This weekend was more infused with art and music than any other this year, and I’m hoping that this is the sign of a wonderful new trend.

Friday night: Heard the Chuck Boogie Trio at the Soul Sessions, Grand Star Jazz Club in Chinatown.  Very, very nice.

Saturday afternoon: Wandered into the Folk Music Center in Claremont (photo right) after a friend’s graduation ceremony, a fabulous place, that lets you try out all their musical wares.  And people do.  The place is a friendly happy cacophony.  It has history too –  the store now has official status as a museum.  It was started by Ben Harper‘s grandparents in 1958.  Harper grew up in the place and you can easily see how it must have contributed to developing the soul of a musician.

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Democracy is basically a system that lets people make decisions together.

The key to making that happen, besides lots and lots of meetings, is lots and lots of preparation.

The pay-off is: well-informed decision-makers, more effective meetings, and discussions that allow everyone to participate in the conversation.

Making informed decisions together is the ultimate Do-It-Together.

This post offers the first three in a series of faciltators’ tools designed to help you get this done.

SPEED DATE, SMALL GROUP AGREEMENTS, and GALLERY WALL

There are 24 people in our Community Scholars class at UCLA.  Some are students, some are faculty or staff, and some are community leaders and artists.

The purpose of the class is to produce popular education material related to “Green Jobs.”  We spent our four weeks in lectures and discussion with experts about aspects of the problem.  Now we need to break into working teams that will produce popular education products over the next fifteen weeks.  Big commitment.  High stakes for the participants.

To get those decisions started, last week we we had a three hour retreat where we engaged in the following exercises in sequence:

• Speed Date




• Small Group Analysis




• Gallery Wall
  

Instructions for these exercises are provided below, with their purpose and goal,  necessary preparation and materials, and links and images to our experience.  Read More…

Gay rights issues, particularly same-sex marriage, has been roiling within the African American community in Southern California. This has come to a head around the Reverend Eric Lee, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles. He’s come under pressure from his national board for calling for the repeal of Proposition 8. Indeed, Lee, who has also been a supporter of organized labor causes such as advocating for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, was active last fall on speaking against the proposition when it was on the state ballot during the presidential race.

Initially there was much ballyhooing after the election that black votes were responsible for Prop.8 passing. There were claims based on exit polling that blacks had voted 70% to 30% for its passage. These numbers engendered a lot of finger pointing and various OpEds and commentaries all over the map decrying the gay-black split, the historic group denial long attributed to the black community not acknowledging its own LGBT folks and on and on. Calmer heads prevailed and further analysis of the data showed those numbers were a tad off. African Americans who came to the polls last fall, motivated in no small part by Barack Obama being at the top of the ticket, did vote a clear majority, 58%, for Prop. 8’s passage. This is higher than the overall 52% among all voters. Not great, but not insurmountable.