Sharing a White Paper of one of Conflict Resolution Alliance members, Jerry Clay, and Zoe Payne.
Message from Jerry: Get informed and get involved below: if you like what you read, sign our petition and subscribe to stay updated on our progress and to find out how you can help us reinvent government.
In order to solve houselessness, we must ensure every stakeholder–people experiencing being houseless, the nonprofit agencies working to assist them, the government, and citizens in communities who are impacted by houselessness–has a seat at the table when formulating a solution.
This can be accomplished through a process called “Partnering.”
In partnering, every stakeholder must attend a workshop designed to build a shared solution for the project. Workshop facilitators encourage the various parties to form relationships that act as a basis for collective brainstorming and problem-solving. At the end of the workshop, the group details their agreed-upon solutions in a document known as a “compact”–an aspirational agreement that provides specifics as to how the group will carry those ideas forward.
Unlike our legal system, which assumes everyone coming into the system has access to the necessities of navigating it, partnering doesn’t require externalities like lawyers and paralegals or an in-depth understanding of law. Instead, it merely asks for participation, and its non-adversarial approach allows disparate groups to come together to problem-solve without concerns about power imbalances.
It’s time government departments went through a partnering process with all groups both using and providing houseless services so that real solutions can happen together.
I have been involved with partnering for over 20 years, and have worked with groups ranging from the Hawaii visitor industry to the Hawaii State Bar Association. To further explain how partnering is far better suited than our legal system for addressing civic problems, I will expand on the nature of partnering and its unique ability to solve the homeless problem.
For a brief, preliminary attempt at identifying stakeholders for the houseless issue, we would want to include representatives of various houseless communities on Oahu; nonprofit stakeholders, such as service organizations identified by the Department of Housing and Urban Development; and government bodies that either provide services or whose decisions impact the houseless community. The list should also consist of individuals from the houseless community as well as the Tourism and Business industries that encourage the houseless sweeps. This is an incomplete list, and we welcome additions and corrections.
Once the stakeholders are assembled, the partnering process then has a facilitator lead a retreat to find solutions to the houseless problem. While facilitators do not usually offer opinions or ideas, they do supply procedures by which stakeholders can brainstorm, articulate and communicate ideas. By ensuring that ideas come from the stakeholders themselves, no particular group is left feeling as though they’ve been pressured to compromise.
Please go to http://himediation.com/reinventing-government to read the full story.
