Article Written by Carl Ewing
Transformative Leadership continues to influence the staff, steering committees, and membership of DACU, as well as the general public.
Doña Ana Communities United, an NGO in Las Cruces, New Mexico, focuses on health equity and a Time Bank, as well as supporting other NGO’s in the area that work with people with mental or physical disabilities, such as Beloved Community. They also have a program financed by the City during this pandemic called “Las Cruces Contigo” that communicates with people in the community at least once or twice a week to ensure that they do not feel isolated or alone.
Early in 2020, my wife and I joined the Time Bank sponsored by Doña Ana Communities United (DACU). The Time Bank is designed for people to share their skills and abilities with the Time Bank membership. If one member needs a service, another member may respond and carry out the service. That person is credited for the time spent in the service. This exchange of services is not remunerated.
During the orientation of the Time Bank that we attended, one question asked was what skills or abilities we could offer the other members. Among the things that I had to offer was the facilitation of a workshop on Transformative Leadership. I had taken both the Moral Leadership workshop and the facilitation workshop from Eloy Anello some twenty years ago.
A few weeks went by, and I received an email from the Director of DACU, asking if I would be willing to facilitate a workshop for the staff. Of course, I immediately said “Yes.” After some time, we began the first workshop with the Director and staff. Even though the staff completed the workshop some months ago, I still attend a portion of their weekly meetings to discuss the progress with Transformative Leadership.
When we were studying the last few chapters of the book with the staff, we began discussing our “next steps” with Transformative Leadership. The idea that resulted from our consultations was to offer the workshop to the members of the two steering committees and, if there was room, to other agencies with which DACU has a relationship, plus some people from the general public.
In November, we began two workshops. We sent out invitations and consulted with those who wanted to participate about time frames and availability. We decided to have two sessions, one on Thursday afternoons for 1 1/2 hours for ten weeks and another session on Saturday mornings for 3 hours during five weeks. Before each session the participants read the assigned pages of the book, and in the call we discuss what they have learned and how to apply it. There are 21 people currently involved. DACU and I are now consulting about holding another workshop a bit later in Spanish as there is a large Spanish-speaking population here.
In the first workshop with the staff of DACU, we took our time studying the book and were able to go into greater depth. As a result, I feel that any of the staff and the Director are now capable of facilitating a workshop. In the current workshops, one of the staff members assists me with the Thursday group, and the Director assists me with the Saturday group. This has given them experience in the process of facilitation.
The experience has been and continues to be very enriching. We have discovered that the reflection on the material presented in the book in light of the community’s needs demonstrates that there is a thirst for meaning and more depth to life. The participants are all very open to the ideas presented in the book, and together we are working on ways of taking what we learn into the realm of action.
As we go through the book together, we have formed “creative groups” with two or three people in each group. The groups are to find some way of expressing what they are learning in action. We wanted to make sure that the workshops do not just lead to discovering and learning but also produce some action based on the principles studied.
Another initiative that we will start soon is forming a “learning community.” The learning community will be composed of those who have taken the workshop and wish to participate in an on-going dialogue to deepen their understanding of the capabilities. We are finding that even the intensive 5-week workshop or the 10-week workshop do not permit going very deeply into the subjects in the book due to time constraints, which led to the decision to begin the learning community.
We are on a learning journey with this program. We hope to extend workshops to an ever-widening group of community members to contribute to local community-building