Peggy Holman

It would help to name the purpose out loud. Sandra, you're the one to speak to it.

Let's hold until we've heard from the others.

Before we do that, I think it would help to hear from Audrey the way we just heard from Sandra: what questions brought her to this conversation. I'd suggest that as the rest of us check in, we speak to the same thing. Then we can open it up and see where we go, and save a few minutes at the end to ask what we've discovered and where we go from there, if at all.

And what are your edges at this point? What questions are you sitting with right now?

A bit about my background: I have been, in a sense, a chronicler, connector or gatherer of practices. What we call this keeps evolving, and I think that's exactly one of the challenges: what do we call this systemic, high-participation work that creates conditions in which people with very different points of view discover common cause and can move forward together?

Part of why this call came about is Sandra's recent paper on whole-system development, which I thought beautifully captured what the process world has learned about doing this. In 1999, and again in 2007, a couple of colleagues and I put out a collection in which a wide variety of practitioners described their practices in their own words. My selfish reason for doing that book was that I was seeking the patterns underneath, which I hear in your language, Audrey, and certainly in Sandra's. And you bring in the element of scale in a terrifically exciting way.

One observation: in just the last few months, I'm finding more and more people from these different practice communities saying, "I think we need to collaborate." I'm very intrigued by your comment that your generation is already swimming in these ways, in this mindset. A question I've asked through the years is: what if dialogue were our default mode of communication? What you said makes my heart sing, because it sounds like we may indeed be on the path to that. I'm hearing more and more conversations about connecting these practice groups, and in the world of democracy, about putting these ideas to the test both locally and globally.

I've also done a lot of work with journalists over the last 25 years. I never managed to get these ideas into the national media, but they are growing locally, and there's a wonderful network gaining traction called News Futures. They use the term "engagement" for what we're talking about, and their journalism is increasingly focused on community needs. So that raises the question for me of how the local and the global complement each other, and how we support that.

That's one of the questions I'm living in. Another is connecting these many networks so that we see ourselves in context, with a macroscopic view of these multiple systems. Those are a bit scattered, I'm afraid, but they're the questions and themes that fuel me.

I hear Audrey talking about that as well.

I was going to suggest what Sandra began: as we close, let's take a few minutes for a final reflection from each of us on the gift of taking this time together.

I'll offer what I put in the chat. I'm very intrigued by your intentionality: that a key purpose of the work is essentially to grow the work, so that the experiences themselves build civic muscle, and to do that consciously. I know our work does that too, but the consciousness, the deliberateness with which you do it, adds a regenerative quality that I appreciate. Thank you.

Thank you.