(This was the third of a series of three articles, all published in Community Living Magazine - year 2000- trying to introduce partnership theory to learning difficulty services.)
"You must become the change you want to see in the
world."
Australian Aborigine saying
Here's the crunch issue. Get ready for it.
If you try to work in partnership way within the dominator system, it will try to destroy you. It crucified Jesus, it shot Mahatma Ghandi, it shot Martin Luther King, it imprisoned Nelson Mandela, it has imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi.
I learned my lesson a long time ago in services when instead of being extolled for running the most innovative, happy, person-centred service in the area, I and my team were marginalised . We would not follow the prevailing line, so we were not seen or acknowledged. As Jack Pierpoint states : "It is always sobering when bureaucracy becomes the central value - rather than people - when the craving for neatness transcends vision."(1990 From Behind the Piano, Inclusion Press, Toronto, p 94)
A long time ago I chose to work independently of services.
Now here I am, trying to write about this thing called partnership. You go along and you keep on questioning, thinking. Because you see the damage being done, the compromises that stifle , too many good people burning out, too many people dying sad and alone.
Along the way you latch onto good things like Gentle Teaching,
because here at last is humanity, here is hope. God bless the
people who came on my workshops. because I knew - and they knew
, they had to go back into services with all that
talk of solidarity, and it wasn't going to be easy to sustain
within the system. Not easy at all .
The likes of me and Dan Hobbs - what we had in common was that we were independents.
So you keep moving on and bit by bit, years and miles down the road the puzzle begins to fit together. And then in nothing less than a "what the f....!!", it hits you. One day you wake up and the issue is clear. And nothing is the same anymore. Because your eyes have been opened, your mind is suddenly clear and your heart awakens , smiles and says "let's dance!"
You've undergone a paradigm shift.
You realise with startling clarity, that of course you can't-
as Wolfensberger tried to tell us a long time ago - you cannot
change the system from within. This system that dared to imprison
the people I've come to know and love, within the hell that was
the mental handicap hospital. This system that has barely begun
to embrace normalisation. This system that is very good at paying
lip-service to all your ideals and efforts . This system that
stifles, destroys, kills. This system - you find a name for it
- the dominator system in partnership language, we can no longer
work with it !
Yes !! You shout from the roof tops : a new era has dawned.
You just know, because your mind has been opened, that it is more than possible to work in new ways. You look around and you read the signs of the times. You notice John O'Brien in the last issue of Community Living urging the formation of alliances, organisations and groups explicitly to work outside the service system. You notice that more and more people have taken the step that you did a long time ago and are working as independents. A letter from someone who has taken that brave step arrived on my desk just this week.
You just know that the way forward is to work directly in partnership with people. And individualised funding packages are the golden opportunity.
What ways of working - as yet undreamed off, will emerge as these partnerships fly free ?
Can you imagine you and I coming together, outside of services ( I think we'd place a ban on that word - which has come to mean anything but service) to form co-operatives and sell our skills, our creativity, our determination to fight for a better world, with people who are buying-in support ?
We'd make sure we were kept at the peak of our abilities, by buying in our own support, our development, our supervision from other - independent - sources. A whole new market place will emerge.
Think of how we'd work. We'd maybe get together in small , highly focussed , highly skilled project teams, to help the person in a particular area. Maybe you'd manage that team, but be a member of this other team. These teams would only last as long as they were needed. We would make sure we don't get stuck. We'd demand results, the highest performance from ourselves.
Not just that, around the prime partnership, other partnerships, connections, groups would form, come together, disband when the job is done. We keep going .
It's a complex world out there. It takes courage to deal with it, chutzpah, balls, to know how to move things forward, to take the global view, to not give up - to work in partnership.
Can you imagine the buzz, the excitement, the aliveness, the creativity ? We'd push the frontiers and ride the waves of change - which I have come to learn are the waves of love.
You and your partner - you'd literally scour the world, using the internet to find whatever is needed. Boundaries, local, national, and international would be broken down. We'd form links - a crucial concept in partnership, across the planet - sharing our discoveries, our stories, keeping each other going.
It would be an extraordinary life, all right.
Here are some of the things that will change :
Out In
An Ordinary Life Living
Circle of Friends Power as linking
Person-centred planning In-the-moment planning
Staff teams Partners
Labels Names
Authority Equality
Access Inclusion
Compromise Consensus
Conformity Diversity
Uniformity Individuality
Hierarchy Heterarchy
Utopia Pragmatopia
....There will be lots more that you can probably think of. The thing is we need to think in entirely new ways. This is much much more than just changing things. It is creating completely new ways of being.
I have discovered that Raine Eisler and others in their work on partnership have given me a language and a theoretical basis which I have found helpful in articulating what has dawned in my heart. For example I get excited that partnership theory is guided by the positive transformative energy which Mahatma Ghandi called satyagraha - or "truth force" .The dominator system feels driven to control people while partnership emphasises discovering your own power so that as you grow , the more welcoming you will be of others. The less needy will be your drive to control and limit others - which always arises from fear.
I find it highly inspiring as a carer, that partnership will bring about a balanced economy in which "caring for others is not just given lip-service but is the most highly rewarded and therefore the most highly valued , human activity." (Eisler R (1990) The Chalice & the Blade, Thorsons, London p.201) The present grossly over-rewarded economic system, arguably, is successful only on the back of the vast unrewarded informal economy - the parenting, the caring, the voluntary work, the co-operatives that make it all possible.
It may be difficult to imagine a different world, but it is emerging. More and more people are finding the courage to take the risk, to make it happen. In some ways this ties in with the upheaval taking place anyway in the workplace under the impact of communications technology and the new cargo-trousered dot-com culture. Tom Peters , for example , has made the catastrophic prediction that in the next 10 to 15 years 90% of jobs are going to be destroyed or changed beyond recognition. (Time , May 29 2000 p. 60) Traumatic - but what new opportunities abound and are there to be grasped !!
Don't be left behind. Use it !
The future is going to be infinitely much more complex. And rightly
so. When we look back on the last two decades one day, we will
marvel at how simplistic we were in our service effort, how we
divorced the 5 accomplishments from its radical context and dared
to reduce the intricacy of human experience to ticks on a chart,
as if that made everything all right . As the singer Moby (The
Observer Magazine 15 October 2000 p. 15) observes :"the
world is not a simple and understandable place and people who
try to make it so...are jerks."
Well, we've seen the future and it's got partnership written all over it - for this pilgrim at least. There's a wave already forming and see me - I'm there. I'm riding it.
From up here my creative imagination, my mind, my heart, is
freed. And look - the human spirit soaring with dignity and the
power of love unleashed across the world.
greg.crowhurst@virgin.net
This series has been profoundly challenging to write, because I have been learning how to open my mind to embrace partnership more fully. I cannot thank my wife Linda enough , for how she stood by me all the way and bit by bit showed me what she knew all along.
Three steps to partnership
(Based upon the work of Leonard Laskow : Healing with Love, Harper Collins, San Francisco, 1992)
1. TRANSLATION
Numerous studies , including most of normalisation theory, testify to the power of language to change how we THINK, how we ACT and how we FEEL. The classic case is the glass half - full or half - empty. Naming the Dominator System , for example, helps us to imagine an alternative world.
2. TRANSFORMATION
This is the key concept in partnership. Step one helps to raise our awareness, but the underlying issue stays the same. Transformation is a higher level of consciousness in which we penetrate to the truth, about the issue and about ourselves, thereby moving towards a different reality on all levels : Mind, Body, Emotion, Spirit. In this process hitherto trapped or repressed energy is released in abundance. To return to the glass - it becomes full, even to overflowing.
3. TRANSCENDENCE
In transcendence consciousness takes a quantum leap beyond duality and perceives the interdependence, the vision of the whole. As Laskow says : "The glass is not only filled, but we tap into the ocean the source of all."
Note : The reader is strongly urged to refer to Paulo Freire's work on conscientization : the transcendence of semi-intransitive and naive-transitive states of consciousness by critical consciousness. (See for example Freiere P 1977, Cultural Action for Freedom, Penguin Education, London p.78 .)