The Eugene Permaculture Guild (EPG) seeks to educate the community and ourselves in the principles of sustainable living or ‘regenerative design’ as it is now often called. We arrange workshops, workparties, potlucks, an annual Plant and Seed Swap, and jointly sponsor many other sustainability-related presentations and events during the course of a year - including the annual Bioregional Permaculture Gathering. The Eugene Permaculture Guild steering committee is a grassroots, all-volunteer group largely concerned with helping nurture and steward these activities within and around Lane County, Oregon.
We meet on the second Monday evening of every month. The minutes from recent meetings will give you a solid flavor or our current concerns.
Participation in the steering committee is open to everyone. If you are curious about joining us, please read the following which will give you a useful sense of the type of people we are. Then, if our passions, concerns and sensibility resonate with you, please find instructions at the foot of this page about taking the next step. We are keen to encourage fresh faces and energy in our midst. In very recent years, the ‘permacultural life’ finds itself fast gravitating from the outermost fringes of mainstream culture and acceptance, toward its very center, and the resulting demands and opportunities for playing a stewardship role are blossoming.
Some context, then. The unofficial motto of the EPG steering committee might read: “A friend to all and enemy of none.” For about a decade now, we have been meeting each month to explore how we might steward a gentler understanding of a life well-lived. As you might hope and expect, the character of our meetings tends to model our vision for the larger community and world of which we are a part: our own lives tend to embody life-affirming trends; we are a deeply egalitarian tribe; we acknowledge that all are steering; we are open to everyone; we focus on the local; we emphasize positivism, cooperation, and care for the Earth and People. We have always naturally gravitated toward consensus-based decision-making.
The highly egalitarian nature of our group, our lack of formal structure, the easy and friendly informality which typifies our interactions, the comfort and trust we feel, the considerate and benevolent manner with which we reach decisions, and the solid, practical effectiveness with which we are now able to approach our work, is no happenstance. The maturity of our group culture derives not only from the ideals we hold, and a persistent clarity of intent shared by our many participants through the years, but also particularly from a conscious effort to experientially explore co-intelligence in ways that are necessarily challenging and hard-won.
How do normal, flawed souls stumble into humane, respectful, empowering and effective collaboration? At what point does organizational structure, or lack of it, create big headaches in the way we are interacting? What types of meeting format work best for us? What happens when friends blindly but persistently co-opt the group’s social contract? What mistakes have other individuals and groups made that we can learn from? What social tools exist which allow us to address frustrations through our work? We have only so much time and energy, so how do we account for the whole picture? Where’s the balance between inclusion and discrimination? Where do we draw lines? Such are the concerns of social permaculture.
As we have had to engage with these issues, and many, many more through the years, so the wisdom of our group interaction has morphed accordingly. We have been helped by the presence in our neighborhood of some highly experienced group facilitation trainers, whose know-how and skills we have drawn down upon deeply.
Although steering committee participants tend to be keenly self-aware individuals - such is a typifying characteristic of our tribe - formal responsibility for keeping an eye on steering committee process itself is carried by our ‘process arts group’. The remit of this small working group might best be described as ensuring that the larger group dynamic evolves in as healthy a manner as possible. In other words, the process art group’s role is essentially ’suprapolitical’ - to help interaction and decision-making evolve as smoothly and fairly as possible, while remaining impartial to any result. To that end, the ‘process arts group’ witnesses, researches, supports and proffers suggestions on how the steering committee might better communicate and function. (The process arts group has no more formal power than any other working group within the steering committee - its recommendations stand or fall according to consensus.) The process arts group has also enlarged its education efforts to include the broader bioregional community - it recently played a key role in the public workshop, “Meeting Facilitation with Care and Skill”, taught by nationally-regarded group process consultant, Tree Bressen.
But if the maturity and inclusivity of our modest experiment in beauty and truth affords us, on the one hand, enormous potential in the way of positive evolvability, on the other it also demands a degree of discrimination with regard to how people join us. Our group culture functions well: we would like to encourage and support this trend. To that end, the steering committee has agreed to a simple protocol for itself. As a group, we have agreed by consensus:
- to a formal facilitation function*; and for this ‘process stewardship’ role to be managed by at least two people in any meeting – co-facilitation.
- to honor this function on an ongoing basis, with goodwill, constructive feedback, and resources where necessary.
- to make facilitation training available on an as-needed basis for ourselves and, where possible, the public at large
- to the Rule of Three**.
- to a basic meeting protocol which includes but is not limited to:
- agenda planning
- a brief (5 min) end-of-meeting feedback evaluation of meeting process
- minute-taking with minutes made publicly available
- that the process art group will continue to evolve, refine, document and research techniques and ground-rule agreements that foster healthy group culture, reflecting feedback from steering committee members.
*The role of facilitator: A facilitator is the servant of the group, the steward of the process so that others can mainly focus on content. It is a neutral role, a service role, not an authority role.
**The Rule of Three: A person must attend three consecutive meetings in order to become a decision making member. At the first meeting she/he may only listen to the group; at the second consecutive meeting she/he may participant in discussion; and the third consecutive meeting she/he may participate in discussion and be part of the consensus process.
(Here is a working document from the process arts group outlining further potential iterations of our social contract, which may yet, in whole or part, make it to a steering committee discussion or decision.)
Put another way, the highly informal ease of the steering committee is both afforded and underpinned by a self-aware and conscientious attentiveness to flow, with recognition of our group’s need to consciously steward itself now formally acknowledged and empowered within the group gestalt as a ‘facilitation function’, wotevah that utterly confusing mishmash of gobbledygook means. In practice, to most outsiders entering the group for the first time, we simply appear relaxed, respectful, conversational, fun, pragmatic and wholeheartedly welcoming. In a very real sense, our small group’s social contract embodies the higher values of the community from which we are drawn. Done well, groups make wiser decisions than individuals. Most participants who engage with us are not unwise, and are naturally good-mannered, and so fit right in without any ado. Hence, we tend to be largely concerned with the spirit rather than the letter of the law.
We meet on the second Monday of each month, with working groups meeting between times. Should you wish to explore participating in a Eugene Permaculture Guild steering committee meeting, please call Bryna Livingstone at: 541–345–1586.
Thank you for your interest in the Eugene Permaculture Guild.