Tag Archives: Winds & Waves

Back to the Future with the ICA Global Archives Project

This article was written for ICAI Winds and Waves, August 2014 issue.

ICAI Winds and Waves, August 2014Welcome to this latest issue of Winds & Waves, the online magazine of ICA International.

The theme of this issue is ‘Back to the Future’, and it features a series of articles related to the work of ICA’s Global Archives Project (GAP). The contents are overviewed by W&W editors John Miesen and Dharmalingam Vinasithamby on page 2, and by GAP guest editor Gordon Harper on page 4.

ICA celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2012. Those 50 years of worldwide engagement in human development and social change have generated an extraordinary wealth of practical insight, models and methods, of which ToP (Technology of Participation) facilitation methods are but the best known and most widely applied today. We are fortunate indeed, therefore, that a small but tireless team of long-term volunteers has been prepared to work so hard for so long to make more of the wisdom of ICA’s global archives available and of practical relevance to the social pioneers of today and tomorrow.

Much of the material of the archives was developed and refined in the annual ICA Global Research Assemblies that for 20 years until the mid-1980s brought as many as 500 practitioners together from around the world, for as long as a month, to share, learn and create together. ICAI has continued this tradition to an extent, by means of its quadrennial Global Conferences on Human Development since 1984 – most recently in Kathmandu in 2012. The upcoming Virtual Global Research Assembly in September (page 39) is a particularly important and exciting initiative, as well as an audacious one, for seeking to translate the participatory process of research and development as well as the content of the global archives into the 21st century and the virtual age.

If you have been involved with ICA and its work of human development during the past 50 years, or if you plan to be involved during the next 50, I urge you to get in touch and get involved with the project and with the research assembly. You will find plenty of material in this issue to whet your appetite. Enjoy!

ICAI General Assembly facilitates global connectedness and collaboration

This article was written for ICAI Winds and Waves, August 2014 issue.

ICAI global networkThe ICAI General Assembly is the governing body of ICA International, a global network of non-profit organisations advancing human development worldwide.  It comprises representatives of ICA locations in over 40 countries, including at present 22 voting (statutory) member organisations – see our global network (above).  Recently the General Assembly has met online once a year, most recently in December 2013 (see ICAI online regional gatherings and General Assembly), and previously face-to-face every other year. This year we have begun to meet more often, to reflect a growing appetite and a growing technical capacity for online connectedness and collaboration among ICAs globally. We have also introduced some new innovations in how we meet, in order to be more inclusive of our entire network.

Twelve ICAs were represented by 22 participants in the latest 26 June online General Assembly meeting, and 18 of the 22 statutory ICAs participated in the online voting on the three resolutions. The three resolutions were all approved without opposition.

The first resolution was to approve criteria to direct the ICAI Board in disbursing funds drawn from members’ dues to provide financial support for regional meetings and other member initiatives for peer-to-peer support and collaboration among the global network. Already the Board has approved support for Spanish language training in online ToP facilitation for 20 staff and volunteers of several Latin American ICAs and ICA Spain. The Board is now inviting member ICAs to submit brief proposals for support for other new initiatives.

The second resolution was to clarify criteria for non-voting (associate) membership of ICAI. This is to enable and encourage organisations and groups who share ICA’s mission and values to formally join the ICAI global community, and so to join existing members in peer-to-peer support and collaboration at the global level. Associate members must be a registered organisation in their country or a constituted group with at least five members, and they must operate out of values in alignment with ICA’s and participate in peer-to-peer support and collaboration for the international work of ICA. The Board is now inviting new nominations for associate membership, from existing members or from prospective new associate members themselves.

The third resolution was for the Board to appoint an ICAI working group on global conferences. The last (8th) quadrennial ICAI Global Conference on Human Development was held in Nepal in 2012 – see ICAI Revisited and ‘Growing a New Sense of Leadership’ in Nepal. The new working group is to support, receive and review proposals from ICAs to host an ICAI Global Conference or conferences in 2016, and to consult with the global network in order to submit a 2016 Global Conference proposal for approval at the December 2014 General Assembly. The group is to comprise around 6-9 people representing all continents, diverse in terms of language, age and gender, and with considerable first-hand experience of managing previous ICAI Global Conferences and other similar events.  The Board is now inviting nominations for individuals to join the group and begin its work.

Two additional items were included for discussion in the agenda of the General Assembly meeting. The ICAI working group on global ToP facilitation (Technology of Participation) policy, convened following a decision of the General Assembly last December, presented its working draft for feedback and invited suggestions for wider consultation to further build global consensus during coming months.  Members of the ICA USA Living Archives team presented plans for an online Global Research Assembly in September, and invited feedback to help to ensure that the Assembly and the online collections that are in development will be as relevant and accessible as possible to ICAs worldwide.

The General Assembly meeting was held twice, at 10am & 5pm UK time for different time zones, and global times were announced using www.timeanddate.com. The meetings were held using the ToP Adobe Connect platform, a powerful tool with which ICAI members are increasingly familiar and adept. This allowed multiples layouts for sharing of video and various documents, with participation by voice, text chat and polling. A poll within the meeting was used to prioritise agenda items for discussion time.

Voting was conducted this time by asynchronous online poll on surveymonkey over 10 days following the meeting, in order to maximise the participation of all voting members. Surveymonkey was also used in advance of the meeting, in addition to email, to consult and build consensus among those who might not be able to participate otherwise.  In a survey on global conferencing in advance of the meeting, 44 responses were received from 31 ICA locations worldwide.

For further details of the ICAI General Assembly and any of the issues addressed, please contact me or another ICAI Board member.

ICA International Board update, May 2014

Global Buzz
This post was first published in ICAI’s monthly bulletin the Global Buzz.

At the ICAI Board’s April meeting the focus was on detailed planning and assignments for implementation of the 2014 Business Plan finalised in March and circulated then.  The Board offered it’s support to the regional Vice Presidents as they work to facilitate networking among members within their regions over the coming months.  Krishna is liaising with members in Asia Pacific to convene a regional working group to facilitate peer-to-peer support and collaboration in that region, Isabel is working with members in the Americas to organise online facilitation training in Spanish and Gerald is connecting with African ICAs by phone and skype. Martin is also working with ICA Spain to confirm the dates and location for this year’s face-to-face ICA European Interchange, to be held late October or early November in Andalucia.  We agreed that ICAI would make a token contribution toward the rent of the new ICA offices in Toronto, from where our Canadian colleages continue to maintain ICAI’s legal status and financial accounts, and we have renewed ICAI’s membership of the World Alliance for Citizen Participation CIVICUS.

Building on conversations with members at last year’s online regional gatherings, Martin has now drafted criteria for non-voting Associate membership of ICAI and for ICAI financial support of member’s peer-to-peer initiatives.  These will be reviewed by the Board in May before being circulated to the membership for further feedback and revisions, in order that they may be voted on at the online General Assembly in June.  Also building on last year’s regional gatherings in preparation for the June GA, Staci is drafting an online survey by which to consult members on possible approaches to convening a face-to-face ICAI global conference in 2016.  The annual accounts are ready for Board approval in May, and we continue to monitor progress on ICAI’s ‘Continuance’ as a non-profit in Canada and on release of the legacy that has been left to ICAI.  Invoices have been circulated and members are renewing their dues for 2014.

The ICAI working group on global ToP (Technology of Participation) policy has had several online meetings involving a dozen or more colleagues from many ICAs in all continents, and is considering what it may circulate more widely for consultation in advance of the global online gatherings and GA in June. The Winds and Waves team published another fantastic issue of ICAI’s flagship magazine, Networking, and are about to meet to make advance plans for the next issue.

ICAI Winds and Waves – Networking

ICAI Winds and Waves, April 2014 - coverThis article was written for ICAI Winds and Waves, April 2014.

Welcome to this latest issue of Winds & Waves, the online magazine of ICA International.

While many international NGOs have shifted from a more centralised to a more networked approach to their operations in recent years, ICA has operated globally as a network of autonomous and independent national NGOs for over half of its 50 years. Many member ICAs themselves operate as networks, both nationally and internationally, and many individuals around the world remain connected and involved with ICA in various ways long after they have moved on from a formal role within an ICA organisation. Such loose and diverse structures with such ‘leaky boundaries’ can be challenging in some respects, not least in terms of governance. However, they can also enable greater local relevance, responsiveness and self-reliance in conjunction with greater global connectedness, learning and mutual support. Networking is one of the ways by which these advantages can be realised, and so supporting networking among ICAs and ICA colleagues is central to the role of ICA International and networking makes a fitting theme for this issue.

Within these pages you will find stories and reports from individual ICA colleagues and from national ICAs, on their work of research, training and demonstration to advance human development worldwide. Networking and a networked approach feature strongly in many of them.

Terry Bergdall in Chicago reports on the Sustainability Leaders Network of ICA USA’s Accelerate 77 programme, empowering community leaders from across the city by supporting them to ‘connect, align and produce’ together. Lorraine Margherita in Paris reflects on the role that networking has played for her as she has established herself as a professional facilitator within the emerging ICA network there. Larry Philbrook in Taipei reveals the findings of a recent research initiative conducted through ICA networks, online and face to face. Gerald Gomani in Harare reports on ICA Zimbabwe’s work helping communities fight HIV/AIDS – this work has been supported over many years by ICAI network partners in the USA, Canada and the UK among others, and networks people living with HIV with each other and with local health and social service resources. Charles Jago in Australia writes of an online networked approach to holding government and politicians accountable by ‘asking real questions’. Ishu Subha in Kathmandu writes of the network power of a local women’s group that grew to a leading financial institution. Teresa Sosa in Caracas writes of how principles and values she has learned from ICA have enabled her to gain strength from networks to strive re-create a country in times in chaos.

The global network of ICA International now comprises member ICAs and related groups and organisations in 40 countries worldwide. We welcomed ICA Ukraine as our newest statutory member at our ICAI online General Assembly in December. I have been privileged these last few weeks to serve as a mentor to one of ICA Ukraine’s ToP facilitation trainers, Natasha Karpova, and to learn something of how she and ICA are working to network diverse actors in Ukraine, another country in a time of some chaos, to re-envisage and rebuild their country’s future together.  It was a privilege also (and fun!) to help to network ICA Ukraine’s facilitators with Russian facilitators attending the Moscow Facilitators conference this month, by exchanging real-time Facebook updates between my post-conference ToP strategic planning course in Moscow and Natasha’s simultaneous ToP strategic planning course in Lviv.

Moscow facilitators study the ToP Participatory Strategic Planning by planning ‘What can we do over the next 3 years to promote a culture of participation in our organisations?’

Moscow facilitators learned the ToP Participatory Strategic Planning process this month by planning ‘What can we do over the next 3 years to promote a culture of participation in our organisations?’

Meanwhile ICA Ukraine’s initiative connecting mentor ToP facilitators from ICA’s global network with mentees in Ukraine prompted Larry Philbrook of ICA Taiwan to adapt and apply the model globally, attracting so far 25 mentors and 36 mentees – just the sort of peer-to-peer initiative within the ICA network that ICAI seeks to support.

The ICAI Board updated its Business Plan for 2014 in the last month, in light of the experience of 2013 and discussions and decisions at the December General Assembly, and supporting peer-to-peer networking for mutual support and collaboration remains at the heart of our approach. Whatever the extent and nature of your relationship to ICA or ICAI, if you share our collective concern with ‘the human factor in world development’ then please join in networking with us.

Please share this issue of Winds & Waves and consider contributing to the next, please connect and share with us online via ICAI on Facebook and @ICAI on twitter, and please connect directly with whichever national ICA of the ICAI global network is closest to you in your geography or in your passion.

Enjoy this issue!

ICAI online regional gatherings and General Assembly

Winds and Waves December 2013These three articles were first published in the ICA International magazine Winds and Waves, December 2013.

Welcome to another great issue of Winds & Waves, the online magazine of ICA International. The theme of this issue is Imaginal Education, a whole-person approach to life and learning that has been at the core of ICA’s work in human development and participatory social change since it began some 50 years ago.

The 2012 book Changing Lives Changing Societies, republished by ICA International this year, quotes Gail West of ICA Taiwan:

“Imaginal learning is what ICA has always been about. Enabling the shifting of one’s images or internal pictures of ‘what is’ is what directs my beliefs and behaviour. As a facilitator or trainer, or any person supporting another’s development, my understanding is that learning requires image shift. In order for that to happen, a person needs to change the messages that one pays attention to. No change in learning, no change in behaviour.”

This important link between self-image and personal behaviour remains core to ICA’s approach to ToP facilitation and human development worldwide, as illustrated by the many rich and varied stories from ICA colleagues included that book.  It has also been at the heart of the of global, online community of practice on Reshaping Education for the 21st Century that grew out of the 8th ICAI Global Conference  on Human Development hosted last year by ICA Nepal in Kathmandu.

This issue draws on the work of that community of practice and others to share something of what works, and some of the challenges and the rewards, of applying such an Imaginal Learning approach in the field of education and more broadly.  Marge Philbrook of ICA USA writes of the ICA Archives project in Chicago, and its efforts to make these and other ICA models and tools from the archive more available online to a generation. Svitlana Salamatova and her colleagues of ICA Ukraine, in a country and a city again currently in the midst of profound social change, write of their use of online communication tools for connecting, learning and empowering of communities. Nelson Stover and Shankar Jadhav share insights from ICAI India’s ‘Global classroom in a village school’, and Isabel de la Maza writes of changing self-images in Chile. Mane Arratia writes of ICA Spain’s facilitation role in the global conferences of Initiatives of Change in Caux, Switzerland, and Amani Jensen-Bentley of Australia writes on ‘a teen’s perspective on a rural Aussie initiative aimed at celebrating multiculturalism’.

As I write, ICA International has just completed its third series of online regional gatherings this year, to connect ICAs and ICA colleagues and facilitate peer-to-peer learning and collaboration worldwide, and we are poised for our online General Assembly in a couple of days’ time.  Nineteen ICAs participated and shared reports for the regional gatherings, and also in this issue you will find an overview of the gatherings and excerpts from some of those reports.

ICAs Name of OrganizationYou will also find a scattering of graphs, maps and word clouds, illustrating both the diversity and the commonalities of our global ICA community. These are drawn from the 37 responses to this year’s new ICAI global membership survey that we have received from ICA locations around the world. We are grateful to all those who took the time and effort to respond.

I hope you will agree that all this makes for a stimulating and inspiring read. Please let us know what you think, and connect and learn with each other online, by posting your thoughts on our facebook page.

ICA International online regional gatherings facilitate peer to peer support and collaboration

ICAs Values StatementThe Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) is a global community of non-profit organisations advancing human development worldwide. The role of ICA International is to facilitate peer-to-peer interchange, learning and mutual support across the network. ICA International also maintains consultative status on behalf of the membership with UN ECOSOC, UNESCO, UNICEF, WHO & FAO.

With member organisations and related organisations and groups in over 40 countries worldwide, online gatherings play a key role in facilitating peer to peer support and collaboration among ICAs and ICA colleagues, within and across regions.  ICAI currently convenes online regional gatherings three times per year, for three regional time zone groups – Asia/Pacific, the Americas, and Europe/MENA/Africa.

ICAs Mission StatementThese regional gatherings are open to all ICA members, staff and volunteers worldwide, and people are welcome to attend another region’s gathering if they cannot attend their own.  The third series of gatherings for 2013 were held December 9-11, and attracted 23 people from 19 countries.

The aims of the gatherings are to connect ICAs and ICA colleagues with each other, and help to build & strengthen relationships between them; to share information and facilitate peer-to-peer support and collaboration among ICAs and ICA colleagues; and to hold ICAI accountable to its members, and seek input & support to strengthen our global network and advance our global mission.

The agenda every time includes introductions and questions & discussion on reports shared by ICAs and ICAI. Agenda items particular to the December gatherings, in preparation for the following online General Assembly, included criteria for ICAI financial support to member initiatives, a proposed procedure for developing global policy for ICA, our pattern of face-to-face global conferences, and categories of ICAI membership. A full transcript of the gatherings has been circulated, including links to the meeting papers and online recordings of the three 90-minute meetings – please ask if you’d like a copy.

ICAs Current ProgrammesIf you have not been able to join the online gatherings this year, please do let me or another ICAI Board member know if there is anything that we can do to make these online regional gatherings more relevant and accessible to you next year.  Please also let us know what alternative approaches to remote networking might work better for you, whether synchronous (such as online meetings and twitter chats) or asynchronous (such as email, facebook and linkedin).

ICAI December 2013 General Assembly

The ICAI General Assembly meets normally once per year. Its aims are to take ICAI membership decisions, including approval of Associate & Statutory memberships; to take ICAI strategy & policy decisions, to direct the work of the Board and to guide & support the peer-to-peer collaboration among ICAs; and to elect the ICAI Board and hold it accountable to the membership, including by receipt of an annual audited finance report.

The 2013 GA was held online on December 16, using Adobe Connect. Nineteen people from 12 ICAs participated, including voting representatives from 10 of 19 voting statutory members. We were grateful for technical support for the meeting from ICA:UK Associate and virtual facilitator Orla Cronin.

ICAs Major funders and partnersSeven ICAs were accepted as new or renewed statutory members, bringing the total to 19. A further 11 ICAs were accepted subject to payment of dues and/or formal request. It was decided to change the term of membership from the January-December calendar year to the 12-month period following receipt of dues.  The GA received the audited financial statements for 2012, and Timothy Wright in Canada was re-appointed to audit ICAI’s Financial Statements again for 2014. The seven serving members of the ICAI Board were re-elected as Directors. A new procedure for development of global policy was approved, and a number of ICAs agreed to propose a working group to use the procedure to develop a new global policy for ToP facilitation and training.

In addition to this decision-making, feedback was invited on the Board’s plan to develop its work plan for 2014 on the basis of the 2013-14 strategy approved by the GA in 2013, and no objections were raised.  Further discussion was had on the question of whether to call a face-to-face General Assembly for 2014 and/or a Global Conference for 2016, although it was decided not to hold a vote due to insufficiently inclusive and in-depth discussion among members prior to the meeting. The meeting was notified of the new legal requirement to obtain a ‘continuance’ in order maintain ICAI’s registration as a non-profit in Canada. A special General Assembly will be called for February 2014 to amend the Bylaws for that purpose.

A full report is available on request, with a link to the full online recording of the 90 minute meeting. Feedback from those participating included: “Efficient and effective”, “Very smooth and good timing”, “It was excellent. Thanks for all who made it possible”, “Awesome organization! Thank you for such professionalism!” and “Appreciate clarity, preparation from area meetings and moving well”. Isabel de la Maza of ICA Chile was unable to attend but watched the recording and wrote:: “It was a great meeting!!!!, Thanks for a very professional virtual facilitation job. Wow!!! It is incredible what technology is permitting in these days”.

ICAs collaborative projects, funding relationships, etcA brief online survey has been circulated by email to 99 representatives of 42 ICA locations worldwide to seek further feedback, particularly from those who did not participate, to help the Board make future online gatherings and GAs more inclusive and more effective.