How are you using Gracious Space lately?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Karen Marsolek on December 10, 2009 at 11:46am

Oh Pat - I did the mingling activity with 200 health care professionals in Spokane. I FAILED - yippee. Well not entirely. However, I did the format almost the same as you did with us, it was a little too much. I needed to hold the form and adjust for this group. I love the activity though and will use it often. It generated a deep and juicy discussion in the room, it could have gone on for days.
Thanks for this gift.
Karen

Permalink Reply by Karma Ruder on December 10, 2009 at 11:50am

HI Pat,

I'm thinking a lot about how Gracious Space can support greater collaboration in organizations that have barriers.

Permalink Reply by patricia hughes on December 10, 2009 at 3:41pm

I just heard from Mary Hernandez in Billings, Montana with this news:

"Yesterday I received a request to facilitate a conversation between the food providers (Food Bank, school back pack program, Family Services, etc) and major funders to discuss the fact that families (particularly children) continue to go hungry in our community. There’s been a long and troublesome history of who and how food is provided to individuals/families and the tension among the food providers does not serve our community well. The caller (a Nonprofit family service provider and director of a family foundation) asked if we could use GS for this discussion!! The conversation will occur later in January with about 20 people."

And this from Jesse Peterson in Helena.

"Just a quick fyi: I've introduced Gracious Space to the public school
youth engagement organization here, and I hope to do my community
service with them. Learning GS at as young of an age as possible seems
like an incredibly impactful way of absorbing these communication
principles early on."

Keep the good news coming!

Pat

Permalink Reply by steve stapleton on February 15, 2010 at 11:07am

I just did a half-day training with 30 Americorps members who are working in schools in North King County. They are preparing for an in-service next week focusing on race and undoing institutional racism. They wanted to learn about Gracious Space as a way to help hold their conversations about race. We didn't have the conversations, but I think I was able to help them see how the elements of Gracious Space can help them hold each other when the dialogues get difficult next week.

Permalink Reply by Karma Ruder on February 16, 2010 at 2:51pm

Hi Pat,

I just did a session with the Board of Directors and the Foundation Board for a local assisted living facility. It was quite fun and people left with some good ideas. in addition, there were a couple of tough conversations that had been waiting to happen for some time that actually happened when the space opened up.

Karma

Permalink Reply by steve stapleton on January 27, 2011 at 11:32am

I just worked with another group of Americorps members last week, introducing them to Gracious Space in preparation for their work on undoing institutional racism.  We did several activities including the name tag with a characteristic of Gracious Space mingle, "step into the circle if...", burning questions wheel.  When we were debriefing the activities one woman said, "I felt like that was a silly exercise."  Then after an hour of deep conversation with the whole group about identity, she came back and said that maybe there was more to the exercise than she initially thought.  It goes to show, "it only takes a small opening to create a space for profound transformation when using Gracious Space."