[Oe List ...] Response to Carolyn Antenen

[David Walters]

Carolyn Antenen  wrote:

(David’s response in orange)

Thanks for your witness. It was interesting to understand more about your perspective.

 

Obviously each person experiences reality differently. Reading a witness about how one person 

experiences a situation does not necessarily tell how things are, only how that person

experiences it.

 

I think it is important to respect Marge and Margaret's witnesses for the telling of their own perspective.

I have never tried to anything other than to honor both of them. I speak out of gratitude for the impact that have had on my life. 

 

It is inappropriate to publicly dispute or contradict such a thing. After all, each person's perspective becomes their story. I have not sought to “dispute or contradict” anything that they said in their witnesses. Maybe what you are saying is that you do in fact ”dispute or contradict” what they have borne witness to.  

 

The Board of Directors has tried to respect the privacy of former staff members and to discuss changes

only in a structural manner, avoiding details on problems in operations that could be construed as individual  criticism.

What is the point of causing embarrassment to colleagues that we respect and wish to treat in a dignified manner? I and some of my other colleagues around the country would be interested in how you and the board have former staff with “diginity”. The manner in which they were fired resembled the HR practices of a multinational corporation rather than a nonprofit concerned about the human factor in development.

 

Much of your discourse sounds so personal in nature, that I am unable to appropriately comment. I reacting to the pain of colleagues in personal, then so be it! I am one of TWC.

 

I certainly appreciate that the changes at ICA USA may be painful and confusing to many of our long time supporters.

“Confused” does not begin to described my response to the actions of your board. 
As with anything in Life, many others would see the same situation from not only a different viewpoint, but all together 

differently.  

 

As to your statement "Then to sit and watch as a small but otherwise trusted group of colleagues making some awfully inane 

decisions about the future in order deal with an imbalanced balance sheet." I can strongly say that the balance sheet

was not why the ICA USA Board made the decisions it made in October. If the deficit in the balance was not the reason for the firings, then please tell us what was the rationale.

 

Perhaps you have not stayed fully aware or  have significant gaps in knowledge of ICA USA's structure in 2006-7

from the pre 1984 era?  You may not know that the staff has been fully salaried with benefits, hired to meet the mission of a nonprofit organization? I have read all of the 990 returns for ICA and EI for the five years preceding the firings. It is interesting that the 2206 returns are not available on the web. My analysis of the data in these returns causes my to believe that the board has not been completely transparent to the rest of us with its actions.

 

Thus accountability would be connected to performance and outcomes. ICA USA answers to its program recipients, donors, the IRS, and various constituents.

 

We honor our legacy but strive for modern best practices on all levels of our organization.  Please explain these best practices and how you are implementing them.

 

By chance have you followed the communications that the Board has sent out since October?  We are working hard to help colleagues understand not only the need

to change our staffing model, but new directions and ways to participate. I would be interested to understand where we've mis communicated with you, so that we can

do a better job. I certainly have read everything on your website and all of the emails posted to the ICA and OE lists. It is not so much what you and other boards members have communicated  

but rather what you have not communicated. 

I was unsuccessful at reaching you at the phone number 334-222-7062 that is listed under your name. My new number is 344 370 0173, Perhaps you would be interested in sharing how you've used EI/ICA methods

at the Living Legacy event in October?  It appears that you and the staff and present staff have decided to use the “Living Legacy event” as a lets-all-get-together-and-feel-good-soiree to provide cover for the inane and insane actions of your board. I will not be attending..

 

 

David Walters

 

PS I don’t know if you ever took RS1, but you might ask Jay about the use of the term “floating”. It certainly describes you and the board. 

 

The following is my witness on the earthrise list to which she was resonding to :  
Thirty-seven years I boarded a night owl flight from Atlanta to Chicago. Someone picked me up at O’Hare and drove me to a strange place in the middle of the westside ghetto. I woke the next morning to sound of a gong and some idiot screaming, “Praise the Lord! Christ is Risen. With only a few hours sleep it was all I could do to make the appropriate response, “He is Risen indeed!” I felt like a stranger in a strange land. Thus began a long journey that I am still own. 

 

After breakfast, I was assigned to a team charged with converting a sad looking, dirty, grimy space that had once been a gymnasium into a meeting to seat five hundred souls that would come together a week later for the summer research assembly. We were supposed to do this with little to no budget. All went well until the last day when Joe Mathews walked in and told us that we needed something on the north wall. He said wouldn’t it be great if we had a big set of triangles to symbolize the three parts of the Local Church Model. It was to late to go out at that time of night (Lowe’s and Home Depot had not yet been invented). So we scoured the basements and attics of several buildings and came up with enough to build a huge mobile suspended against the wall. This next morning Joe was pleased. 

 

That week taught me what can happen when a group of committed human beings can accomplish when they decide to take what have been given to carry a specific task. Over the next twelve years as an order member and movement colleague, I got to participate in making the same kind of miracles happen over and over again. This my first lesson in team work 

 

About half way through the summer program I was standing out in the courtyard one evening with two or three other people when Joe walked and joined the conversation. Someone began to tell him about the trouble everyone was having getting the little canteen. It seems that the colleague assigned to run it would not show up at the appointed time to open up. About the time that Joe was explaining the he had assigned this fellow to run it and not much else for the summer, up he walks. Joe turned around and became his former army persona and addressed this guy down with is colorful language and by saying: “If you want to be a son-of-a-bitch – go somewhere else and be one. But you don’t get to 

Be one around me.” He then stooped over and began chatting with a young girl that had been tugging on his pants leg trying to get his attention. This was first real lesson existential style and radical integrity. 

 

Marge Philbrook witness several months ago was painful for me to read. Here was some who cared for me all those years ago when I trying to figure out where was and what this new way living was all about. What was so painful was not so much the way she had been treated along with all her other colleagues who had been so shamefully fired, but rather the decision who some very old colleagues had decided not to care for her and other dismissed staff members. She talked about how people would come to conferences in the Kemper building and express appreciation over the gracious hospitality. She bemoan the fact that was now gone. This is the place where some many learned about what means to human being engaged it creating the future.

 

Then a couple weeks ago I got an email from Margaret Aiseayew. She too wrote about the pain she felt relative to what has happened in the Kemper building over the last nine months. Here is another colleague who had invested so many years not only carrying the tasks she had been assigned but caring so deeply for all around her. Then to sit and watch as a small but otherwise trusted group of colleagues making some awfully inane decisions about the future in order deal with an imbalanced balance sheet.

 

I have thought about Marge and Margaret a lot the past few days. I thought about the bumbling colleague that Joe had chewed out. About the board that had refused to act out of the common wisdom and methodological prowess we had all learned together. About a president who refuses to change course, about a college student who kills thirty something people and then himself last spring. What underlies all this it seems to me is what happens when people refuse to deal with life? 

 

Kirkegard taught us that what we despair over is not the situation we find our selves in, but the relation ship we take to our given situation. Jesus expressed the same thing when he told the man to pick up his bed and walk. We can all live our lives or let our lives consume us. The word about is we can decide to live our lives –  or we can even decide to  REALLY REALLY LIVE OUR LIVES.        

 

Marge and Margaret have both decided in the midst of their pain to go ahead and live their lives and we can too! 

 

I am David Walters. I took a PLC course and RS-I in the spring of 1970 and worked in the summer program on the Local Church.  I attended the Academy that fall. . I worked on the Social Processes the next summer. I helped finish up with town Meeting in the spring of 1978 and went to help start thee Gibson HDP. I stayed until it ended in 1980. Since then I have been living in Andalusia, AL and continue to use what I learned with EI and the ICA in community projects and my local church

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