Team Human local, live LIVING ROOM events, all aspects

This began as a post on THforum.com site. Better version.

By all means, let’s discuss and produce local, live LIVING ROOM Team Human events, ask questions and share scripts.

In a recent Team Human podcast Doug mentioned hearing interest in live. local, independently organized Team Human events. I suspect many Team Human fans have similar images in mind. Positive ideas and offer of a FULL LIVE EVENT SCRIPT are below.

First the context. Many of you reading this, like me, have been part of multiple failed attempts at live, local sustainable gatherings of Cultural Creatives and Team Human. The last failed group of this kind I was involved in was an offshoot of Richard Wolff’s Economic Update, Democracy at Work. The Santa Monica, CA chapter, at the main library lasted only 2 meetings if I recall correctly.

Let’s skip the story of their failure and the larger patterns, now quite obvious. Let’s forward to the crucial question: What live-local group process has the best of working and being sustainable?

Best Practices in Group Process, wisdom from the 1990s, tells us two things:

1) Girls just like to have fun. This can’t be ignored because PEOPLE like to have fun, and

2) To attract, engage and sustain the attendance of Cultural Creatives LEARNING MUST OCCUR.

Points in support of getting your head around the challenge of creating, producing and sustaining such events:

- Realize Cultural Creatives and Team Human are the same audience or overlap 90%. If you don’t like this idea, check yourself and your friends. Are you an atheist Old Left solitary outlaw? Some other kind of isolated Outlaw? How’s this working for you now?

• You much pitch to and appeal to your ideal customer, Cultural Creatives. You must offer multiple benefits. A relevant theme is only one flimsy benefit.
• Be aware CCs come as much or more to MEET EACH OTHER as they do for the official topic. To Doug’s remarks on “Find the others” I can add, Cultural Creatives have very few public places to find each other now, meet each other now, for purposes of friendship, marriage, child-raising, divorce, working together. (See footnote re start-up pitch gatherings.)
• The group processes of lecturing and panels belong to a male-dominated age now long past its expiration date. On stage interviews are not the best. Why? They are too left-brain, meeting few if any needs for attendees to meet each other, for movement and for joy. (Doug’s rants are good as they are whole-brained. Few people can speak this way tho — and most of them are women.)
• What you want is not orators, nor political activists. You want Group Facilitators. Healthy Group Facilitators do not wish to control people. They wish to facilitate groups of people to learn from each other; and, learn from their own experience.
• Live events of sequences of group processes, threaded together with a theme, with a heartfelt intent and wrapper of heartfelt look and feel, were perfected in the 1990s by Insight Seminars, much imitated, seldom duplicated.
• Live, local events attractive to Cultural Creatives, organized around sequences of group processes, require written scripts. Facilitators may go off-script; yet, a structure on paper is useful. Improvising is easier if you have initial structure to build on.
• The literature of group process exercises, how to match exercises to themes of your choosing, matured in the 1990s. It’s still being added to. The best known text is Games Trainers Play. Last time I looked, many used copies of this and similar book available for one cent plus shipping online.
• If every two or four years, you must gather your forces to support local and national political candidates; or, have a giant Womens march; or, a local public emergency arises — all fine. Now you have a large contact list you can invite to opt-in these actions.

FULL SCRIPT OFFER — If you wish a script for a two hour live event, email me. healingtoolbox attt g mail com I’ll email you a sample, Title: Conveying Interpersonal Competency
thru games and exercises — Two hours minimum time needed.

Footnote re start-up pitch gatherings: 1995–2010 this was how the positive, transformational energy of Cultural Creatives has been siphoned off into corporations. Especially after the “death” of most New Age memes, no designated places for Cultural Creatives to meet each other existed.