Ken Gass Community Building Award

I was honored to be recognized at the Ken Gass Community Building Awards dinner December 7th.

Truly it was splendid to have been included in that evening's array of many contemporary community servants. I was one among 17 others to receive this sweet expression of love by the Whatcom Family and Community Network. Thanks Geof, Kathy and Amy for this!

Here is how Geof Morgan of WFCN introduced me:

I have known Jeff for over 15 years. Every time I see Jeff, he is excited about something. He has always shown a heart for community. He has a genuine interest and curiosity in other’s gifts and believes to his core in the strengths and leadership of residents to guide their neighborhood’s future. We met when working together with the residents in the Roosevelt neighborhood in 1996, he was driven from his faith-based belief in service and in the residents of a neighborhood that were often seen as the problem or the “client.” Jeff has become a leader in our community for training in John McKnight’s model of asset-based community development and his home cooked lunches at his trainings model simplicity, welcome, and what my friend, Joe Erpenbeck, calls “radical hospitality.” He is a founding board member for the Whatcom Dream, an organization that has focused on building people’s ability to focus their personal assets to build financial assets in order to stabilize their lives and achieve their dreams. His current focus is partnering with residents and community leaders to support families at Regency Park Apartments. John Gardner wrote, “In the conventional mode, people want to know whether the followers believe in the leader; a more searching question is whether the leader believes in the followers.” Jeff is an example of how contagious belief is. Jeff’s belief in the community lifts up our belief in ourselves. Jeff believes in us and we are all better for it.

Thank you Geof!

World Cafe' Training

I had a great opportunity to receive excellent training in the art of World Cafe'. Thanks to the Whatcom Family and Community Network who hosted this training. More description of this GREAT group discussion format...is just below the pictures.


























































What is ‘the World Café’?

The World Café is an intentional way to create a living network of conversations around questions that matter. It is a methodology that enables (12 to 1,200!) people to think together and intentionally create new, shared meaning and develop collective insight into issues they see as important. Although people have been meeting in ways that share the same spirit of the World Café for centuries, the actual methodology was ‘discovered’ and formalised by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs in 1995. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been meeting in World Café style across the world, in order to explore a wide range of social, educational, political, economic and cultural issues. The purpose of this bulletin is to offer an overview of the approach, supported with a practical example of how it has been used to engage staff and students in a joint enquiry.

The World Café approach makes use of the café metaphor quite literally. The room is actually set up like a café, with people sitting in groups of four or five at different tables, for deeply participative, high-quality conversations. They are guided to move to new tables as part of a series of conversational rounds focusing on questions that matter to them. With each move, a table host remains behind, sharing the essence of his/her table’s conversation. The others separate and move to new tables to consider a new question and connect to what other tables have talked about – in this way networking and cross-pollinating the conversations. The café format, with its ability to weave and further build insights, new ideas or new questions, enables collective intelligence to evolve within a group. The approach is based on a core assumption that the knowledge and wisdom that we need is already present and accessible. Working with the World Café, we can bring out the collective wisdom of the group – greater than the sum of its individual parts – and channel it towards positive change.

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