Secret to success:

Fundraising. It’s a reality that all non-profit – and some for-profit – organizations must face. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to have spent such a large chunk of this summer looking for funding. Searching for foundations, typing up solicitation letters, cultivating donors…the routine began to get old, especially when my thoughts turned to the slim chances of snagging a hefty sum.

Social enterprises, socially-minded businesses, or whatever we call these waves of innovation that the Starr Fellowship fosters – they might theoretically be able to turn a profit and self-sustain. It’s easy to think, or hope, that the burden of fundraising is left to unquestionably charitable organizations like UNICEF and the American Cancer Society.

The Capital Good Fund, for example, is different from these: it’s a microfinance institution. It’s the trendy new poverty alleviation tool that will eliminate the global need for charity. Right?

But when it comes down to it, CGF is still a non-profit organization. “Turning a profit” is not exactly a part of its mission statement. The fact that I’d end up fundraising this summer seems, in retrospect, quite obvious.

As I practiced my elevator pitch and drafted LOIs until CGF’s catch phrases became ingrained in my memory, I did some soul-searching. Why was I not spending my days out of the office, meeting CGFs borrowers, getting my proverbial hands dirty and feeling truly productive? I’m still figuring out the answer. One thing I’ve realized is that productivity rarely happens without money. People like the Starr fellows might be motivated by less monetary incentives, but we need others to get substantial things done. Or maybe we don’t, but working alone, progress would come only through intense, full-time labor – with no income, how would we survive? I’m realizing that every non-profit organization, even microfinance institutions, needs to actively seek donors. Though it seems disconnected from social missions, fundraising really does enable all the impact that we might have.

Is fundraising the root of all social work? To get to it, will I drop everything and aspire to become a professional grant-writer? I can’t quite see myself heading in that direction, but after this summer I certainly have a newfound admiration for those who do.

Julie Siwicki, Capital Good Fund

People

One golden evening in West Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard, I turn into a narrow driveway off a dirt road. The driveway is narrow and flanked by untrimmed bushes and piles of firewood. There’s a green old pick-up close to the house, a wonderful house: all natural wood with a wrap-around porch that touches up to the trees surrounding. There are conch shells—big ones—on wire hanging whimsically from the overhanging roof around the door, and they shimmer a little in the breeze. Inside it’s dark, cozy and spacious, very airy, with high ceilings. There’s a stove and fridge and great cabinets under a skylight’s slant; the 7 p.m. summer sun comes in. The place is decorated with tenderness and purpose. I’m handed two fat, fresh steaks of striped bass, and advised to cook them simply for best flavor, with some garlic. On the ferry ride home I realize how magical and strange it is that I was ever there, on Martha’s Vineyard, that I was bought ice cream by the old fisherman. We ate our cones together, chocolate dripping on the Menemsha fishing docks, before he wiped his hands on his knees and bailed rainwater out of his boat with a plastic bucket.

My summer was scattered with similar moments of wonder: how did I get here? There was the Gloucester Farmer’s Market Seafood Throwndown, my Vineyard community radio debut, the cup of tea in Stonington, Maine. These were profound encounters throughout my organizing for the New England Fish Forum’s first Conversation, which at last took place on August 18 in Rhode Island, right after the Women & Fisheries Project meeting that the Fish Forum co-sponsored.

When I proposed the Fish Forum for the Starr Fellowship, I did knew that networking and trustbuilding would be necessary to convene such a meeting, where fishermen, scientists and policymakers would come together not because it was required or official, but because they wanted to talk with each other. Still, as the summer unfolded, it became obvious that my principle work would not be holding the meetings, not even organizing for those meetings, but building interest and engagement in the New England Fish Forum’s goals, and above all, getting to know people and their concerns so that the New England Fish Forum could serve real needs. I did this by phone, email, and by meeting people. Some were discouraging or cautious, others very encouraging. Enough were encouraging that I continued to feel that my sometimes frustration and confusion were worth it, and that the New England Fish Forum was needed. A New England quality of life, the success of the region’s fisheries management, and a balance of environmental and social sustainability could only be achieved with better communication among fishermen, scientists and managers outside of the Council. I was bolstered by support and interest from people I met, and their enthusiasm was inspirational, even as the caution and skepticism I heard from others guided the design of the August 18 meeting.

I did not foresee how the networking and trustbuilding and organizing I would do would involve me directly with the lives of people up and down the region’s coast. I did not expect to see people’s houses, for instance, or to be called just to check in, and I am honored to have earned the respect and trust that I did. I wrote my thesis on New England fisheries management but I have learned more in this summer than I did in my last year of research, simply by talking with people, seeing their homes, seeing where they work. And for that reason, as August 18 approached, I became not only excited but terrified by what was at stake.

August 18: the Coastal Institute at the University of Rhode Island’s East Bay Campus. The evening was designed as a duo of meetings. The first, a discussion meeting of women involved in fisheries management, was organized by the Women & Fisheries Project for research purposes, by professors at Brown University and URI. Members of industry, state representatives, fishermen’s wives and NGO employees were present. There had been serious discussion about how to schedule the Fish Forum conversation and the Women & Fisheries Project meeting, since both were similar, and I had been involved with the Women & Fisheries Project the summer before, but wanted to make clear that the New England Fish Forum was not for research but was a community-supported platform for productive interaction. In the end, I agreed with the Women & Fish PIs that the New England Fish Forum would co-sponsor but not organize their meeting, since one of their goals, to unite women in fisheries from various backgrounds around important social and environmental topics, was shared by the New England Fish Forum. It also served as a way to advertise the Fish Forum conversation meeting to women who might be difficult to reach. The decision about scheduling the two meetings back-to-back ended up being a valuable experience in itself, about how to cooperate and collaborate with other projects that have similar but different purposes but that can nonetheless help each other. Because of the complex social and geographical fabric of New England fisheries populations, the New England Fish Forum relies on these kinds of semi-alliances and support networks, not only for advice but to publicize its mission (Saving Seafood and the FishFolk mailing list, for example, were valuable ways to invite a wider audience than I, working alone, could have reached). In the future, the Fish Forum may develop some of these semi-alliances into official partnerships, as other fisheries organizations have done.

The August 18 conversation (the first in a fall series) focused on the social impacts of Amendment 16 to the New England groundfish plan, a contentious and particularly critical development in fisheries management that came to a boil over the summer. The Fish Forum chose this focus after considering input from scientists, managers and industry members (the people I had spent the summer meeting, emailing and calling); it seemed that the scientific/environmental objectives of the amendment were quite clear, while the social objectives were not, despite the inevitable connection between social and environmental sustainability. Participants at the meeting were asked to envision what they thought groundfish management should accomplish socially in an ideal world, and what it would accomplish after Amendment 16 (how will communities, families, individuals be affected?). To make this and future conversations worthwhile to participants, and to foster discussion towards a tangible product, the meeting was framed around creating a list of recommendations to submit to the federal fisheries agency, which will soon design social impact monitoring of Amendment 16. The guiding question: What types of information should be tracked to monitor the social effects of Amendment 16 and future amendments to the New England fisheries management plan? The meeting, being in many ways a trial run for future meetings, was also a time for generating critical feedback from the people who attended, and I will write about the meeting specifically another time. In general, I was pleased that the twelve people who came were from a mixture of industry, science and social fisheries research, and that a couple of people made the trek down from Maine. I need to think more about how to prevent a few people from dominating the conversation.

The New England Fish Forum conversations are designed to accomplish two tiers of goals. The first tier is immediate and politically productive: to address important issues in fisheries management amongst fishermen, scientists and managers, and to empower people of different backgrounds and viewpoints to share their ideas on such issues (on August 18, this meant discussing the social aspects of Amendment 16 and groundfish management in general, and drafting a list to submit to a federal agency). The second tier goal is vaguer but perhaps more profound, and is the “true” goal of the Fish Forum: to build social capital in fisheries management, to alter the culture of communication by promoting non-Council, relatively informal interaction among people who might not normally meet or agree, so that successful natural resource management (which essentially manages people) can occur.

As I reflect back on the first New England Fish Forum conversation of August 18, and on the rest of my summer, its golden evenings in West Tisbury and all, I feel a sense of cautious accomplishment, but I do not think I have reached my goals, and it is largely because I have worked solo. Either the New England Fish Forum needs more full-time bodies working specifically for it (right now it’s only me, supported by several community leaders and advisers who have other responsibilities), or it needs to rethink the way it operates (a more directed snowball tactic than the one in place, a spiderweb of community organizers with the New England Fish Forum at the center), or the scale on which it can be sustainably effective (pick a place, pick a political season). The most important work of the summer—generating feedback and networking, often in person—is also the most difficult for a single body to accomplish. While the New England Fish Forum has generated a small buzz, thanks to community leaders, listservs, blogs, and word of mouth (I’ve gotten, “Oh, you’re that girl” or “Howdy told me about you”), this small buzz will have a difficult time sustaining itself and continuing to build momentum without a stronger, more continuous push. Fisheries is an area constantly bombarded by political effort and scholarly interest, and it is also an area whose people are constantly multitasking, their time and attention divided by many efforts, and they are wary of wasting energy. I operate as a realist-idealist, thinking a bit idealistically but working realistically, and this summer has also been a lesson in fisheries politics and fishing community-organizing. I could continue this fall as I did this summer, networking and publicizing for the next meetings more easily after three months in the field, and I plan to. But I hesitate to hurtle immediately back into planning for the next meeting (in October) when I have recognized that I am not enough. I have some ideas but this post is too long. For now, please advise if you have thoughts, and I’ll write soon about my plan for the Fish Forum’s sustainable future. I want to do this right. It’s not just about the fresh fish I’ve picked up. It’s about people.

Engaging Communities

People are more willing to contribute their own content if you are exchanging information with them

This is a great post on what it takes to engage communities, in which the author exclaims, “in my experience of working with rural communities during the last 20 years, unless a community accepts you, no meaningful engagement will take place.” I am curious how this summers Starr fellows have earned their acceptance. What have they given in return?

The Power of Place

I have been told that in the U.S. one’s “twenties” are about finding yourself and finding your place. This summer I have explored new places with a new team. Assetmap has taken me from Providence to Chicago and across the path of the gold rush to San Francisco. I have slept on sofas, in closets, and along riverbeds on the way to this foggy city. But even with long days in the car, and prolonged hours in coffee shops I cannot say that I have found myself. On the contrary, I have found myself lost more often than found (lots of one way streets and mountainous streets in the Bay). When I landed in the Mission district of San Francisco, the dynamic and diverse community overwhelmed me. I quickly retreated into my work and into my new home, trying to find myself in this new place. Yet after weeks of sitting behind my computer working in cafes, I was no closer to knowing my new neighborhood or myself. The self-awareness I had sought was not forthcoming.

Last week, with work in a whirlwind, the team at Assetmap decided to take a few days off from the café hopping to begin our search for a more permanent home. This brought us to spaces I never expected to find: law office, co-working spaces, and tech incubators. Through the process of office hunting, seeing new communities, I realized why I was lost in reclusion. I was only going to “find myself” when I “found my place” situated in a larger community.

The right community could provide a sense of belonging and meaning, new opportunities, and a safety net in hard times. The three options that we explored revealed unique ways of creating a sense of place. At the small office space we could build something totally unique from the ground up. In a co-working space we had the opportunity to embed ourselves in a young community with upward trajectory. Lastly, at the tech incubator we saw the chance to enter a robust and deep network.

I never expected to land a corner office in a lawfirm. Our first visit was in an old attorney’s office with all the amenities I had seen on the set of… “The Office.” The next-door professionals were dressed in drab business casual, a rare site outside of the financial district. The neighborhood was nice, and it would give us the opportunity to create a name for ourselves, but it was not our space. This was apparent, as we would have taken the spot for another start-up doing design for social businesses, who had clearly worn tired of making a name in a place they did not fit.

Alternatively, co-working spaces were a new and enlightening phenomenon. There were open offices with round tables for small business owners, designers, programmers, and entrepreneurs to share in a collaborative work environment. Our favorites, Citizen Space and Parisoma, are coffee shop-esque spaces with printers and conference rooms. Both host community events multiple times a week, and members are expected to contribute to other members work a few hours a week. Joining this community would be an opportunity to build a name for ourselves and support our co-workers.

Lastly, we drove through the San Francisco fog monster into pristine Sunnyvale CA to be wowed by Plug & Play, a tech accelerator and incubator. This bustling international office had over 200 companies as well as satellite workspace from every major university (a Brown space was conspicuously missing, despite alums throughout the building). Although a new community, Plug & Play already attracted the smartest minds from technology, business, and investment to accelerate the growth trajectory of nascent tech companies. To say the least we felt like a small fish in a big sea. This intensely competitive environment, with dozens of companies in “stealth mode,” clearly drives innovation if you have what it takes.

In the end we settled on a hybrid route. Our new space is in the heart of the mission in the skeleton of a failed dot-com: evidence from the gold rush of the new millennium. But our new home is no traditional office space, we are working in a room that includes base camp of The Hub (a co-working space for social entrepreneurs about to open in Berkley), the organizers of Social Capital Markets (the premier U.S. conference for social entrepreneurs), B-Lab (a design firm building a ‘good’ focused product line) and Good Capital (a premiere investment fund for social enterprise), organizations we are passionate to be working around. This quasi co-working space is a dynamic work environment with big ideas constantly bouncing off the walls. More importantly we have found a community to build real meaning and new opportunities, and if we get off track our new friends will act as a compass to set us straight (it also doesn’t hurt to have a view of the entire city).

We have emerged from the coffee shops where writers and programmers type ferociously on their computers, rarely taking time to even notice each other. Seraching for a working space and a new community has set me and Assetmap on the right course. This reaffirms my belief that I can only know myself when I am a part of a dynamic and supportive community. Not only do I have more to gain, but I now have more to give. Surely this is only just the beginning. More to come on the inner workings of Assetmap and our projects in conferences and Uganda.

Networks for Peace – Pakistan

While Meghna has been hopping all over India, I have been firmly planted in Karachi all summer. In my initial conversations with professors and administrators here I discovered that there exists a strong network of personal and institutional relationships between colleges and universities across Pakistan. I thus decided to modify my approach to take advantage of these pre- existing linkages by first building and solidifying my relationships with universities here in Karachi, and then using those linkages to connect with more universities outside Karachi. I now plan to travel to Lahore and Islamabad shortly, once term starts in the schools over there.
In my time doing on the ground research, talking to professors, administrators, students and others, I have been pleasantly surprised by the level of support I have found for Networks for Peace and for other projects like it. While there has always been backing for any initiatives and policies that allowed for greater people to people contact, the overwhelming body of informed opinion now seems to have come firmly to the conclusion that the a just and equitable solution reached through dialogue and compromise is the only way forward in South Asia.
I have also found that video conferencing has taken of here even more strongly than I had initially anticipated. All the public universities in the country have been equipped with specialized video conferencing centers, and many of the private colleges are following this lead as well. This is great for us since it removes to a large extent the infrastructural problems that we had worried about.
We have simultaneously been working on getting our website of the ground. Since we have reconfigured our project to include a far greater role for video conferencing, the shape and structure of the website has also had to be reconfigured. We debated whether or not to involve a professional developer but for now we are developing it in collaboration with a student from LUMS in Lahore who is helping us get this integral part of our project going

Looking for advice!

Hey SII. I come to you humbly seeking advice on behalf of the Capital Good Fund. We’re revamping our organizational structure, and aren’t sure how to do it best.

Quick background: CGF is a year-old microlending organization in Providence, based out of Brown and currently run by Brown student volunteers. We launched a pilot set of loans in the spring and have 5 borrowers right now. We make 3 types of loans: for small businesses, immigrants seeking US citizenship, and small credit-building loans to install eco-friendly thermostats.

Microfinance organizations have to worry about more than just administering their products, though. Aside from needing staff members to oversee these loans (ie loan officers), we need people in charge of fundraising, evaluation, marketing, etc.

As of now, we have two options for an organizational chart that we’d like to hear your thoughts on. One breaks up the entire staff by loan product, having teams for each that include loan officers as well as members focused on evaluation, fundraising, and so on. In this set up, there would be 3 separate staff members doing evaluation for 3 separate loan products — separately. But each would be part of a team that has the clear goal of making their designated product WORK. We think this could be appealing for a student staff that might not be familiar with CGF when they start working with us.

The second chart divides the staff into teams specializing in areas that span all 3 loan products. For example, the evaluation team would be in charge of evaluating all 3 types of loans. Each team would have a more holistic view of the organization. We worry, though, that the goals might not be as concrete here. Because of this, the staff might not feel as much direction – or take as much initiative – as they would in the first option.

So what do you think? Do you have experience with organizations or student groups that could guide us? Any and all comments are welcome. (and preferably in the next couple days!)

Let me know if you have any questions. I can email you the tentative charts if you’re curious. julie_siwicki@brown.edu. Thanks!!

Julie
Capital Good Fund

A Powerful Force

by Colette DeJong, Mali Health Organizing Project 2009 Summer Intern

Gray storm clouds hang in the sky outside, and children poke their heads through the grates. A chalk board, marked in careful French cursive, holds the day’s agenda. The Community Health Action Group – 12 elected community leaders – is seated around the table in benches, and the tempo is slow and laden with the heat before exploding into bursts of rapid-fire Bambara. I don’t catch a single word, and hope only to follow the plot arc –  an earnest objection here, a sassy slingin’ response there, an angry outburst that defuses into laughter all around. I occasionally whisper an urgent “QUOI??” to Lassi, the Malian intern next to me, and he starts half a sentence in French before I lose him back to Bambara. When I think I’ve pieced together what the riff is about, I call out something in French, and they sweetly pass the floor for two seconds (she-ain’t-too-bright-but-her-hearts-in-the-right-place) before diving into Bambara discussion once more.

These guys own the room.

The relationship between MHOP and the CHAG is a fascinating puzzle. On the one hand, we feed ideas into the discussion for their approval– exciting plans drawn from lit reviews, development classes, what’s been done and what’s been talked about. We draw up project timelines; as the intern for a new community health worker program, I scribble ideas for the community-service “action fees” which will replace cash user fees into a crumpled purple notebook from an Illinois CVS. When the CHAG disagrees with the plan, it feels like a misunderstanding, even a fly in the ointment – how can we convey that girl’s education programs in Bambara, not French, have a greater statistical impact on child survival? Our interjections are a curious mix of steering the agenda and being left in the dust. The CHAG winds and weaves through a 2 hour discussion before reaching its decision – an approval, yet with ownership, of ideas that almost universally start with MHOP.

In the weeks before my first CHAG meeting, brainstorming Action Fee ideas while squeaking around Sikoro in my brand new Chacos, I felt like I smelt something burning. My actions felt perverse – was I arbitrarily, patronizingly pinning up hoops for people to jump through for donor-funded health care?  How had I been so blind to this foul, sinister underbelly to my Starr proposal?

My first CHAG meeting cleared the air and lightened my heart. Their pride, their spirited ownership, their brief, amused and motherly audience to my off-base contributions – left no question of ownership. Most of the ideas did originate in our CVS notebooks, and I still don’t know how this works —  the interplay between local ownership and efficient task-setting, the CHAG’s initiative and our willingness to alter our breathless designs. But I know that it does work. I’m bearing witness to something vivacious, spirited, and community owned. And if I pretended anything different to the CHAG, I’d get mercifully, profoundly, and deservedly walloped.

The Power of Personality

by Rachel Levenson

Things move quickly at the International Institute. A new family from Bhutan arrived two days ago. Two weeks ago, it was an Eritrean family. With each new person comes individual doctor’s appointments, school registrations, job applications, as well as new thoughts, dreams for the future and burdens from the past. In the Children’s Education Room where I spend most of my mornings, these complexities come alive. They kick other children whose English is better than theirs, sit quietly in chairs trying to read a book, jump up and down singing words they don’t understand while dancing in a circle, and, most of all, challenge me as a leader and an educator. Leading the children’s room has been a learning process. Each child is different every day. Sometimes it feels like each child is different every minute. When I ran after one child who had grabbed too many cookies, I came back into the room to find that one of the better behaved of the children had kicked the classroom’s globe, creating a big dent in it. The symbolism of this action struck me and now every time I enter the room, the dented globe reminds me of the complexities of the experiences of the youths who enter this building, who go to ESL classes, and who, in the fall, will have BRYTE tutors.

During a check-in meeting with my mentor at the Institute, I expressed how overwhelmed I felt by my desire to help every individual I meet at the Institute as best I can every day and at the same time committ time and energy to redesigning BRYTE. He said to me, “Ah, I see you have been caught in the vortex.” Maybe he is right. But when I go to the library to work on BRYTE’s strategic plan and go to meetings with community partners, I think that sometimes that isn’t too bad of a thing. One of the bases of my Starr fellowship was my desire to make sure that BRYTE would survive when some of its original leaders disappeared– when the people who had the passion to found the organization passed the torch to new tutors.

But now I’m thinking that it may be the power of personal relationships that will keep BRYTE alive. At a recent meeting at the Swearer Center on ways to interact with community partners, the power of personality was mentioned as a critical tool for successful partnerships between organizations. The facilitator of the meeting, a Brown student who has worked with several organizations in Providence, said that she cherished her personal relations with different people and felt that such relations are generally underacknowledged in the field of public service. At  first I resisted her comment, saying that I thought it was problematic that an organization needs strong leaders to work well- that at the end of the day, personality trumping strategic plan is not a good thing. But I think I am changing my mind a bit about this as I see how public service organizations work, both at the Instiute and through my work with the Family Help Desk. This has been a big breakthrough in how I approach what I am doing this summer, and how I understand the concept of “success” in BRYTE. Now, I plan on instituting a BRYTE Internship: a semester long student coordinator internship at the International Institute to further ties between BRYTE and our community partner. I know that my presence at the Institute has done much to reform its ideas of BRYTE and BRYTE’s work,and I want to make sure there are always students in the building from Brown whom the staff and students at the Institute can turn to with trust. So, while I am still working hard on BRYTE’s strategic plan, I am no longer seeing the time I spend developing professional and personal relationships with BRYTE’s staff as a detractor from my work on BRYTE but rather as an essential component of it.

How do you teach what’s really important?

Yesterday I walked through the familiar maroon doors of Stephen F. Austin High School, a building that I knew all too well for a four-year period.  Since graduating from high school, however, I have avoided stepping onto the campus, appreciating my education and memories from a distance.  But yesterday I returned to Room 302, my old debate classroom, with all the same posters on the walls and only a few minor changes in the arrangement of the desks.

In hindsight, my return to this classroom makes sense.  Of all the activities I participated in during high school, I most obviously see the benefits of debate.  The skills that I gained in this activity transferred to my writing in literature classes, my analysis of statistics and my ability to argue with my parents at the dinner table.  Learning how to debate has immediate impacts and ferments the desire to think critically about the realities of our world and then go on to solve some of these problems.  In theory, it is an incredible activity.

Yet even now I have the exact same complaints with debate that I did in high school.  Why do we have to learn the terminology?  Why do we have to follow so many rules?  Why does one person have to be declared a winner when the issues are so vast?  Why don’t we get so angry at the government or corporations or failed programs that we actually walk out of the classrooms and do something about it?  Why does improving at this activity bring one into an even more isolated world of hypothetical conversations instead of promoting activism?

Teaching debate in Providence, rather than participating in the activity as a student, is now becoming its own form of activism.  Yes, I am still spending my afternoons in high school classrooms instead of at the State House, but now I enter these schools with more of a mission.  Our goal is not just to teach students how to research, read tough authors or speak articulately.  Even more, we want to show these students that this ability to think about complex issues will enable them to affect future micro and macro policy decisions.  Many of our lawmakers are former debaters; many people in power grew up with this activity.  We at the RIUDL want bright, motivated Rhode Island public high school students to have the passion and credentials to be the next agents of change.

This socially conscious goal was never explicitly expressed in my high school debate program.  We talked about tournaments and the specific topics and which intellectual could be most helpful to a certain position.  Yet the spirit of social change must have somehow seeped into us, because most of my peers and I went on to care about something broader than the internal world of debate.  We looked back and got what it was really about.

Now I sit here comparing my experience of high school to the mission of the Swearer Center, which expressly communicates its desire to address inequalities, share knowledge of the public good and “prepare students for lives of effective action.”  Debate taught me to do all of these things, but even today I have no idea if that was the intention of my coaches or by chance.  If it was by chance, should I just trust that debate imparts these same goals and desires on all participants?  If it was a focus of my high school coaches, must I too make these goals so subtle?

These questions are perhaps what any teacher or parent asks: If I have a clear goal, do I make it known or just hope that all turns out well?  Or do I let these desires develop organically, and avoid steering people in any one direction?  This is perhaps an issue of trust – in a program, in another person, in the culmination of many experiences and observations.

Going back to Austin High felt good; I no longer felt the anxieties of being a high school student.  I could view my education with a distance, even in the building that housed much of it.  But returning did not answer my questions of intentions or expectations of my debate coaches.  And perhaps this is one of the great secrets of debate: under the mask of concern over competition or trophies, everyone in this world understands the gravity and power of this activity on the lives of these students and the future of our society.

Sophie Elsner
Rhode Island Urban Debate League

Post-Maine trip thoughts

I just got back from a trip to Maine, where I finally met Meredith Mendelson at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, and met with fishermen and fishing community advocates in the Downeast region (and got in some Acadia National Park time, too!). It was exciting to talk with Robin Alden and Ted Ames at the Penobscot East Resource Center, and to meet Gary Libby of the Port Clyde Fresh Catch community-supported fishery (they’ll be starting one of the Amendment 16 sectors). I got valuable perspectives on Amendment 16 and organizing the Conversation around it. I learned a lot, too, about how Maine and other more remote parts of New England view the management conversation, what they need and could use from something like the New England Fish Forum, and so on. I also thought a lot about some of the challenges ahead. There are lessons I am learning that I didn’t know were in store at the start of this summer:

TAKING TIME TO CHAT

Meeting new people and building relationships with them is proving to be the most important part of my work this summer. It is by meeting and talking with people that I was inspired to start the New England Fish Forum, of course, and how I have learned (and continue to learn) about the state of fisheries management in New England. But establishing these relationships is no longer for research or background, though it serves that foundational purpose: this is my work. I am really recognizing that presenting and pitching the Fish Forum idea is almost secondary to what happens around those conversations: the informal chatting. This is how I get a sense of how people are feeling and what they’re thinking, and it’s also a way to un-jade the jaded and motivate the weary.

Last weekend I took a trip to Downeast Maine for the Fish Forum, to meet with some key community leaders and talk with community organizers and fishermen there. I had an agenda: to introduce the Fish Forum and its project, to gather feedback about how best to engage people in participation, to generate ideas for the points of discussion at Fish Forum meetings in August, and to put a face to the emails I have been circulating around the New England fisheries listservs. In Bar Harbor and Blue Hill and Stonington and Portland I did do these things, but I think the most important work from that weekend was not, in fact, the conversations that focused on my particular agenda. It was the hangin out, the straying from topic. There is a part of me that wants to be very efficient about all this, to go in, get my feedback, and use that time in as productive a way as possible, so that I can form the plan for the meetings and see some real effect from my work this summer. But communication can’t happen in a vacuum—in fact, communication requires intangible in-person relationships, and that’s what the Fish Forum is based on.

I spent seven hours with Howdy Howton on Sunday. He’s the groundskeeper at the College of the Atlantic and a retired fisherman. For seven hours there was no lack of conversation as he drove me from Mt. Desert Island to Deer Isle and points in between, to meet with fishermen, a biochemist and the director of a fishing community foundation. We talked about the local food movement, maca powder, yogurt, music, local radio, and, of course, fishing. And sitting under a tree in a parking lot in Blue Hill at a community-supported fishery pick-up (works just like a CSA), I joined in a conversation with a couple as they talked about their in-laws, pesticides, beer, and, of course, fishing. I was there to learn about Amendment 16, but what happened was the establishment of relationships. At the risk of inefficiency, I wouldn’t have it another way. Because of those conversations, with their loose ends and meandering topics, these generous people provided me with the names and numbers of other people, invited me to visit their shipyards—gave me an in to an even wider community. You can’t rush these things. But then, Downeast Maine is pretty effective at slowing a New Jerseyan down.

WHO TO TRUST?

I’m learning a lot about the politics of starting an organization, especially a social/cultural one. The New England Fish Forum depends on relationships and social networking. In some ways this poses a challenge for thinking about the sustainability of the Fish Forum—something I’ll write on later—but it also poses a challenge for getting the right relationships that will advance the goals of the program rather than undermine their success. The Fish Forum relies on mentors and community leaders to spread the word, convince scientists, policymakers and fishermen that participating is worthwhile, and distribute some of the responsibility of planning these Conversation meetings so that I, as the official organizer, simply don’t have the resources or connections to do. In other words, the momentum of community outreach about the Forum relies on community leaders to do that outreach and on mentors who know the dynamics of these relationships to offer their expertise.

But how do I know who to trust? How do I find mentors and community leaders and then, how do I choose mentors and community leaders who will contribute to the culture I hope to influence, instead of undermining it? Answering these questions can be difficult and pose legitimate concerns. Individuals have political agendas, ideologies, good and bad reputations, and their own interests, and the Fish Forum can be a platform for opportunists. I expect that most everyone who participates in the New England Fish Forum has his or her own interest and motivation for doing so. But I want to keep the forum from being associated with any given group, movement, or personality, since these associations may undermine the open, transparent, trusting culture I am working to foster.

Sometimes I feel like the more people I talk to in commercial fishing—be it a fisherman, a head of a organization, a Council member or a scientist—the more confused about everything I become. I also recognize now more than ever the biases of individuals, the nuances of individual opinions, the complexities and diversities of “industry,” and the drastically different attitudes among individuals, which range from completely burnt out to stubbornly idealistic.

By now I am used to mentioning a person’s name to someone and getting a highly negative or highly positive reaction back. The positive reactions are great; the very negative ones can be alarming. In some cases I have relationships with the people with certain reputations, as I do with their critics. My strategy has been to be observant, open-minded and cautious, friendly with everybody because I can learn something from everybody, and to establish myself as constantly neutral. It is through recurring conversations with individuals that I can evaluate those people and their helpfulness as Fish Forum allies.

COMMUNITY SCHEDULING!

I want to coin the term ‘community scheduling’ if it doesn’t already exist. This is hard, especially for the New England Fish Forum. The dates for the first Conversations keep getting pushed back. As of now there will be two meetings early in August, at the Coastal Institute at the URI Bay Campus.

Community scheduling requires flexibility, and balancing the desire to ‘get it right’ and start off on the right foot with the recognition that things always have to start somewhere, and can’t go anywhere without a beginning. These two desires don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but they can sometimes seem to conflict. It can be frustrating to want to see some clear results for my work, and to have these meetings be well-attended and regular, but to be faced with the reality of scheduling.

Things have been a bit difficult not only because of the nature of people’s work and personal lives (geography and variable work hours keep many individuals from attending New England Fisheries Management Council and other meetings), but because of the particular timing. In June, everyone was busy either preparing for the major NEFMC meeting in Portland, where Amendment 16 to the groundfish FMP (fisheries management plan) was passed, or they were hard at work fishing (both groundfish and fixed gear have heavy seasons throughout June and the beginning of July), or they were juggling both. In early July, the groundfishing season was still in full swing, and people were weary of meetings after the exhausting haul of Portland. But now things are settling, fishermen are grappling with the decision to join a sector or the common pool category, scientists are working on the catch limits and everyone has had some time to think a bit harder about the future, anticipated problems, strategies with which to proceed, and what the real impact of Amendment 16 will be.

The first New England Fish Forum Conversations will provide the space to talk about these issues, to settle confusion and exchange ideas, fears, hopes, and offer the opportunity that doesn’t otherwise exist for those on different sides of the fence to rub shoulders. So while my plan for the timing of all this has changed and in some ways my goals for the summer have been delayed, I think (I hope) it’s been in response to real needs and on-the-ground changes.

More later,

Katie Okamoto