The Little Book of Transformative Community Conferencing

A Hopeful, Practical Approach to Dialogue

David Anderson Hooker

• Publisher: Good Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781680991673
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Alternative Dispute Resolution
• Index: Law

When conflicts become ingrained in communities, people lose hope. Dialogue is necessary but never sufficient, and often actions prove inadequate to produce substantial change. Even worse, chosen actions create more conflict because people have different lived experiences, priorities, and approaches to transformation. So what's the story?In The Little Book of Transformative Community Conferencing, David Anderson Hooker offers a hopeful, accessible approach to dialogue that: Integrates several practice approaches including restorative justice, peacebuilding, and arts
Creates welcoming, non-divisive spaces for dialogue
Names and maps complex conflicts, such as racial tensions, religious divisions, environmental issues, and community development as it narrates simple stories
Builds relationships and foundations for trust needed to support long-term community transformation projects
And results in the crafting of hopeful, future-oriented visions of community that can transform relationships, resource allocation, and structures in service of communities' preferred narratives. The Little Book Transformative Community Conferencing will prove valuable and timely to mediators, restorative justice practitioners, community organizers, as well as leaders of peacebuilding and change efforts. It presents an important, stand-alone process, an excellent addition to the study and practice of strategic peacebuilding, restorative justice, conflict transformation, trauma healing, and community organizing.This book recognizes the complexity of conflict, choosing long-term solutions over inadequate quick fixes. The Transformative Community Conferencing model emerges from the author's thirty years of practice in contexts as diverse as South Sudan; Mississippi; Greensboro, North Carolina; Oakland, California; and Nassau, Bahamas.

Chapter I:

Overview

Greensboro, North Carolina, is a mid-sized city in the southern United States that has been divided by race and class for much of the city’s history. At times, the divisions have violently reinforced the separation of different groups. It is also a city with a 100-year tradition of attempts at inclusion and economic advancement—a history that is overshadowed by distant and recent experiences of racialized and class-based violence. The city has been characterized by limited opportunities for effective dialogue on these difficult subjects. Conversely, a counterproductive commitment to civility results in polite conversation about things that matter little, further ostracizing people who want deeper dialogue.

In 2013, a group of Greensboro residents crossed boundaries of race, class, citizenship, and geography to participate in a form of conversation called a Transformative Community Conference (TCC). The results were very encouraging: They created a shared narrative of the community that accounted for the differential impacts that race, ethnicity, class, citizenship, gender, sexuality, and employment have on their day-to-day life experiences. They were able to acknowledge and specifically name the systems and relationship patterns that perpetuated inequities that created violence (i.e., the racial separation that defined the community created a sense of unknowing and insecurity, which resulted in increased police surveillance). They were also able to name the positive, albeit less well known, activities and relationships that pointed toward a more hopeful community (i.e., the occurrence of informal dialogue between some members of the police and undocumented residents that was hosted by a local civil society group). Ultimately, they envisioned a different city based on a broader and more inclusive story. The results of the Transformative Community Conference have become the basis for ongoing efforts to re-shape police/community relationships, explore new approaches to community economic development, and involve local government, businesses, and colleges in welcoming and embracing immigrants and non-citizen residents. The group calls itself the Greensboro Counter Stories Project. While there is much work to do, the TCC approach offers a framework to identify and address difficult issues in hopeful ways.

In Gainesville, Georgia, a group of older African American women formed the Newtown Florists’ Club to bring attention to the excess death and disease from industrial pollution, which affected both old and young living in their community. Their story was touching and important. They experienced several small and some large victories. Yet, for the first twenty years of the organization, their problem story, how people were being abused by local industry and disregarded by local government, was seen as fairly narrow and only of concern to a poor, black, and brown population in one small neighborhood. As a result they had not been able to rally other groups around their agenda. A conversation with several other community groups styled in the framing of a transformative community conference allowed them to spur the development of a multi-racial, cross-class coalition based on broader and more inclusive narratives. TCC helped their cause.

In Decatur, Georgia, a small-staffed but nationally focused non-profit organization (“Hometown”) was having internal challenges about how to live out their organizational values. The tension divided the staff, creating bitterness and personal animosity. The organization was in danger of losing some of its longest serving and most devoted staff. A strategic planning process that started with a transformative community conferencing framework allowed them to:

a) humanize each other: the people were not the problem;

b) identify the problems: rooted in an incoherent action agenda, and

c) establish trust: needed to make substantial structural changes.

Many communities and organizations that experience divisions are using restorative justice practices to address marginalization based on racial, ethnic, religious, citizenship, and sexual orientation categorizations. Communities often try everything from cross-racial hospitality and dialogue to cultural exploration, system-wide trainings in racialized power analysis, or recognizing implicit biases in an attempt to resolve conflict and violence. In Greensboro, they tried it all, going as far as to implement the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission inside the United States. While each of these efforts makes some contribution to inclusion, equity, and justice, the end seems the same: division, polarization, suspicion, resentment, frustration, and withdrawal. Some wonder: are we condemned to a life of division and inequity? Transformative Community Conferencing is a community engagement and change approach that relies on certain principles that are central to most restorative justice approaches such as inclusive processes and broad consideration of continuing harms. The TCC model extends beyond typical restorative practices by drawing on the power of narrative to connect individual experiences of present harm to systemic and structural sources of harm and to the narrative and societal discourse that gives meaning and sanction to those systems and structures.

What’s the Story?

The question of the story and the power of narrative are being recognized today in transforming conflict and violence as more significant than previously thought. People make meaning of their lives and structure their relationships and aspirations in the form of stories. Events and observations in people’s lives are given meaning by placing them inside of currently available stories or by making entirely new stories. The stories we tell most often conform to larger narrative patterns. All narratives have setting, plot, characters, conflicts, and themes. The process of framing all observations and descriptions inside a particular narrative determines what are appropriate behaviors, emotions, and expectations. The Transformative Community Conferencing model takes advantage of the impact of narratives and stories on the life of a community. TCC creates environments where people can come together across previous divides to address difficult issues, imagine, plan for, and work toward a community that has relationships, resource allocation, and create structures that align with their preferred narrative.

People make meaning of their lives in the form of stories.

Similar to its influence on individuals, narratives guide behavior and emotion in organizations by giving meaning to structures and relationships. In organizations, we relate to others inside the frame of narratives. We pass meaning on to new members of our organization through stories told from within the organizational narrative frame. Most organizations are structured around narratives that become invisible to the people living inside of them. As a result, many structural change processes and efforts to resolve individual episodes of conflict without first understanding the narratives that guide behavior are often ineffective. It may actually be the case that the ways that people know how to live their stories reinforce the very problems they are trying to resolve. The Transformative Community Conferencing process invites people to discover previously unconsidered narrative frames that may reinforce or reproduce the problematic conditions and to also identify the presence of events and make observations in different ways that align with their preferred narrative. If people live their lives by narratives, and if organizations and communities are formed through narrative, then it is my belief that they can be transformed with the intentional development of narratives that support a preferred experience; they can then determine the relationships, resources, and structures that would support the construction of that preferred reality. Transformative Community Conferencing is a practical approach that contributes to the construction of this preferred reality.

Transformation happens through the creation of preferred narratives.

About This Book

This is a Little Book about a big idea. Many communities that have community-wide traumagenic experiences will be structured in ways that have high degrees of systemic inequity. Race, religion, ethnicity, or class often divide people, creating a different quality of life for residents and visitors because of some aspect of their identity. Conflicts often become ingrained in communities, and divisions are maintained by systems whose rationales have long since been abandoned or discredited, and yet, because the divisions are so readily sustained and persistent, hopes for significant change have long since faded. The big idea of this book is this: Even these communities and organizations can be transformed. People, organizations, and communities that have lived with the by-products of societal and cultural trauma, even for several generations, can overcome their history and build equitable communities characterized by respectful and just relationships, inclusive and life-affirming institutions, and sustainable allocations of community resources.

In response to long-standing inequities and communal tension, especially when embedded in systems and structures, dialogue is almost always necessary but never sufficient to achieve transformation. People are often given opportunities for dialogue, yet no action results. Participants reflect back that when a dialogue is poorly framed it reinforces divisions, adding to a sense of resignation. Often a community’s actions prove inadequate to produce substantial change. Even worse, some action increases negative sense of conflict among people of good will who have different lived experiences, different priorities, and different approaches to transformation. The transformative community conferencing framework presented in this Little Book offers communities and organizations hope that there is another future possible.

The Little Book of Transformative Community Conferencing offers a practical approach to engaging communities in ways that address conflict and historical, trauma-based divisions.

Transformative Community Conferencing is innovative. In TCC there is acknowledgment of and attention to the need for trust and relationship building. TCC processes identify the power dynamics of structures and stories that shape the experiences of individuals in communities and organizations. It is important to be clear on this point: identifying the difference between TCCs and other processes is not presented to establish one process as superior. It is my contention that each of these processes is important, useful, and valuable; the identification of distinctions is to help the reader select the most appropriate process for the intended work.

Approach	Similar to TCC	Different than TCC
Restorative Justice	(1) Seeks to broadly identify harms. (2) Inclusive processes.	(1) No need to categorize people within victim/aggressor paradigm. (2) Not focused on accountability for perceived historic injustices, rather, maintains focus on establishing a preferred future and addressing present impediments.
Narrative Therapy and Narrative Mediation The Transformative Community Conferencing process draws heavily from the rhythm of narrative therapy1 and narrative mediation,2 with a few important distinctions.	(1) Shares the proposition that the people aren’t the problem, the problem is the problem. (2) Uses narrative practices and techniques including: (i) Externalizing conversations. (ii) Double listening. (ii) The construction of preferred narratives.	(1) Focuses on the performative aspect of the collective narratives.
Dialogue Processes	(1) Uses story models that describe lived experiences of participants.	(1) Listens to stories not to establish facts on the ground, but to understand the narrative frame that guide relationships. (2) Focuses on change process and not just increased understanding.
Appreciative Inquiry	(1) Uses curren...