Arkansas Does Neighboring Right
On February 19th and 20th, I (Ian) had the incredible opportunity to join our rockstar GNE facilitator, the Rev. Jessica Wright, to co-lead a training in Little Rock, Arkansas. The training was for a group of 6 United Methodist clergy and conference staff who are now the newest members of our Faith-Based facilitation team!
The whole training was an immense joy to be a part of. I left energized and only more confident that our network of facilitators across the country will continue to live and breathe ABCD and neighboring. As with any Neighboring Movement workshop, our goal was to do as little lecturing as possible and to facilitate as much interaction between the participants as we could! If nothing else, we wanted these future facilitators to experience what it feels like to lead our materials with intentionality and hospitality.
We started off with the Head, Hands, and Heart game to make visible our hidden gifts to one another. We found a multitude of gifts and passions in no time: fly fishing, clogging. cooking, bread baking, a fascinating multiplication table trick, writing effective press releases, helping marginalized women dress for success, empowering people to do meaningful work, soul care, natural disaster response, sociocratic decision-making, and reproductive health.
After covering some of the basics of The Good Neighbor Experiment (GNE), neighboring, and ABCD, we came back to the sticky notes we had labeled with our gifts and grouped them based on the connections we saw. There were natural connections around cooking and baking, outdoor recreation, and holistic health. This process brought to life some of the key ABCD realizations that are better visualized than read about.
To further hone in these points, we brought out two of our favorite games: “Social Capital Jenga” and the “We Can” game! Even though I have facilitated these games many times before, I still walked away with some new revelations thanks to the insights of our new facilitators. We found that the small group of church people in attendance could collectively do just about any task needed to run a functioning neighborhood. Of course, this realization could be very empowering, but a couple of facilitators pointed out that church leaders and congregants often stretch themselves way too thin and burn themselves out trying to do every task under the sun themselves. The true empowerment, they said, would be learning to shift some of the tasks from the “we can” pile to the “we know who can” pile, asking for help and empowering others outside the church to take action on important work.
On Day 2, our new facilitators put all of their learnings into practice. We had them each facilitate an activity from our faith-based curriculum for the rest of the group and encouraged them to add their own flair. Each facilitator sprinkled in their own gifts and learnings to help us do the curriculum in a more lively way- from participatory song to interactive use of The Neighboring Movement playing cards!
We closed the workshop by going through our ReCycle discernment tool together. We pieced together a story from our time together centering on hope, possibility, excitement, collaboration, and alignment, and used that story to find mini-experiments in which we would each take our learnings out into the world.
The mini-experiments helped clarify a clear sense of direction. Some of us will be meeting new neighbors where we live before the end of the month, connecting neighbors by email, or organizing events with them. Others will take some of the gift discovery and relationship-building activities into our own churches and neighborhoods. Still others focused on maintaining the internal connection between facilitators. One facilitator, Danita, even had an idea to create a community punch card to incentivize her church members and neighbors to act and buy local!
The wonderful hospitality of Amy Ezell, the Arkansas Conference of the UMC, and Argenta UMC tied the whole week together. It was a true blessing to be able to learn a little about Arkansas and to spend so much quality time with such good people. Our new facilitators add yet another dose of eagerness and excitement about ABCD, neighboring, and practicing faith in community to our already wonderful network.
The best part is that this is only the first of several potential regional trainings this year. The Arkansas UMC has plans to use what they learned to recruit 20+ churches that will go through GNE. This training also helped us compile some key activities that we want to use to train facilitators in lots of new places around the country. There is hardly a better feeling than seeing people find life and joy and possibility in the materials that we find so life-giving. We are elated to be able to pass these tools on!
