Moving Our Money

While the official Bank Transfer Day has come and gone, it took our household a while to find time to move our accounts out of a big bank and into a small, more accountable institution.  Brooklynites have several choices for community banks and credit unions and it’s worth exploring your options.

We ended up joining People’s Alliance FCU, which allows membership to anybody who lives in Brooklyn (among others).   The woman who helped us open accounts said that they’ve been getting a lot of new business in the last few weeks, which was great to hear.

If like us you didn’t quite manage to dump the big banks by Nov. 5, take heart – it’s always a good time to move your money!

Process and Result at BKGA

If you follow media coverage of Occupy Wall Street, you hear a lot about the utilization of a non-hierarchical consensus model for decision-making.  You especially hear a lot about the hand signals, which are easy to latch on to as a hook for superficial infotainment or satire.  I think that OWS participants who have talked publicly about the model have usually done pretty well at expressing that the consensus model can be very empowering, but simultaneously time-consuming and difficult.

After attending a Brooklyn GA last Thursday, I’ve been thinking a lot about the current implementation of consensus within the Occupation movement in Brooklyn and how it relates to the dual goals of fostering inclusiveness and promoting progress toward tangible ends.  For me, these issues became particularly glaring during the discussion of the Internal Solidarity Statement proposed by Brooklyn’s POC Working Group.  Neither this discussion nor this meeting were particularly unique in terms of navigating consensus, but they provide a pretty good case study.

First of all, I think it’s worth noting that the members of the POC working group respectfully fielded a number of questions and responded to several pieces of criticism about the statement and its creation.  Some of this criticism, though not all, involved substantial misunderstandings about or strenuous denial of privilege.  The working group deserves recognition for dealing with these moments as gracefully and productively as the circumstances allowed.  For me, while these incidents reinforced the need for a statement of internal solidarity to be adopted by the GA and for anti-oppression work to be integrated more thoroughly into our movement, they did not in themselves represent a challenge to the consensus process.  Difficult issues come out in open discussion and their articulation should be taken as a signal that the process is working. However, there were other aspects of the discussion that suggested to me that our implementation of consensus remains flawed.

During calls for clarifying questions, concerns, and friendly amendments to the statement, participants used stack slots as an opportunity to present broad political treatises, comment on consensus method in general, or otherwise raise issues not directly related to the proposal in question.  While several people raised points of process during these instances, and these points were recognized by the facilitator(s), several individuals continued to hijack much of the dialogue.  This situation suggests two things to me:

1. We should promote a more explicit understanding of what consensus method is for.  One vocal participant at the meeting suggested that it was inappropriate for anybody to be interrupted while speaking at the GA.  To me, this represents what is perhaps the key misunderstanding about consensus method: that it means all participants are free to say anything at any time.  The process is there to help ensure that voices are not silenced, yes, but it is also there to provide structure.  Consensus means the right to be heard for all, but also the responsibility to seek an appropriate time to speak on a given issue.  The GA is not always that place – this is why we have working groups.  I see similar issue arising in the repeated concern that not everybody had seen the proposed statement before GA.  The statement had been presented at a prior GA and was generally available through the e-mail list.*  What I take from this is that the consensus process only guarantees inclusion commensurate with the effort of participation.  The doors are open, but the process isn’t there to carry you over the threshold.
2. We should ensure a more comprehensive understanding of how our process works. Beyond a review of some basics (the hand signals, progressive stack, etc.) at the beginning of the meeting, there seemed to be a general lack of clarity and consistency about points such as the structure of discussion under consensus, the role of the facilitator and the persons presenting a proposal, the difference between temperature-taking and voting, how, when, and by whom a proposal can be edited, and how decision-making would ultimately be handled.  Admittedly, I am not entirely clear about the extent to which some these points of methodology have been formally adopted by the GA, but it seems we are in need of a standard and comprehensive explanation of how BKGA intends to do consensus.  This is probably not something that a facilitator can be responsible for covering in full at every single meeting, but perhaps something that could be available in written form and referenced when conflicts arise.  Like any other statement the GA produces, this should be a living document.
3. We should ensure that process is open for review and revision, but that until revised it is carried out consistently.  
4. We should consider how we intend to handle situations where participants who don’t abide by 1 and 2. This is very difficult.  The notion of “rule enforcement” rings of hierarchy and exclusion.  On the other hand, if adherence to the process seems optional, we run the risk of having discussions continually hijacked by individual agendas.  On at least two occasions during this GA, speakers who were not adhering to process shouted down facilitators or other participants who raised points of process.

Finally, I’m was grateful for the participant who addressed the group in the latter part of this difficult discussion, explicitly recognize the process-related challenges that we were navigating and to ask everybody not to lose heart.  I think these challenges are something that we need to deal with, but shouldn’t been seen as evidence that consensus is not a viable means for both determining and achieving our goals.

*Assumptions about participants’ regular access to internet for ongoing communication remains a real issue, but I didn’t get the sense that this was the primary concern in this instance.