There's a lot to "unpack" here as they say. Not the least of which is trying to do what has not been done before. And there are a myriad of components. Thinking of a co-op...modified, somehow.

I'm a scatterbrain! When I read this several threads came to mind and I'm not at all sure how to braid them together or even if it's worthwhile or relevant to this discussion.

Louis Raths was a student of John Dewey and a long time professor of Education at New York University. He is credited with formulation of Values Clarification. The Book Values And Teaching lays out Raths' ideas.

"Persons have experiences; they grow and learn. Out of experiences may come certain general guides to behavior. These guides tend to give direction to life and may be called values. Our values show what we tend to do with our limited time and energy."

So Rath's and his collegues were less concerned with values as they were the processes of valuing; i.e. what are the most effective processes for obtaining values.

From the best I can tell Values Clarification in schools had a short life span because the views seemed anti-traditional or hippysh*t. Naturally, I think Raths' approach appeals to me ;-)

So the process of valuing came first to mind. Then I thought of a vignette in Ruth Benedict's "Patterns of Culture:

"A Chief of the Digger Indians, as the Californians call them, talked to me a great deal about the ways of his people in the old days..."

"One day, without transition, Ramon broke in upon his descriptions of grinding mesquite and preparing acorn soup. 'In the beginning,' he said, 'God gave to every people a cup, a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life.'..."They all dipped in the water,' he continued, 'but their cups were different. Our cup is broken now. It has passed away.'"

"...[H]e had in mind the loss of something that had value equal to that of life itself, the whole fabric of his people's standards and beliefs. There were other cups of living left, and they held perhaps the same water, but the loss was irreparable. It was no matter of tinkering with an addition here. lopping off something there. The modeling had been fundamental, it was somehow all of a piece. It had been their own."

One of the central problems with ideas about values is the intersection of values and culture.

Benedict's book is probably regarded as a "classic." Published in 1934 and remarkably accessible, the book, or at least certain categorizations about the book, are offered to today's students as "what not to think." Culture is a much disputed construct. But where I find Benedict so worthwhile is her central questioning about the relationship between individual human beings and the culture in which they live. The critics of Benedict seem to downplay Benedict's insight into the mutableness of culture and her steady commitment to promoting peace among peoples.

So I'm a fan of two old-fashioned approaches to the sorts of problems you're thinking about.

On the one hand I view the formulation of values not as a process of inculcation, something poured (or knocked) into them from the outside, but rather a process of reasoning as an "inside job." Mary Catherine Bateson wrote a book "Composing a Life" and that expresses what I'm talking about. People live their lives in a "culture" whatever that is. And while culture seems to be "somehow all of one piece" cultures adapt and change, and in some sense are composed, but not at the level of any individual in that culture.

I see the Acholi cup not as "passed away" as Benedict's interlocutor spoke of his culture, but the cup needs repairing. The kids of Opok Farms are a part of that cup. Their repair is essential to it. The formation of values is a part of the repair of the wider culture, but also the broader acts of restoration are part of their lives too.

The way we do our lives here in the USA is a faulty cup. The image that comes to mind is trying to drink from the bucket a steam shovel. But even within this broken culture, the lives of people all over the world affect us.

Especially looking at change and adaptation, it seems that valuing and culture are at different levels. And a "global consciousness" for lack of a better term to describe the sorts of human adaptation we need to do together is at yet another level.

I've babbled too long already, so I'll just point to two articles you may find interesting: The first Regarding a New Humanism by Salvador Paniker. The Second Time Loops by Paul Davies (There's something shorter I read within the last day or so by him, but I can't find it).

In sum it seems your project, and the related project of Peter Hurst deal with the relationship of three related creations: values on an individual level, cultural repair, and Global or Planetary consciousness. What's important is understanding the relationships. In understanding them--how they work together--the differences of logical type or level are important to keep straight. I also think that the assumptions about our three fates: past, present, future, may need to be altered--the reason I linked to Paniker's and Davies articles. Relentlessly shallow as my analysis is, I imagine the universe in creation--certainly our understanding of it--rather than "created."

Linda said:

I think it was Peter Drucker who said something like if it can't be measured it can't be managed. How do we measure progress in this work so that we know what needs to be tweeked when?

I recently came across this HBS article called Six Rules for Effective Forecasting which I think might provide some insights to you about what you can effectively map/measure. As the article is subtitled:

The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present.

Still trying to come up with the exact "here's how it applies to you" but I think there's a there there.

This is an interesting thread, but one to which I can add little of any theoretical value. I do though enjoy the apposite suggestions John makes from so many unexpected quarters.

When thinking of the child-headed households, however, I am reminded of a couple of scenarios that I think have relevance.

The first relates to a young man I used to supervise in the mid 1970s, when working as a probation officer in Nottingham (I'll call the young man "Len"). On the surface, he was all that was ever intended by the phrase "feckless youth": 18 years old, permanently unemployed when not committing petty burglaries, without true friends and without any ambition and hope. I had supervised Len for for almost two years and we got on pretty well, largely because in his very large, fatherless family it was the 14-16 year old boys who were the principal reprobates and his younger brothers (one of whom I also supervised) had already taken over his mantle in the family as the burglars-in-chief.

I had almost got Len to consider seriously making a fresh start away from his family when, after months of non-arrest, he was accused of stealing a wallet from one of my colleagues when he came to report to see me at my office. I was always very sceptical about the case against him. The wallet was stolen from an office in a corridor he could not easily have visited in the time available and the wallet and its contents were not recovered. The police said Len has incriminated himself by saying somthing about the expiry date of one of the credit cards but that seemed pretty vague and might have been said by Len in the hope that if he cooperated a bit, he might be freed on bail.

Well, he was released on bail and remained out of custody even though he was committed for trial to the Crown Court, since the alleged offence, if proved, would trigger several other matters for which 18 months before he had been given suspended sentences.

On the assumption that he would be found not guilty, I made progress in arranging for Len to go to a Probation Home (with its own farm) in Kent (150 miles away) where I had spent two happy weeks during my own probation officer training. We drove down there together and I left him happily settling in. He liked the idea of working with animals and was vowing to actually try to make a success of this job. He even wrote to me to confirm that he really getting stuck into his new job - despite the early mornings.

A week before his trial I was contacted by the Probation Home with a less sanguine assessment. Len hadn't done anything wrong, but they didn't feel he was suited to the experience they were offering. They'd put him on a train home.

I was called as a prosecution witness - against my will, because I always thought it unlikely that he stole the wallet. Apart from any real evidence against him, he denied the offence, and if there one positive thing I could say about Len, it was that was usually truthful! When he was found guilty, the only non-custodial option that might have saved him from imprisonment had just broken down and he was given a three year sentence: 15 months for the theft of the wallet and 21 months activation of previous suspended sentences.

So what's the relevance of this tale? I think it says much about personal investment in a community. While Len thought he'd like to join this new community, it probably had more to do with his desire to please me, my own "haloed" memories of the happy time I'd spent there, and the pressure of the impending court case in getting Len to commit himself to an uncharacteristically positive decision.

In the end, a city kid with no history of work (or success) failed to succeed in working on a farm where he knew no-one and could turn to no-one for support. He'd acquiesced in a decision, but the decision hadn't really been taken by him.

The second scenario is one related by AS Neill in his book about progressive teaching methods at Summerhill school, where he was the head teacher. Here, he had just caught up with a disturbed and unhappy young pupil who was throwing stones at the glass windows. Instead of falling into a censoring, discipling mode, AS Neal picked up some stones and starting throwing them at the window as well. That proved to be a decisive moment in getting that young person to feel that their point of view was being taken seriously. The cost in terms of broken school windows was nothing when compared with the benefit of beginning to engage positively with the young person concerned.

Sorry about the length of this post. What I'm trying to point to is the isolation of child-headed households and the need for them to be more than simply consulted about the community. They need a greater stake. This might be provided by letting them decide to a large extent who the older membes of the community are to be. These older members will need to be chosen with a view to their fulfilling almost a family role in relation to the children. After all, the children don't have the depth of relationship normally found in more extended family groups.

The children need to be listened to even when they may be asking for something older people might be reluctant to grant them, and if it thought necessary to deny their requests, the fullest of explanations over the longest of times may be required to retain their commitment to a project that will certainly fail if it does not command their eventual support.

edit to correct Neill and Summerhill

I want to thank all of you for all of the brain fodder you have given me. I read and find potential solutions and sit back and say "What if..." and look and read again. When I did my MS in Chemistry, a failed experiment meant, a broken test tube or my personal time lost. This giant experiment is much more fragile. I fret over each consideration.

I too am coming to the understanding in myself that this venture in participatory research is mainly participation of the individuals who will be living their lives in this village. I am seeing my role in this more as the resource (ทรัพยากร) person who helps provide information for each additional step and the person who looks at what is happening with a "critical" eye to perhaps steer their attention to something particular that seems to have started off course.

So, I do endless what-ifs in my mind so that if the time comes, I have a (hopefully) better than even chance that I at least considered it and have some relevant information stored away to help deal with the quandary.

Wish I had had this much "wisdom", foresight, consideration, planning ... I don't know what to call it ... when I was younger and helping my own son to navigate the channels of growing up and having to make HIS own decisions rather than do that parental thing of trying to make the decision for him. He turned out to be a great man with a heart that never ends and has developed into a man that I love (and like) and respect. And it all happened in spite of me...a true testimony to the resilience and wisdom of children.

Thank you again from the very bottom of my heart. Please keep chiming in ideas that you have because, for my role in this project, I need all of the ideas and wisdom each of you can share. What is the line? "It takes a village to raise a child." The logical extension to that here is that it takes a world community to build a village.

I still haven't figured out how to use ONet! I knew that I had written my post that's here, but couldn't remember where it was when I was looking for it. Today I checked my profile and noticed "Deep Community" and wondered what that was all about--D'oh!

Sadly,what I wrote doesn't makes much sense. Linda's question: "How do we measure progress in this work so that we know what needs to be tweeked when?" is so important . And in my scattered way I was trying to unpack the construct of "progress."

This is the part of Linda's post that caught my attention:

"It is about understanding how everything is interconnected - what happens to you, changes what happens to me; what you do to nature changes nature on the other side of the globe. Good concepts I think but not your typical "kid" mentality.

Where do we learn abut those concepts? Where do we learn good and bad and right and wrong? Mostly, I think (I think a lot these days and realize how little I know.), we learn them from our families. From those people who have gone ahead of us and experienced more and hopefully developed some wisdom. Sometimes those families are extended - sometimes all the way to a community - but that part is seldom recognized. How do we have children teaching values when they have little experience with living and no remaining role models?"

I mentioned values clarification because I think understanding values as a process is a better way of imagining how values are formed than is the construct of role models.

I don't know; I'm not there, never traveled to Uganda, but my opinion is that the kids have a map in their minds of their community. They are very facile with the map because in their hearts they know they should be represented, yet what they feel most is an absence of their representation.

David gets at this about kids in a different context: "I'm trying to point to is the isolation of child-headed households and the need for them to be more than simply consulted about the community."

Something that's probably obvious about me, especially to David and Linda, is that I have a hard time keeping things straight. I know that and wonder why that is? In this case I was thinking of the situation of former child soldiers and their isolation. I was thinking about an individual and the relationship to the broader community and the relationship between the two is what seemed so hard to keep straight.

One idea about values is they are something the community shares and which are transfered by modeling and punishments to kids. But in this case the war has caused a tremendous rent in fabric of the community, in some ways the community values are disordered and in disrepair. So where does that leave the former child soldiers and what of the community? That's not how Linda asked these sorts of questions, but sort of a paraphrase I was using to understand her questions.

Two points I wanted to make were: 1) Kids are not passive vessels to receive values. Rather I think it better to understand that personal values come from a process of valuing. 2) The active process of valuing as an individual is influenced by society in general, and in turn influences community values.

Joining those two points together the bigger point is to notice that values aren't a thing poured into people's heads.

The still larger vision of a "change in perception" that Buddhist economics entails seems global in it's implications.

So there's individuals, their community, the world community all involved with perceptions and changes of perception, and I'm not keeping things straight; especially as it regards the issue of measurement of progress.

And she talks about Participatory Action Research, "instead of looking at a path that is a straight line from A to Z with all of the intermediate (B,C,D....) questions to be answered, it is more like wandering around in a spiral."

That bit about the spiral shape got me thinking about logical typing.

Gregory Bateson wrote quite a lot about logical typing (here's a brief article about Russell's Paradox that points to what's meant by logical types). There's a wonderful chapter in Bateson's book, "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity" entitled "From Classification to Process."

I think Bateson is really important when it comes to thinking academically about social science. LOL the chapter seems important enough that I would actually type it out for you or get it to you in some way. I'll spare you now, but suggest that Bateson was onto something very important about how to keep complicated problems of hierarchies--individual, community world community--straight in studying.

Linda is concerned that the perception-change that's needed doesn't seem like "typical kid mentality." My hunch is these kids in question are perhaps closer to such a perception change as a result of the traumatic events of their experience than a middle-aged American like me is.

William Faulkner's line from "Requiem for a Nun": "The past is never dead. It's not even past." has always intrigued me. Partly that's because it's so often used in reference to the American South. I lived in the South moving in 1963 and then moving above the Mason Dixon line again in 1971--from ages 8-16 formative years. People outside the USA might not comprehend how the idea of the South is so strange and important in America. In any case the quote in context isn't about the South, but about an individual's relationship to the past.

Linda's post asks such deep and complicated questions. The theoretical aspects are so intriguing to me. Time is important to the paradigm that Bateson presents. Since my mind had wandered from the kids to the community, to the whole world, I thought to myself what about the universe? That's where the suggestion about Paul Davies came to mind. I did later find the article I was looking for but couldn't find. It really is a worthwhile interview that has a bit to say about keeping things straight in mind too.

Alas, I'm really far afield and the question: "How do we measure progress in this work so that we know what needs to be tweeked when?" seems so practical and straightforward.

What needs managing needs measuring. But does all that's really important here need managing? I'm reminded of the prayer for the courage to change the things we can, to accept the things we can't, and the wisdom to know the difference. Drucker is a very good teacher about management. What made him great, I think, was he was good at figuring out good ways of dealing with the things we can change while maintaining an abiding interest in and exploration of wisdom.

I flunked out of college the first time around, but the first item around got introduced to Drucker and management by objectives. After a long time I went back to college for the second time around to study elementary education. Lesson plans begin with behavioral objectives; they sounded really familiar to Drucker.

Naturally, education or pedagogy like any other field gets into its own strange loops and jargon. But contrary to reputation the the field asks fundamental questions and produces meaningful and insightful responses to them. Among the questions teachers ask is: "What are the best ways to establish meaning."

In education as business management behavioral objectives are favored in no small part for evaluation or testing. So after the lesson the student will name at least 40 of the 50 state capitals in America. The evaluation is simple: just listen to the student name them. In business the objectives are related to widgets. Of course what happens in the middle: the lesson on state capitals, or the making of widgets, is where the hard part lies.

In some ways Participatory Action Research seems a long ways away from Drucker's management by objectives. I don't think antithetical to it, but different.

Kieran Egan has some very insightful ideas about education. You can scan this brief introduction to imaginative education here One of Egan's books is "Teaching as Story Telling." It's intended for teaching in the elementary schools, but the model is quite simple and based on deep psychological insight. Story telling has shown up in business theory as well.

Some of the questions Linda raises are about management, and how people are accustomed to establishing meaning about management. Those conventions cannot be dispensed with. Egan is an "ivory tower" but he also knows most of his students will go into schools where conventions of discourse will need to be used too.

Bottom line: well, PAR and storytelling aren't what to get into when what the person really wants to know about are metrics. But most of the time what people really want to know is: "What's the story?"

Egan's model doesn't mean you have to throw everything else out. Nevertheless,I think the model might well be helpful in presenting Buddhist economics in many contexts. I also think the Story Form Model is a useful way to create ways of understanding and discussing the progress of the work of Opok Farms.

I suspect that Dr. Hurst is aware of Egan's work. Probably there's some differences too, but there's some fundamental similarities. The beauty of Egan's story telling model is that it's simple enough for even education students to get and the focus is on helping children establish meaning. The simplicity rocks. Egan's work maybe a way to connect Hurst's Deep Community to your presentations of Buddhist economics as well as sharing the experience of Opok Farms.

Lots of theory to digest here... now to connect this with some reality on the ground.

Opok Farm is physically located between 2 IDP camps (Koch Goma and Alero) that are filled with people hoping to someday resettle to their own land. Ofir (our volunteer) has been mobilizing groups of +/- 25 casual workers from each IDP community, with interestingly different results in each community. This experience, plus talking to a lot of people in the know about the children's current plight in the resettlement process, has given us some interesting insights over the past couple of weeks. This leads to thoughts on how we can start shaping the farm community and conceptualizing it's long-term development as a values-based place to belong.

Later today, we are meeting with the 25 workers from Koch Goma camp and their wives, to offer them all a 2 acres for 2 years package that includes a monthly salary and a whole lot of education about simple techniques and technologies that can help them resettle onto their own land. My intent is to make it clear to them that the purpose of forming the farm community is to serve the most vulnerable children in society, and the way we will serve them is through providing them with knowledge about the land. So if they take the offer, that is the kind of endeavor they are becoming a part of. They may be invited to stay on longer after the initial 2 years, but at that point we expect there may be additional opportunities on the farm to consider. Hopefully by that point they will also have self-organized as a group to help each other build roads, clear fields and build houses on their own land. So at the end of the 2 years, our hope is that they will all have options on what to do next.

Another 5 regulars from Alero camp will be extended the same offer, but the group of workers from that camp has been much less reliable and cohesive. We've seen there are a LOT of idle youth not in school at the camp. They do not really know anything about agriculture, having grown up in the camp and not on the land. Our current intent is to work with the local secondary school to identify youth that have school fees back-logs which are keeping them from sitting their final graduation exams (there are hundreds of such cases at every school). I have interest from the Catechist Training Center at the Catholic mission in Gulu to help us develop a vocational training program that will bring these youth to the farm in groups of 25-30 to participate in the various organic farm processes going on, and learn about the region's bio-diversity and environmental protection for 3-4 months. At the end they will receive a certificate, and we will pay their school fees backlogs and exam fees to the school directly so they can sit their final exams and graduate. If this works well in Alero for 2-3 terms, then we'll also make the opportunity available in Koch Goma camp, as well as in the Life in Africa community in Gulu and the Acholi quarter IDP camp on the outskirts of Kampala.

Most of the encroachers who are cutting down trees to burn charcoal are from the Alero side of the farm. Mobilizing and sensitizing large numbers of youth about different ways to earn from the land - as well as bringing them into the larger farm community as alumni - will hopefully give us a broad base of local support for protecting the land and making well planned decisions about how to use it. Putting the families around the periphery also plays to that objective.

Ofir, our volunteer who's worked most closely with the 2 worker groups, argues that we should just forget alero camp altogether and focus efforts in Koch Goma. What we already know, however, is that people from Alero and people from Koch traditionally don't really get along that well. The people from Alero complain alot is what the Koch folks say. The farm is actually closer to Alero than it is to Koch - within a 2-3 km walking distance - so it seems to me that exclusing participation from Alero in building the farm community really isn't an option. Being located in the middle, I remain convinced it's in the farm's and the school's short and long term interest, to encourage stakeholders from both communities at the outset.

Some interesting thoughts about the children's village - very hard to sell the idea that children should just come and live on the farm. Start calling it a boarding school, however, and it makes perfect sense. Both poor and rich alike attend boarding schools in uganda - we can get children sponsored in and target precisely the target groups that the school is designed to educate. After graduation there may be some families who decide to stay around - they will all have been educated according to the values of the school. There will also be teachers and school staff that add to the adult population and settle into living there.

Feels like there is a lot more to say on the background that led to these ideas, but let me post this before the link goes.

Wow, Christina, I want to acknowledge what you are doing on the ground. I am so jealous. I want to be there where you are.

Peter Drucker who said something like if it can't be measured it can't be managed

Hmm... well, there's a flipside to this, maybe management isn't always necessary? It seems like great leaders don't really manage very much at all, other than perhaps their own communication (with themselves, and others).

Maybe I'm off base here but it seems like we have the potential to accomplish amazing things, simply by managing our state of being, and not doing anything other than what comes naturally.

As an example in my own life, I've noticed that no amount of strategising leads to me getting what I want from my wife. To get what I want, I have to stop being right, laugh at myself, and do what comes naturally, without worrying too much how I'll look.

Hey, I just read an email from my brother and it turns out he's going to Naropa University! Small world, isn't it?