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Michael's Review of the Second Planning Fellows Session |
Below you will find a correspondence that Michael Dimock, Executive
Director, sent to the ROC Stewardship Council immediately following the
second Planning Fellows Session.
June 25, 2007
Council Members,
I wanted to give you an overview of the second Planning Fellow’s
retreat including developments from Thursday, the final day. I am happy
to report that we have again achieved our goals: more trust, more
buy-in to both the process and to the work of the Vivid Picture
Project, and more collaboration. Plus, we began to integrate the
Council into the dialog: Rich Rominger, Larry
Yee, and Jim Cochran joined us with great effect.
The session opened with the Fellows reflecting on the May session and the period since that time. The reports from the Fellows were good. They generally seemed to have been energized and enthused by the launch, returning with intention to move further toward their goal. The readings we provided, Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science and Fine’s Momentum, were well received with a couple of exceptions. The Fellows then broke into stakeholder groups and spent the afternoon diagramming the food system in its current state. The diversity of views was striking.
By Tuesday night, when we gathered at Craig McNamara’s for a meal and a dialog with him, the group had reached a level of honesty that allowed them to share their views openly. Craig is the founder of the Center for Land Based Learning (our meeting site), a member of the State Board of Food & Agriculture, and an organic farmer. He shared his journey from being a Stanford college student and the son of Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense during Vietnam, to becoming a farmer and a highly respected agricultural leader in California. Craig’s story sparked a frank dialog about government and its role as regulator.
Wednesday was spent working on deeper understanding of each stakeholder group’s concept of what would improve the food system. It was an exercise to diagnose the core problems and potential solutions. It proved difficult for some and easier for others. For those who made progress, it emerged from successful cross identification of interests. Those who struggled described it as hitting the wall with a “thud” resulting from an inability to find a place of collaboration or shared understanding of the key need within the system.
The mixed results were not a bad thing. It set us up well for the evening dialog with three guests: ROC Stewardship Council members Larry Yee and Jim Cochran, and Tom Tomich, the Director of UC’s Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Program. Larry and Jim spoke of the their hopes for the group and its work. Two Fellows made important statements. The first was a request for the Fellows to refocus on ROC’s New Mainstream Report (NMS), as well as the supporting white papers. The second was a call for ROC to be more proactive, which was the invitation that the ROC Coordinating Team hoped might appear. Tom ended the evening stating that he felt we were doing very well, and that we are on track, given the complexity of issues and diversity of views.
Thursday morning, the ROC team agreed that I should open with a clear statement of what we would like to see from the Fellows, which I communicated as a series of four questions:
1) Who among the Fellows would be willing to work on a synthesis of their emerging ideas from the two previous days of work with the recommendations within the New Mainstream Report?
2) Who among them would be willing to develop a recommendation for what the ROC Fellows should become in the years ahead?
3) Who among them would be willing to continue to collaborate with us after July?
4) Who among them would be willing to work in between sessions 2 and 3?
This call to action unleashed a transformative discussion that lasted ninety minutes and resulted in a solid commitment to begin to align with the New Mainstream findings. We then turned to an “open space” group process format to dig deeper. This is the same processed used at the Kellogg Food & Society Conference last April. It allows a group to self-organize so that maximum buy-in can be achieved. Six topics emerged that people engaged for the balance of the session:
1) How to engage mainstream agriculture in the NMS work?
2) Integrating health into the new food system
3) Where is the buy-in to the NMS and where does it integrate with their own proscriptions for improving the system (which emerged Wednesday)
4) Engaging large-scale consumers in sustainable procurement
5) Defining the New Urban-Rural Partnership
6) ROC Fellowship 2.0
We are now in the real “ground-truthing” phase that we had hoped would occur. The Fellows, of their own volition, are taking responsibility for engaging the NMS findings. We are very happy this has transpired organically.
As with May, the ROC Coordinating Team members Joseph McIntyre, Lindsey Roark, Jon Ramer, and Nicole Mason worked incredibly hard and well to make the event a success. Nicole and I were happy that Daniel Kramer, ROC's newest staff member, joined us just a few days after he was hired and his assistance during the session proved invaluable.
So the second ROC Planning Fellows session went about as well as we could have hoped. We have a more trusting group, which is beginning to engage in substantial collaborative thinking that aligns with the huge investment ROC has made in the NMS vision. They are now clarifying the priority actions that they feel will prove most effective, and ROC has their commitment to work with us into the future.
For me it is simple and concrete. We are now concretely forming the base of an effective Leadership Network that will join the Council and the Coordinating Team to pursue our collective mission and thus achieve our common vision. Stay tuned for act three!
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