Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Re: Opening Ritual

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

In my work training community facilitators I advise to ALWAYS have an
opening activity, a spirit lifting, fun game or something which sparks
peoples enthusiasm, gets them  doing something together, and creates a
positive uplift. In fact, for a "difficult" meeting I have found having a
good opening makes the environment much more positive and productive. A good
way to accumulate a bunch of ideas is to search the internet using the
keyword, ICEBREAKER. There is a game titled, Icebreaker which has a bunch of
great ideas for fun sharing topics.

My community has been using openers at meetings for the past 12 years. From
that experience I will tell you that this motivates some people to come
early, because they know they will miss the fun part of the meeting if they
are late. Those few that don't care for such things come 15 minutes late and
miss them. Our last opener was a round robin question: What keeps you here.

A good opener takes about 15-20 minutes and connects and makes people feel
they belong. It can also be instructional as well, and you can use this
space for just in time instructional work, for example, a quick triad
(groups of three) practice on the parts of NVC, or some other process you
want to reinforce.

One of the most memorable openers I can recall was when the facilitator was
a bit late for a tense meeting where we  had to decide something that was
conflicted.  He came running into the commonhouse, with a shovel, with dirt
on his clothing, and a burnt and dirty piece of rolled up parchment. He
proceeded to call the meeting to order then breathlessly told everyone he
had been digging in his backyard and come across a very important artifact.
We had no idea what he  had, he unrolled the parchment and said  that it
must have been very old, and that it came from Sir Mick. Then he started to
read....You can't always get what you want, you can't always get what you
want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need. At that moment, the
stereo came blasting on to that tune (A classic Rolling Stones song) and we
all began spontaneously dancing.  Mind you, this was right before some very
tense and important discussion (the nature of which I can't recall) and it
got everybody in such a compromising mood that whatever it  was we had a
great  discussion, often referring to the "sacred words". These words hung
in the commonhouse for the rest of the year and reminded us about getting
what we need and what we want are sometimes different things.

I used to tell this story as an example to my facilitation students, to
illustrate that the facilitators role is to help set the mood and the
environment to be as productive and fun as possible. If you leave off the
fun, then why would people want to come? When meetings are fun people come,
and even look forward to them. When meetings are tense, and tedious, people
find other things to do. This matches my experiences, communities where
facilitators made the meetings interesting, had  high attendance.


Rob Sandelin
Sky Valley Environments  <http://www.nonprofitpages.com/nica/SVE.htm>
Field skills training for student naturalists
Floriferous [at] msn.com


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