Posts Tagged: convening2

Cohort Stories November 30, 2011

Where there’s breath there is life, where there’s life there is hope.

By Joanne Smith

Greetings beloved community,

I was quite ambivalent about sharing my blog with the world. For me it is sharing, in real time, a piece of my personal growth and development that I am still figuring out. It is an intimate process of rewiring my internal dialogue that eventually will have me believing that, “I am enough,” “I can’t do it alone” and “others will show up because they have my back and because our struggles are intertwined.”
 
Our second convening at Rockwood Transformational Leadership was a gift of spaciousness to practice Rockwood’s Five Leadership practices of Purpose, Vision, Partnership, Resilience, and Performance.  My job at this training was to go through the full arch and stretch myself to try the suggested strategies. Contributing to the opening prayer was the spiritual lift I needed as I started on my journey. Roberto Vargas, Rockwood facilitator, led the prayer circle and invited me to read the south point prayer,
 
“Turning to the south, the direction of the children, youth, vitality and health, we give thanks for all the children and our health; and ask that we do our work considering them and the seven generations to come.”
 
This prayer served as a reminder that my personal and professional purpose is intertwined in the simplest and most complex ways. 

As a first generation Haitian American, I always saw my purpose tied to creating a foundation in America that would help improve the quality of life for future generations within my family.
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Cohort Stories November 22, 2011

Catchment for Convening 2

By Nancy Nguyen

Four major takeaways surface from the second convening: healing, articulation, transformation, and sustainability.

The second convening offered the cohort many opportunities to learn about each other individually. As I learned more about my cohort members, I began to realize that for each of us, our work was tied to a very, very personal place. Through our dialogues, I re-discovered the purpose behind my work: as Che Guevara put it, “the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” Confirming Che, I am coming to realize that at the core of my work is a love for my community. I also recognize that for myself, my family, and for my community—having materialized on this side of the world due first and foremost to US military intervention—there is a deep need for healing. As I am undergoing a process of my own healing, I am also trying to engender this process in the Vietnamese community at large. Decolonizing the mind and the spirit is part of the process of healing; and that community building and organizing Vietnamese people is turning out to be my method of choice.

Articulation, then, is vital: to be able to articulate the vision is to move with a compass in hand. As leaders and story-tellers in each of our own socio-political locations, the ability to tell the story of our vision(s) is critical. By the end of the second convening, and after a rigorous process of articulation and “pitching” to each other, I’ve settled on the following articulation of my purpose: My purpose is to engage in culture based organizing as a healing practice for myself and my community. However, the challenge for us as a cohort will be discovering how to articulate a vision that will-- as one cohort member put it –“moves a nation.”

The third lesson is how to understand my work, or my practice, as being an intrinsic part of personal transformation.

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