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

[Casey Morrigan (cjmorr]

It's great to think that Rob remembers the opener and not the deep tense
issue that got discussed.

Casey Morrigan
Two Acre Wood, Sebastopol, California

Where we are planning our second annual February song and poetry fest on the
theme of LOVE. Maybe I'll get to practice that sappy swing tune (by Irving
Berlin, of course) with my singing partner tonite.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org
> [mailto:cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org]On Behalf Of Rob Sandelin
> Sent: Friday, February 07, 2003 4:57 PM
> To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
> Subject: RE: [C-L]_Re: Opening Ritual
>
>
>
> 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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