FYI, the founder of the model, Jim Rough, currently has a blog series running on Stanford's MAHB platform, Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere, 'A Holution to the Human Predicament.'
Best,
Corrina McFarlane,
Santa Cruz, California