creating connection - building resilience

Cuban night was really great fun and very interesting. We showed the film, and people watched and clapped at the end. Then we pulled tables togeher and food was served. As the eating carried on people shared their observations and insights from the film. What slowly happened was a shift from the issues directly identified in the film, to people's local concerns and interests in and around the town. Phone numbers were exchanged, people made connections with others who were doing similar work, or had mutual aquantainces, we couldn't see a web of connection, but we could feel it.

It serves as a good example of resilience in action - nothing overly complicated - just a situation created where people could focus on something together, have a chance to listen and connect in their own way to ideas and possibilities and then reconstruct their observations in the company of others without any particular agenda or forced plan. The circle of diversity, feedback and modularity seems to hold together quite well - diversity - people who attended came from a really broad spectrum of the local community, and came for different reasons, some for the fun of an evening out with a film, some came to dance (!), some came because they knew us, some came because they were interested in the Incredible Edible 'thing' but didn't know much about it - this range gave the place a buzz and provided a base of difference from which to start. In modular terms, it self-organised - people drew tables together and just began to talk together, lots of different ideas being tabled, lots of ways of constructing and connecting to them with people responding and refining other peoples suggestions, and the ideas weren't simply coming form one source or influence, I think that this leads to peole feeling they have an ownership and a control - it becomes our shared and our individual stories. Feedback was of all three the most interesting - there was none, quite deliberately we chose to leave the discussion open with the simple pointer that we will pick it up again in the new year. These things take time to synergise, they take time for people to consider and reflect and sift through before committing to action. A few weeks and we will be back in there, - nurturing emergent thinking - don't you just love it!