Voices of Humanity

Thank you for these excellent reference documents.
There may be 4 more individuals from the SF Unitarian-Universalists (SFUU) attending our 6 pm Thursday Mtg :

2 UUSF high school women 18 and 19 years old who will be attending the Unitarian UN Youth Conference in NYC in April
Melvin Starks, co-leader of UUSF Social Justice movies
Liz Cormier, chair of the UUSF United Nations Committee

See you Thursday at 6 pm.
I am bringing Ellie, Komai, my 23 year old cousin from Japan, who is staying with me for a month to develop her ear for English and her conversational English as she observer American ways.
Mary Jane Mikuriya

-----Original Message-----
From: InterMix <questions@intermix.org>
To: MaryJane Mikuriya <mikuriya@aol.com>
Sent: Thu, Mar 6, 2014 6:38 pm
Subject: [sfcoo] Re: Formal Consensus

The following message was posted on InterMix in the 'SF Bay Area Council of Organizations' forum, where you are a member:

Re: Formal Consensus

In Taos, NM, I was part of the Taos Peace House. We also organized a major city-wide peace event: Taos Peace Week. We used Formal Concensus to help us coordinate and organze. At times, we had around 25+ people involved. What makes Formal Consensus so effective is the processes it uses to help create concensus decisions... the facilitator, the time keeper, the agenda planner, how proposals are dealt with, etc. Below is a link that goes into these details. Thousands of groups around the U.S. and the world use this technique. While we may just have 3/4 majority voting, using some of the processes of Formal Consensus could improve our decision making process. Onwards - Tom Ray Here is some link about the formal consensus process: http://www.learningmethods.com/pdf/on%20conflict%20and%20consensus.pdf http://ase.tufts.edu/coalition/tsad/iv.html Most people do not understand what concensus means, or even have experienced it. Some have not had good experiences with a concensus process, probably because it was not structured in a formal way with guidelines & rules, much like the Robert's Rules of Order. One thing though when a group decision has been made through a formal consensus process, the group coordination and organizing is better because everyone in the group is going with the flow of the decision, and it helps prevent creating fractions within a group. Here is some thoughts on consensus from Starhawk, a world-wide activist and organizer: http://www.starhawk.org/activism/trainer-resources/consensus.html by Trilight Tom Ray 2014-03-07 02:35 # Group: SF Bay Area Council of Organizations Subgroup: Core Collaborators

To respond to this post, log into the Group Forum, or simply reply to this message. If you have problems, write to the moderator at sfcoo-owner@go.intermix.org. To block emails from the Voices of Humanity social media, click here.
SF Bay Area Council of Organizations