Solidarity Workshop

Over the weekend, Jenny and I facilitated a two-hour solidarity workshop for a group of political activists. We found the participants smart, open and willing. We started the workshop by identifying such grounds of solidarity as whether and how we connect with other people, whether we have common agreements and common objectives with them, whether we feel we can contribute and how we feel about others' contributions, whether we have a sense of trust, whether we think conflicts can be worked out, how strong our own sense of self is, and so on.

Afterward we introduced exercises to work with the grounds we had identified. We broke the group into two smaller groups. The groups were given the following instructions:

First exercise –
     Group A: "Create an artwork about elephants."
     Group B: "Decide together how to use your time."

Second exercise –
     Group A: "Decide together how to use your time."
     Group B: "Write some haikus about groups."

Third exercise –
     Group A: "Choose one of Group B's haikus to be integrated into the artwork. Then witness the process as group B integrates the haiku into the artwork."
     Group B: "Witness Group A choosing the haiku and then integrate the haiku into the artwork."

The last exercise was the juiciest, as each group watched the material they had created being worked over by the other group. While Jenny and I found the discoveries made during and after the exercises quite interesting, what struck us the most was how important communication was, particularly communicating respect, consideration, and having a priority of including others in consensus. Along those lines, in the wrap-up one participant suggested to us that we might have contacted the group before the workshop and dialogued about what was going to happen in order to create something that was more collaborative and directly tailored to the needs of the group. We thought it was a great idea and would consider the suggestion for the future.