A colleague in St. Louis is participating in this neighborhood approach:https://nextdoor.com/#section_1She says she is meeting new people and is feeling very excited that something is happening.
Yikes, sorry for the late reply, everyone! I am a volunteer, and the only write-up made was for a report at the very top-level that would not have included the kind of detail I share here.
Where to start?
I don't have pictures of the first training event, but we are already working on the training for the next set of interviewers. Apparently, the first set of folks was so enthusiastic that other people started to line up wanting to know if they could just walk in. Not enough managers and trainers to go around and also manage the project and current set of interviewers, so we're scheduling the next training as a proving ground for Training the Trainer. I guess that will be my next major post.
Attached is a picture of a different community meeting I take part in every week using the same technology that I mentioned earlier
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As you can see, we can do breakout rooms in Sococo. The 6 faces you see in the picture are just a few of the 10 people meeting. That's me, with dark hair, second from right.
Of course, for the training, the faces are different, the map showing where everybody is shows different groups of individuals.For the ABCD training, the breakout feature came in very handily when, for example, I asked the trainees to pair off and interview one another for the introductions or divide into sets of four or five people and talk about institutions and associations. Each group could use the Chat function as a flipchart to write down key words from what people had to say, then they would copy the material and when we came back into the main room they could paste into the Main Room's Chat and report out. The virtual arrangement was not as dynamic as having everybody in the same room buzzing away, but it gave trainees a sense of movement and a feeling of security about being heard and getting comfortable with the technology at least. The participants came from Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and North America.
The interviews are going very slowly but steadily as the interviewers are all adults with busy lives. For me, ABCD feeds my appetite for empowering others. And doing it it fits in with the philosophy of the sacredness of the herd that I have learned about over the years. (Reference site: http://sacredcamelgardens.com/)
I identify with being a herd leader -- the animal somewhere in the background staying aware in the moment of the entire herd. I continue to look for leaders and ways to shift responsibility for this projectto others who are capable. For example, now that I've completed the first training, I'm in the process of moving the project managers to learn how to do the training, even as Ialso keep checking in on the trainees and project managers. Even though we are all volunteers, I make sure to keep our roles clear--as the project managers, they handle all the logistics and go through Train the Trainers themselves. As the initial trainer, I trained the first batch of interviewers and consult on the handling of the project.
It's kind of brassy of me, as I haven't been a formal student of ABCD. However, I believe ABCD is critical for us and since I was already doing a different major function elsewhere in the community and I have many other projects elsewhere, because that's just the kind of person I am, we're all pitching in to keep things moving and it's my responsibility to myself to set my boundaries. The work all you ABCD professionals are doing is a blessing to the world.
I will start a different post on the Training the Trainers I'm doing so this doesn't stretch out so much.
As far as outcomes and what more others are saying besides getting new interviewers, this ABCD project is one of two that I have heard be acknowledged by some leaders as something positive that's occurring in the community no matter how small.
Yesterday, my husband and I had a guest visiting from DC who we hadn't seen in a few years and who is also close friends with one of the managers of this ABCD project. Our friend has run several businesses and has been active in community initiatives there.My husband tried to tell him about ABCD as he is also using it but for a project in a different community and for a different purpose. At the end of his explanation, my husband also pointed out to our friend that this was the same work that I was trying to do with the manager we all knew. The man exclaimed, "Oh, now I get what she has been trying to tell me and why she's so excited!" So I challenged him to articulate what he thought he understood. He said, "You're trying to identify our resources." Simple as that, and now I know he will support it.
In terms of outcomes, I used to sit on local citizen committees for the United Way and it was one of the ways I learned about the importance of outcomes. So far we are still trying to get through a certain number of interviews and I have had to remind these managers to share this information with their team as a way to keep folks fired up. I guess the fact that we have more interviewers to train without having campaigned for them is a sign of some community spirit re-emerging.
Thanks for the questions, and I'll keep reporting as I can.
Thanks to your advice, April Doner, and using Sococo, a web-based virtual office, I was able to conduct a three-day ABCD training over three weekends for about 30 people in Europe and the Americas. It's hard to believe people would sit still at their computer for an entire day. We worked out the schedule ahead of time and included short and long breaks, inspirational breaks, and different kinds of learning activities whereby to bond with one another and also keep energy high throughout.(I had to be online before 6am, but the furthest out group was giving up an afternoon and an evening to end at 11pm local time.) Since December when we finished, the interviewers have been practicing with friends and family, and the start-up institution we're working with has been developing what it needs to provide greater support and launch. So everyone is in learning mode and enthusiasm is still high.
Quick reply for now as I take a break so you can get started. You should look at the work of people who have already accomplished something with their work to see what materials you might find useful. The forum moderators have oodles of experience and I have no idea yet whether my own will result in anything with my fellow volunteers.
I searched around and saw several sites online that have materials you can re-purpose. I borrowed from a housing authority in Singapore, but when I just tried to go there again, the site has been locked so that only "authorized users" can get in.
Good sites are listed in the resources section of this forum, and I just found another one:http://ctb.ku.edu/Really well-organized.
Have you ever undergone an ABCD training yourself? What have you tried to start, or what dreams are you hoping to fulfill where you are?
We received word over this past weekend that we can go ahead!
I'm dealing with a cat emergency so also, and I have only the next few days to:
Pacific/Hawaii folks will start first, then the next day we work with the Mainland US/Canada/Europe folks. We couldn't do a three-day training in three back-to-back days since we are working across time zones, and my institution folks were assuming no one would do anything less than one day a month or half a day each month for 6 months. Instead, I presented options to the group of interviewers and, to make a long story short, they argued for 3 back to back weekends at the very least. So the institution folks went along with my initial recommendation 
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We're getting closer to training! I'm told that the Executive Director is aiming for November 15 to start 3 days (or 24 hours) of training. They -- the executive director and staff -- wanted a database and learning conversations, but what they outlined to me was a plain old interview. I've been working hard for the past year or more to make sure they understood the approach I was proposing. So now, I have submitted my presentation and speaker's notes to our culture's institution for review and am waiting to hear back. "Crossed fingers".
I just read Ron's story about the Lutheran Church in California. Very encouraging. I tend to keep things close to the chest until I have commitments, so I'll post when I hear and then let you know what we ended up with and how the training is going.
Thanks for throwing back the ball, April. We have a difficult job ahead, being that we are 1200-1700 people spread out over several countries, mostly in US and Europe at the moment. We have formal institutions (four): one for governance, another to handle properties held in trust, one for outreach, and the fourth which is charged with community development and conceived to be the biggest of the four institutions eventually, because of its scope. But strictly speaking at this moment in time, we're largely a community of practice or a community of interest, and only those of us living in concentrations of practitioners constitute communities of place. The largest concentration is about 300 people, and the smallest is 6.
Four 1.5-hr sessions is barely a day's training, as you've pointed out. So far, everyone involved in spearheading the ABCD project - 8 people - has been working on it as a volunteer for the past year or so. We now have a workplan, a theme/context (establishing our service guilds), a potential set of initial interviewers, a set of open-ended questions to get the conversations started, and the announcement and invitation to everyone about the project (which itself took months to work through).
I don' t see us attracting outside money to support our training and implementation efforts - money could help increase the time spent on training, ma-a-ybe. In any case, as a community of practice looking to develop a positive can-do orientation within the group, this task would not becurrentlyeligible for public grants. I know we need to not take shortcuts with the process, and I am keeping my focus on the opportunities ahead.
The manager for the project was going to have one follow-up during the first couple of months, but I shared this with her, and now she has agreed that we should do more. Thank you for pointing out that doing this would help to build a sense of communal support among the interviewers themselves. I keep trying to convince my colleagues to take their own ABCD training so that I don't have to be the "expert" that they argue with! I'll definitely mention the Toronto Summer Institute .
And I have been lobbying my institutional supporters to be more clear on their end about support, long-term as well as in the field so that this is felt as ongoing community-building and not sitting around waiting for things to happen and the community running out to them.
Thank you very much for pointing to De'Amon's recommendation to have some of the learning happen out in the community. I'm going to find a way to do this even with a community of practice 
, and will let you all know how that actually works out.
Peace,
Magdalena
How long should it take to train 24 people to conduct ABCD interviews? We want to have them learn about the institution sponsoring the drive, learn enough about ABCD as the approach, and practice a few interviews, too. But we also want to do all this in say 4 sessions of 1.5 hours each. How reasonable is this plan?
Deb W mentioned that some people might like to know more about co-housing and other intentional communities. The grandparent of these associations is the Fellowship for Intentional Communities, and I think they are 500+ now, in the Americas and elsewhere. Their website is:http://www.ic.org/
Since I last wrote, a small group of our spread-out community has adopted Sococo, a virtual office online, that helps give us the physical awareness of each other in a way that no other webinar/conference software has yet done. As a failsafe for some of our meetings--when Sococo is undergoing weekly maintenance as all web-based programs must--we use StartMeeting online so that we can continue to take advantage of "breakout rooms" to meet even if we can't see each other there.
Yes, thanks Deb, co-housing is one of the approaches we've taken a look at. Several of us have been on tours of local developments in the San Francisco Bay Area. My husband and I are members of the Fellowship for Intentional Communities--it's an association that includes communities based on people coming together intentionally to build community whether in a co-housing model or another system. Some of our members have such centers, but these are still scattered far and between and are not so much a part of the community around them yet. I have been inspired by the ABCD principle to be part of the community already around one's self (or group). For most of our members, though, living near one another remains an ideal. Thanks for writing!
