Wise Democracy Victoria

NEWS!

The FERNWOOD WISDOM COUNCIL has delivered its message to the community!

See their statement here

PLEASE JOIN US ON OUR JOURNEY TOWARDS GENUINE DEMOCRACY.

Take a look at the unanimous statement generated by nine randomly chosen citizens.

The Wisdom Council and Public Forum, held on Saturday March 29th at the

Fernwood Community Centre, were both great successes.

The Fernwood Wisdom Council has reported on their radical experiment in grassroots democracy! This randomly selected group of Fernwoodians spent a day and a half with a professional facilitator, listened deeply to one another about what matters in their lives and community, and formulated a statement to share with you in the hope of stimulating community conversations.

The statement begins “We resolve to reduce our footprint and strengthen our handshake” and sets out some concrete ways to make Fernwood an even more connected and vibrant community.

Fernwood Community Centre
1240 Gladstone Ave
Info: 595-2290

A Wisdom Council itook place March 28-29 in Fernwood. Randomly selected Fernwood residents have been chosen and received an invitation in February 2008. For a fortunate few this was an opportunity to participate in making history and to put Fernwood on the map in a global sense…

We held a successful information session on Wisdom Councils at the Fernwood Inn on January 28, 2008. It involved a demonstration of the Wisdom Council process, with some amazing results. Read the article here (soon to appear in the Fernwood News). Check out the community website on the Fernwood Commons, established to encourage online discussion about the Wisdom Council and the potential activities it might inspire.

Two Successful Wisdom Councils Have already been organized in Victoria

After two very successful Wisdom Councils in Victoria, our group of volunteer convenors is in the process of organizing the third Council, to be held in Fernwood. We hope to involve the entire community in organizing and hosting the wisdom council, and to join us in taking our grand experiment in participative democracy to the next level. In addition to this website, you can learn more about Wisdom Councils and the convening process by going to our Wiki Site (www.wisedemocracyvictoria.wetpaint.com). Meeting notes and decision are regularly archived on the Wiki and offers a rich resource, particularly for other groups interested in convening a Council in their own community. There’s keen interest in our exploits from far and wide…. including San Francisco, New Zealand, Germany, and Australia.

Click here to see Media Coverage.

The second Victoria Wisdom Council of nine randomly selected citizens met on June 22-23, and has delivered its message to the people.

You can see a copy of the statement here. Continue the conversation and share the statement with family and friends! Please let us know about your views on the statement by filling in an Opinionnaire® kindly provided by Forum Foundation.

You can watch a video clip of the Wisdom Councillors sharing their statement here.

If you are interested in helping to convene the next Wisdom Council please contact info(at) wisedemocracyvictoria.com, phone 598-0124 or 598-5917. Further information on planning is available here.

About 350 invitations were mailed to randomly selected residents of Victoria, offering people from all walks of life an opportunity to participate on the Council.

Here’s a short excerpt from our invitation letter to those who were randomly selected:

The purpose of the Wisdom Council is to discover the issues that are most important to ordinary Victorians, and to have those issues heard and discussed by the public and by community leaders. Members of the council discuss the issues that matter most to them, in a respectful environment where people are listening and working together for the common good.

The First Victoria Wisdom Council reported to the People of Victoria and Canada on March 31, 2007. See their statement here.

Feeling Frustrated that our Leaders are Ignoring the Most Important Issues? You are not alone! We face challenges that threaten the foundations of our civilization, like climate change, the end of cheap oil, and the almost ceaseless violence - real and simulated - in the media, but our leaders hardly seem to notice, let alone to be doing anything about it.

<People are beginning to realize that we can’t just leave things to our leaders, who most often seem to “lead” from far in the rear.

Wise Democracy Victoria is seeking ways for “we the people” to lead the leaders. Read on and learn about the possibilities for real change that will emerge when we unleash the power of genuine democracy.

Like a match in a haystack, the ‘latent energy of democracy’ is there, ready to be tapped. It only takes a few people at the right time and the right place. You can help provide the spark!

Our group has come together to engage our neighbours in a new form of public conversation, called the “Wisdom Council,” which provides an innovative approach to exploring the issues you feel are most important. The Wisdom Council is being organized by a group of Victoria citizens who care about the health of our democracy. Wisdom Councils were first used in the U.S. and have spread to Europe. Victoria is the first Canadian city to introduce this process.

WHAT IS THE VICTORIA WISDOM COUNCIL?

A Wisdom Council is a small group of randomly selected people who symbolically represent all the people of Victoria. The time commitment is short, just one Friday evening and one Saturday, during which the Council members discuss matters of their choice. A trained person facilitates the discussion, typically enabling great breakthroughs in a short time. Council members discover what issues are most important to the group; they explore possible solutions, and they create a unanimous statement summarizing their work. The statement is presented to the people at an inclusive community meeting following the Wisdom Council.

The intention is to receive the broadest possible publicity in the hope that it will generate a public discussion of the issues identified by the Council. In other communities, Wisdom Councils have often resulted in important changes for the better, and a reinvigorated sense of local democracy.

The following is a short excerpt from Tom Atlee’s excellent article “Deep Democracy and Community Wisdom“

“Communities are wise to the extent they use diversity well. The wisest know that every viewpoint represents a part of the truth, and that it is through the cooperative, creative interplay of viewpoints that the wisest, most comprehensive and powerful truths emerge. So they engage in that interplay, that dialogue - a creative controversy or consensus process that winds its way to wise public judgment.

The best government is that government which enables communities to do this - to nurture and utilize their wisdom and resources - especially their diversity - in such a way that they require less and less government.

A community that can manage itself in a wise and sustainable manner is one that has mastered democracy. They know they can’t depend on leaders (from dictators to saviours, from representatives to experts) to do things for them. They know that democratic citizens and leaders work best in partnership with each other, co-creating each other’s power. They know that leaders must be seen as living extensions of their own will and wisdom, which must be kept active. They know that passive “followership” abandons leaders, deprives them of the wisdom and creativity of the community, and opens them up to the corruptions of alienated power.

A democratic community grows beyond dependence and paternalism. In a sense, the more democratic a society is, the more it has “come of age.” Movements for democracy might even be seen as the maturation process of a culture. A mature society knows how to handle itself in dynamic context with others, drawing on its inner resources (its diverse members) and relating responsively and creatively with its environment.

The more it knows how to nurture and use the rich diversity of individual views and capabilities within it, the more wise (and democratic) a society will be. It will resist small-minded leadership and even the dictatorship of the majority. It will cherish dissent as a wise individual cherishes doubt - as a door to deeper understanding.”

WHO ARE WE?

We are non-profit group of ordinary citizens people who live in greater Victoria. All members are volunteers and citizens of Victoria. We welcome anyone who is sincerely interested in creating processes, narratives, and institutions that will “generate and encourage” wise democracy. We are associated with the international Center for Wise Democracy (www.wisedemocracy.org).

PAST EVENTS

The first Wisdom Council met on March 30 and 31, 2007, and reported to the citizens of Victoria at a public meeting on March 31st at the Fairfield New Horizons Activity Centre at 380 Cook Street. It’s
statement is posted at the Statement page.

On November 10-12 we held a Wise Democracy Forum with Tom Atlee, author of The Tao of Democracy, and Jim Rough, author of Society’s Breakthrough. (See the page on the left for more on this and other Past Events). They introduced two key innovations in democratic participation:

Dynamic Facilitation, which enables ordinary people to find solutions for “impossible” problems through creative, collaborative thinking in small groups, and Wisdom Councils, which provide a means, through Dynamic Facilitation, for ‘all the people’ of a business, a municipality, a province, or a nation to find solutions for “impossible” problems through creative, collaborative thinking. They offer a practical way for “we the people” to provide wise direction to government.

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“If we have to wait until the majority of individual citizens become better people, we’ll never make it! We need to have systems that embody higher qualities, even if the people in them don’t. It is the opposite of the systems we have now, many of which embody lower qualities even if the people in them don’t!” - Tom Atlee