brandon williamscraig

Nexus Report

The Nexus For Change conference has just reached a finish at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. This went out as an email to the Association Building Community list of over 6,000 people.

Iris McGinnis Iris

,
John Abbe

, and
Brandon WilliamsCraig

(among over three hundred others) participated in this proto-community of Process Arts practitioners from the relatively unknown to the (in?)famous worldwide. This collaborative message reflects Iris' and Brandon's experiences and becoming aware of the expanded possibilities for the future emerging from this kind of gathering..

A certain "Alice down the rabbit Nexus" feeling pervaded our time in Ohio. We lost three hours across time zones, went to bed late and rose early to be a part of the teams dealing with Logistics, Photography, and IT. By turns, Nexus was frightening, exciting, exhausting, invigorating, disappointing, and wonderfully exceeded both our expectations.

Nexusians provided several suppliants with financial help in order to work toward diversity, as well as giving gifts of friendship and collaborative inspiration. We received round trip airfare and a place to stay so that we might participate, and paid for reduced registration costs and related expenses from matching money raised within the ABC community. We feel profoundly grateful, in particular, for Leon Regelson and Marilyn Madsen within ABC, Bill Adams of Maxcomm, Peggy Holman and Steve Cady, Joe Matthews, Cheryl Honey (Nexus Share and Care) of Community Weaving and the Family Support Network, and the M.O.D. students from BGSU who created the morning-after Ancient Wisdom Circle.

The event itself was a fundamental gathering, for the first time on this scale, of whole systems changers, researchers and authors, organizational development professionals, community builders/weavers, academics, human systems innovators, playback theater and graphic artists, and a multitude of other corporate managers, consultants, and facilitators - all apparently desiring open circles to struggle fruitfully with change-work and make a positive difference in the world. Hopefully this kind of gathering will continue and deepen, find its way around the nation to a different area each year, and reach beyond its currently limited scope to consciously support the face-to-face building of communities of understanding in specific locales - beyond the intense days of cross-pollination.

The opening invocation for the Nexus was a "Samoan Circle" in which each of five chairs was labeled with a role: Jean Bartunek ( professor of Organization Studies at Boston College and former president of the Academy of Management) began in the Scholar chair, Henri Lipmanowicz ( retired CEO of Merck subcontinental, and co-founder of the Plexus Institute) began in the Leader chair, and Carolyn Lukensmeyer (creator" of AmericaSpeak's 21^st Century Town Meeting) began in the Practitioner chair. Peggy Holman offered the following words to introduce my presence in the Activist's chair: " Brandon WilliamsCraig is of the new breed of activists, who, rather than advocating for or against something, are process activists – bringing people with diverse perspectives together so that wise answers emerge." Most gratifying of all was the briefly empty " Wild Card" chair for the rarely heard voices the future/the artist/the natural world/the unknown/the child, etc. The opening was both hopeful and problematic and, in so being, a fine place to start as a metaphor for the whole endeavor.

Iris met many wonderful people at the various formal and informal conversation 'cafes', attended numerous workshops, and hopes to write about them later on her blog. Brandon convened two Open Space sessions entitled, respectively:
- Process Arts: culture-making, Healing Friction, and guardianship of peace
- Grief Before Beginnings: essential depths without which changes are unsustainable
and was happy to be interviewed about the Process Arts by Michael Gaciri.

We wish we had understood, ahead of time, the full scope of the collaborative and emergent Nexus design process, so we might have sent a clear invitation, so you might have watched the invocation process, since the invocation circle was streamed internationally and now is part of growing archive on the web. Everyone involved would have benefited from your feedback and encouragement and we would like to invite you to review the Nexus material on the web, to consider attending next year, contact us with council, suggestions, issues to raise, etc. Please send any thoughts, desires, inspirations and let's continue our conversations into making the next event sparkle even more brightly than the first.

With Nexus behind and before us, the nationwide walkabout to grieve what is past and build the Guardians of Peace begins soon. Iris may also wander, grieve Aidan, and (if financially manageable) go to conferences to continue connecting with other process artists. The better part of a decade has passed in building our small ABCommunity slowly and our core desire now is to grow in size and depth, share the fruits of our modest learning, and be changed by new people. We'd like to send more regular reports and invitations.

Your creative and financial contributions (see below) will help take this work further into the world and empower more folks participating in this culture shift toward peace (conflict done well). If this interests you and you have the ability please contribute what you can to make it possible to take our work out in the world. While attending conferences can be very rewarding it is also financially and physically exhausting. Although this one was largely covered by gifts of various sizes, the overall cost to others to get us there was about $1,500. In the near future we'd like to offer community building circles, classes for adults and children, and raise funds for even more folks to participate in training and intense gatherings like Nexus For Change. Let us know if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and are interested in getting together on a regular basis to learn and practice Process Arts. We would love to expand our face-to-face community. Also let us know where you are outside the Bay Area so we can connect when we are in your area, with you and with others with a will to practice and learn from each other. We are profoundly grateful for our time out in larger circles this year and look forward with particular energy toward being together during the Next Us For Change. Particular thanks to Peggy Holman and Steve Cady - to Peggy for revealing herself in the Ancient Wisdom Circle created with students on the morning after as being a "nexustentialist," and to both for their warm welcome and desire to collaborate - making local ripples swell into waves of global change.

We hope to work more with you on the questions this work inspires and the responses and learning we all carry. For us, the core framing question emerged in Peggy's words from the Day-After Circle and we deeply desire to share its unfolding with you and the wisdom you represent. The core question underlying this entire field seems to be: " In Service to Whom?"

Warmly,

Brandon and Iris
from Association Building Community a.k.a. Beamish Process Arts

A list of links mentioned above: