This week the 2016’s really focused on where our class is going and what we are moving towards. Representatives from our class recently had a discussion with one of our partners, Hope for Honduran Children, to develop some feasible initiatives for us to start working on. She supported our idea of a scholarship fund for some of the boys living in her transition home and gave suggestions of funding the transportation of school supplies or donations of laptops and internet access. Our class was really excited about all of these ideas and already have a committee working to decide which of these initiatives would be the most feasible and, ultimately, the most beneficial to the boys in Honduras.

 

Discussions with our partner also led to us asking a very important question: if given the opportunity to go to Honduras during winter term 2016, should we go? We discussed what type of aid we want to be doing and who would really be benefitting from our going down there. If we go to Honduras, we want to be utilizing our skills to help the people we have been working for, rather than merely touring the country. We recognize that going there may really be most beneficial to our own personal development, which is not necessarily a bad thing. We also found that it could benefit the Periclean Scholars program as a whole because we would gain on-the-ground knowledge and experience that we could share with subsequent classes, improving their projects. This discussion really forced us to reflect on our years with Periclean and look to the future for our class. We will be keeping this discussion in mind moving forward with our initiatives and projects.

As a class, we are furthering our partnerships with Summit for Honduras and LUPE. We are volunteering with LUPE on saturdays teaching ESL classes for local Latina women. Additionally, our class is taking steps in planning our campus summit to be held next year. There are a lot of great things in the works and the class of 2016 is already seeing progress as a class this semester!

As we are approaching many large decisions, our class has realized that we are struggling in creating effective group decisions. As a result, we read Consensus, by Peter Gelderloos, and practiced using his techniques of decision- making in our cohort. We divided our class into small groups and assigned roles to each member. Roles included a facilitator, a timekeeper, a note taker, a stacker, and general participants in the discussion. With this, we discussed what would be the most beneficial method of coming to decisions within our cohort.

In discussing the methods of consensus through the actual use of Gelderloos’ suggestions, we were able to see how his principles may or may not work for us. Deliberating forced us to reflect on our previous discussions and the strengths and weaknesses of our class in order to develop a structure that would allow us to create consensus as we move forward. Many of the discussion points that came up in our class included:

• A process of voting on decisions that will be based on levels of interest rather than majority rule.
• How to equally spread participation in class discussions.
• How to continue our discussions outside of class so that they do not have to end when our time does.
• The methods of creating a respectful and understanding community within the members of our cohort.

In practicing and discussing consensus, we were able to reflect on the way our class structure has been going and collaborate on how we hope to move forward. Taking the time to develop a method of communication and decision-making should make us a stronger and more effective cohort as we continue with our exploration of Honduras and the development of our project.

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The need to focus on developing a way to efficiently make decisions and come to consensus was recognized by many of us in the past few weeks. We felt the need to eliminate indecisive and inactive trends forming in the way we operated our discussions. The goals of the project are to:

• encourage productive dialogue

• create a process so that group members know how to raise issues

• create an environment of trust where everyone is heard

• make it easier for people to act on any ideas they have

Many aspects of our process are a combination of parliamentary procedure and the ideals of the small-group “Consensus” model for decision making outlined by Kieth McHenry, the cofounder of Food Not Bombs, in our reading by Peter Gelderoos.

 

-Erin & Christian