Facilitating Statewide HIV/AIDS Policies and Priorities: A Profile of Mike Hughes

by

John Forester and Irene Weiser

Cornell University 1995-1996

The case [HIV prevention] actually came our way in an interesting way. We got a call

from the National Civic League. The NCL does a lot of collaborative, community processes. They

had hooked up with the State Health Department in Colorado to do something that actually has a

really funny name, something called “The Ad Hoc Process,” which I just think is hoot as a title.

So this” Ad Hoc Process” was supposed to be basically process design. The aim of their work

was to design a process for community planning for HIV prevention in Colorado, statewide. So

they focused a lot on, “Who are the stakeholders? Who cares about HIV prevention? Which

groups are out there doing it? Where do they get their money from? What are their needs?”

So they did a lot of stakeholder stuff. Then they did a lot of talking about, “What is a good

process?” They talked a lot about openness and confidentiality and the balance of those two things.

They talked about ground rules and “What is collaboration? How do you do it? What makes it

go?”

So they did process design and came up with a schedule for what they called, “Coloradans

Working Together.” They really gave this group two goals, which came out of the Centers for

Disease Control. The goals included developing a plan for HIV prevention statewide, and then,

more narrowly, making recommendations to the Centers For Disease Control about the State

Health Department's application for funding. So in many ways this was a federal mandate that was

coming to the State Health Department.

The Centers For Disease Control give money to the State of Colorado. Some of it passes

through so they fund Health Department stuff but they also, through the Health Department, fund

community organizations who are doing AIDS prevention work. So Coloradans Working

Together was supposed to develop a plan for statewide prevention and comment on and, if

possible, come to concurrence on the State Health Department's application for funding. So, the

process design step was, “Who do we need? How do we get them together? How many meetings

do they have?” and all that. So there was a process design phase called the Ad Hoc Process,

facilitated solely by the National Civic League. They figured out who to invite, and how many

meetings there would be. So then the Ad Hoc Process ended and people who were working in the
Ad Hoc Process were supposed to move into “Coloradans Working Together,” or CWT. So as

part of that, the folks working in the Ad Hoc Process had developed a request for a proposal for

additional process design, but mostly facilitation, for Coloradans Working Together. So the

proposal went out, and the National Civic League called us, because one of the things that came out

in the Ad Hoc Process is that there is huge conflict in this area, and if Coloradans Working

Together is going to get anywhere, we're going to have to address those conflicts. We're going to

have to deal real directly in conflict resolution.

So the National Civic League called us, and said, “We don't want to do that piece by

ourselves. We can do this facilitation stuff, but we really think we need somebody who's

experienced in very high levels of conflict and in mediation.”

So they called us, and we became the the subcontractor to the National Civic League. As

it turned out, we were the only ones who submitted a proposal. (I later learned they hated it. So

we were going in, in a pretty big one down position.) They [CWT] also told the National Civic

League that they didn’t like the person that had facilitated the Ad Hoc Process. They didn't want

her back. So we had two strikes against us going in.

So our first set of conflicts actually came up right away, and got played out with this new

group called the Coordinating Committee -- [who were] basically people who had been involved in

the Ad Hoc Process who wanted to continue and some new players. They were supposed to really

be the centerpiece of Coloradans Working Together. They were supposed to be the process design

memory from the Ad Hoc Process. They were supposed to guide this thing and meet weekly in-

between the CWT meetings to make sure everything was going well. So, we were now sitting in a

room, a new facilitator for the National Civic League, me and the Coordinating Committee, which

is about a dozen of the most actively involved in the AIDS community in Colorado. People who

were really at the center of the HIV prevention work in the State Health Department were part of

the Coordinating Committee, including a full time coordinator for Coloradans Working Together.

The Health Department in Colorado had been pushing the envelope. You could say that they were

politically on the left as far as AIDS prevention is concerned: Very strong in school-based

education, very committed to condom distribution, starting into anonymous testing, all of which are

very controversial. So the Health Department had been pretty active. But I would say that the

community-based HIV prevention activists in Colorado saw them as fairly conservative, anyway.

On the ideological spectrum, the community groups wanted more, faster, broader. So they actually

did see the Health Department as conservative, but in the broader political spectrum, you wouldn't

see them that way. They were really aligned pretty closely in some ways. So, the Coordinating
Committee included the Health Department, but it also included gay rights activists and AIDS

prevention and AIDS care activists, both gay and straight. The Coordinating Committee included

some balance of ethnicity, a pretty good balance men to women, a pretty good balance, gay to

straight, pretty good reflection actually. [When I say “pretty good balance,” I mean] at a minimum,

representation. There were several Latino members on the Coordinating Committee. There were a

couple of African Americans, so not equal in terms of numbers but [groups represented]. They

really did try to touch all the bases in the Coordinating Committee so that, again, it reflected the

diversity of the larger group that they expected to come together in Coloradans Working Together.

So, here we were ready for meeting #1, the facilitators and a Coordinating Committee and

away we go. Meeting #1 was all organizational,and it was all process design, and it was all

making the transition from the Ad Hoc Process to this new group of people. It was a huge kickoff,

tons of publicity, lots of mailings and invitations, and we had a 110 people in the room. It was

incredible.

One of the interesting discussions that we had had internally at CDR and then with the

Coordinating Committee was, “Do you believe that it is appropriate to mediate when you have 110

people who are going to try and participate in this thing?”-rather than do what I have done in so

many other cases, and what we at CDR would have done if the process design had been ours,

which was to try to narrow this into some kind of stakeholder representative group, like the

Coordinating Committee. Perhaps the Coordinating Committee could have been doing the

negotiating and the 110 would have been watching and participating in a different way.

But their process design work, the Ad Hoc Process, was committed to the most open

process I've ever seen. So one of the tough decisions we made was to go ahead anyway even

though there was some real skepticism on my part and on CDR's part as a whole. It was a tough

call for us.

I was pretty worried. So we got to meeting #1. There are 110 people in the room, and we start

talking about how we're going to get consensus from 110 folks. I said -- and there was part of me

that didn't believe it -- that it was possible. I knew that the mechanisms we were going to have to

develop weren't going to look like anything I'd ever done before. So I really had prepared myself

mentally, “Who knows what was going to work!?”

So meeting #1 was a whole day, and it was all about what it means to participate and how

many meetings there were likely to be, and where they will be, and how long they will take, and

what are the ground rules, and where's the data going to come from, and what's the purpose of this

anyway, and what's the Center for Disease Control telling you, and what agenda is the Health
Department really going to drive here? There was lots of skepticism and discussion about whether

this process was authentic: Who was missing from it? What would its outcome be? All process

stuff and team building stuff. We did a diversity panel where every shape, size, color, preference

that we could imagine was included. Someone from the African American community started.

She stood up and answered a couple of really interesting questions: “Who is my community?

What has been the effect of this virus on my community? What don't you know about my

community that I want you to know?”

There were really interesting discussions. So we had a member of the Latino community

and a Native American. We had gay people, straight people, bi-people. We had people who were

HIV positive but didn't have full blown AIDS. We had people who had AIDS. We just tried to

cover everybody that we could, including one guy who stood up and he said, “I think I'm supposed

to represent white straight people,” and he got a huge laugh. He was from the Denver Health

Department, just funny, and he really gave the message from the beginning that the differences that

the people were walking into the room with were clearly going to be in play. It was part of what

we were going to have to talk about.

We had religious evangelicals, politically conservative, religious fundamentalists too -- not

very many, but some. We tried to cover the political spectrum, because one of the questions that

the Ad Hoc Process asked was, “Who can stop this plan from being implemented?”

So they sent invitations there as well. So in Colorado that means you send the invitations

to Colorado Springs, to Colorado for Family Values, to people who put Amendment Two on the

ballot in Colorado.

Amendment Two was a ballot initiative, which means that it came from signatures from

ordinary citizens. The wording of Amendment Two essentially said that it is illegal for any local

government, any city or county, to adopt an ordinance protecting the civil rights of people who are

gay or lesbian. It was essentially aimed at invalidating three existing ordinances in Denver,

Boulder, and Aspen making it impossible for any other local government to protect by ordinance

rights to housing, employment, and many of those things. It was voted in. It passed and is now

actually awaiting Supreme Court deliberation.

So, it was in an atmosphere of Amendment Two that this was taking place, and so people

were painfully aware of the deep divisions in Colorado politically. They were aware that this plan

could be stopped in its tracks if it went in a direction that would ultimately be unfavorable to the

people who put Amendment Two on the ballot. So they said, straight up front, “We have to get

different religious points of view. We have to get different political points of view. We have to
really open the doors and mean it when we open the doors. More than anything else, they didn't

want to spend all this time and effort and end up having something that couldn't be implemented,

something that would inflame the political debate one step further. But the religious right and

Amendment Two advocates were under represented, I think, because of who was throwing the

party, where the invitations came from.

I think many of them viewed the Health Department as really in the pocket of the political

left. The Health Department is directed by a political appointee, appointed in Colorado by the

governor who is a Democrat and has not been dramatically on the front lines in terms of gay rights,

but has been outspoken a little bit on it, was certainly anti-Amendment Two and well known to be

anti-amendment two and did, in fact, campaign against Amendment Two. So I think they believed

that the deck would be stacked from the beginning, that this thing really wasn't theirs and so there

was a lot of skepticism on their part.

There were more phone calls and more invitations after the first meeting. . . So we did

team building from the start. We did a couple of exercises. In the first meeting, beyond the

diversity panel, we did some things to get people into some small groups, introducing themselves

to one another. So that really took us through meeting number one.

I think one of the things that people were absolutely sure of, was that if this group was

going to be able to work together they were going to have to see the group's mission -- developing

a plan -- as something that they were going to have to embrace beyond their own personal agenda

for coming to the meetings. There were some who basically said, “Look my agency wants this

money. That's why I'm here.” What we were hoping to do is help people see that what they

needed to accomplish for the State of Colorado was beyond and, hopefully, inclusive of their own

agenda for their own agency.

So there was a lot of turf stuff that people expected, a lot of battles over money that people

thought would come. So the attempt was made right from the beginning to say that this group

needs to see that it has a mission beyond the individual missions of the individual players who are

coming to develop the plan.That was not accomplished certainly at the first meeting. But at least,

what we wanted in the first meeting was for people to begin to feel as though they knew someone

else in the room. So in a room with 110 people, it was entirely possible that you walked in by

yourself and knew no one else in the room. That was pretty rare but we knew we needed to get

introductions done, and we needed for people to be able to know one another by name and

establish some sense of individual rapport with one another.

One of the things that did happen that actually did give me some confidence that the
rapport could be built, happened when I stood up to do introductions, I said, “Now, what we want

you to do is talk about why you're here with one another in a small group. You should then have

one person stand up and say, ‘Well, in my group, these are the names of the people.’” We knew

we couldn't have 110 people introduce themselves efficiently.

So we split them into groups of 5 or 6 and one person was going to stand up and say,

“These are the names of the people who are sitting here. This is Pete and Bill and John and Joe

and Sam and Delores. And in general among the six of us, the thing that we have in common

about being here is...”

So that's what we asked them to do in introductions. I told them explicitly that anything

they wanted to keep within their group of five people, they should say so. You know, “I'm here

because..., but I don't want you saying that to 100 people.” They should go ahead and talk about

that. So, in their group of 5, they could maintain some level of confidentiality. What I was hoping

for, and, I think, what the Coordinating Committee was hoping for, was that they would really go

to the heart of it. “I'm here because I'm sick.” Or, “I'm here because somebody I love is sick.” Or

something at a pretty serious level. But we didn't want to put people on the spot in front of 109

other people.

The thing that gave me great confidence was that they looked at me like I'd lost my mind

and said, “No, that's not a big deal. We'll just talk about what we want to talk about. And for the

most part, people were willing, even in the first moments, to disclose very personal information.

So that gave me pretty good confidence. I think the truth is that people who are used to working in

this kind of arena, talking about sex, talking about death, talking about disease, have learned how to

talk. It’s part of the activism to not hide it.

So in introductions, one person stood up and said, “This is so and so and she's a

prostitute. She has AIDS.” I mean it was just way more explicit than I had ever expected it to be.

That was pretty dramatic stuff right from the beginning. That gave me both a hint of what was to

come, although I don't think I really was prepared, but it also gave me some sense that, “Yeah, if

we stay on top of it, this group is going to learn how to talk to each other even if we have 110

people in the room.”

So we started with small groups and introductions and from the small groups, did some

large group introduction real fast in the first meeting. We knew it was just the tip of the iceberg.

That we were going to have to do a lot of bringing these folks together and doing team building

and getting people to know one another in lots of ways. The biggest challenge for me was that,

there had been so much discussion leading up to meeting #1, that there was going to be a very high
level of conflict and, in fact, we said so to the group. We had a whole set of ground rules that

related specifically to conflict. When it arises, what do we do? When we can't deal with it as a

whole group, where does it go? So we tried to build in a dispute resolution process, again, out of

the Ad Hoc Process from the word “Go.” Because we had to really focus on that, one of the

things that scared the heck out of me at meeting #1 was that it was way too quiet. It was way too

passive. People were just absorbing what folks from the Ad Hoc Process were saying about how

this should go. It was clear to me that that kind of one way communication and the level of

passivity in the room meant that these folks weren't anywhere near saying, “I buy into this process.

This process belongs to me.” So I knew that we had a major uphill battle to do with 110 people, to

get ownership of the process. So that, for me, was the worst part of meeting #1. People left the

room and I think there was some shift [in their attitudes]. There was humor in the panel. There

were some individual connections that were started or old faces that you just hadn't seen forever

and suddenly you remembered them. I did a one hour training segment on principles for raising

conflict productively. When you're angry about something, or when you see your interest as not

being attended to in some way, what do you about it? I gave them “10 key ideas for raising

conflict.” That, again, planted the seed that they were going to have to talk. They were going to

have to raise issues. They were going to have to let the conflict hang out there. So, there was

meeting #1. That was July.

We started off meeting once a month. We then went to twice a month. One of the reasons

was that they quickly realized that [even with] as much work as they had done in the Ad Hoc

Process, they totally underestimated how long it would take that many people to get through the

topics they had to get through. The next meeting was in August. We made a pretty interesting

choice, and actually, I think, in the end, a pretty wise one. A lot of information had been collected,

and what happened in meeting #2 was that it was almost all presentation. They did some team

building and did some more introductions and tried again to break down some of the barriers, but

basically the meeting was, “Here's the epidemiological profile. These are the people who have been

sick. These are the people who are getting sick. These are the rates of infection for different

communities.” And, “This is a needs assessment.” They had done a needs assessment that went to

different AIDS prevention organizations and said, “What don't you have that you would like to

have? Is it money? Is it training? What is it?” So, there was a whole report that was done and

that was presented. The presenters were contractors to the Health Department or Health

Department staff or members of the Ad Hoc Process. So it was basically, “Here's the data, and

let's have a little discussion.” But then the discussion started to uncover that there was some
resistance both to the process and to the data.

Then in September, we went public with that and said to the whole group, “You know,

you’ve had two meetings. You sat back for the first one. At the second one you sat back again,

and we gave you lots of data. We are hearing, and we're getting a hint that maybe you didn't like

what you heard. Maybe you don't like what you've heard about the process. Maybe you don't like

what you've heard about the data. It’s time for you to take hold of it.”

Some of [the hints had been] pretty explicit. They were calls between sessions where

somebody said, “You know, I don't really trust the Health Department to do this.” “You know, the

Health Department's too much in control of this.” “There were too many speakers from the Health

Department.” Or lots of questions and side conversations eventually worked their way back

through to grapevine to the Coordinating Committee. So we needed them to be a detective, to

figure it out. And to a degree, at the end of the second meeting, it was just in the room -- you could

just feel it. The people were kind of a little grumbly, and “Who are these people?” And “I don't

trust this data.” There was just a level of tension in the room that was palpable. There was some

attrition, and we talked about that as a group. People said, “You know, that's the truth of it. That's

how this is going to work.” We also made some adjustments to try and get it right, to make some

changes so that people who were thinking about leaving, or who had left and had not come back to

the second session, would say, “I can come back to the third.”

So we made a proactive effort to try and understand what wasn't going to work for folks

and how to make it work. There was one obvious one that the Ad Hoc Committee, the

Coordinating Committee and the facilitators just missed. We scheduled meetings from 8:00 to

5:00. [Now,] I'm notorious for getting caught up in the subject and being unwilling to take a break.

I have pretty high tolerance for group process. I have a pretty high tolerance for just going without

a break. But we learned right away, that 8 hours was too much, way too much for somebody who

has AIDS. Or for somebody who is trying to fight against the infection or trying to stay well.

Folks needed far more breaks. They needed to spend less time on each day. So we had to multiply

the number of days. People were really pretty much straightforward about it. Some who weren't

straightforward with me and some of the other facilitators were going to the Coordinating

Committee members that they knew off-line and said, “You know, I can't keep this up. This just

won't work.”

So we then cut it back to 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. A mandatory fifteen minute break in the

morning. An absolutely mandatory uninterrupted hour for lunch. A mandatory fifteen minute

break in the afternoon. At a minimum. We had to do that. So we made those kinds of adjustments
right away. We kept saying to the group from the first, from the get-go, “Does this work for you?”

Is this the purpose that you want, that you want fulfilled by this group? Is this data to your liking?

You know, its yours: You have to take ownership of this. This is your process.”

So we really did everything that we could think of to encourage that kind of feedback. At

the end of every meeting, we asked, “What went wrong? What didn't work? What do we need to

change?” I talked to people individually at break, at lunch. We really invited a lot of criticism and a

lot of feedback.

So in Session #3 there was great discussion about whether or not the Health Department

was really just paying lip service to people or whether this process was really gonna make a

difference and would that difference be money flowing in different directions, to different groups

than had gotten it in the past? Was the Health Department prepared to lay off staff in order to get

money out into the community? People asked some very direct and very hard questions about

what would really be done with the end product. The Health Department staff were in the room.

There were some really great discussions. So it was terrific. What made it great is that it really felt

like people were saying, “Hey wait a second here. If we are going to participate in this process, we

have to believe it’s real. We have to know we're doing something useful with our time.”

I just felt this huge transfer of ownership. We stopped talking in meeting #3 about

anything that came before. The Ad Hoc Process just stopped, just didn't exist any more. In the Ad

Hoc Process, this decision was made, or this conclusion was drawn, or these people were there

and here's what they wanted to give you so that you can move forward. That really ended in the

meeting #3, and these folks were saying, “It doesn't matter to us what came before. You know,

we're here now, and we're not sure we want to stay.”

They didn't say it quite that explicitly, but that was really it. It was clear that we were in

the here and now, and anything that was going to happen with this process, from here on out, they

had in their own hands. They were really going to take control of it. We talked a lot about [their

ownership of the process]. And in the design of the meetings, we decided that explicitly -- this

group had to have a talk about whether this thing was for real. The lack of [ownership] looked like

passivity -- people just weren't engaged. That meant they were not really paying full attention, not

really participating fully in the discussion, not asking very interesting or difficult questions about

any of it. [They were taking] just sort of this passive [attitude] “Oh we're just going to sit here and

be told what the process is or what the ground rules are or what the data is.” There was some sense

that that was okay. They were here to check it out, see what was going to happen with this, but at

the end of the second meeting, it was like “That's enough of that. We're really not going to be
passive participants in this while a Coordinating Committee orchestrates everything around us.”

One of the ways I recognized it was that in meeting #3, they came after me. Big surprise!

One of the things I have learned from these large group efforts is that the facilitator is signing on to

be a lightening rod. If you don't want that role, don't pick up the marker, don't do the facilitation

gig. Don't be the mediator if you can't accept that, at least for some part of this, you're the target.

So one of the things that happened to me is that they came after me.

With 110 people, we had set up the room so that they were all kind of looking in the same

direction so that the presenters could make their presentation and so that the communication could

go through the facilitator, at least early on. We were in this really awful room. It wasn't nearly big

enough. So one of the things that was kind of fun is that we were elbow to elbow. But it was a

big arc of chairs and then in rows, so it was kind of theater style. That was the only way to get 110

people in the room, or so it seemed, and still have them have some central focus. So, what I was

doing in front of the room in meeting #3 was calling on people. When 40 hands went up, or 20, I

would say, “Look, I'm going to start over here on the right side of the room and I'm just going to

keep coming around, and I'll catch up so those of you that are way over on the left side of the

room, you'll go first on the next question”

I was trying to be as transparent with this group as I could be, because this was going to

be really hard to just call on people to get them into a discussion. So I started way on the one side

of the room, and as I'm sweeping across the room, of course new hands are coming up. So I'm

calling on them. By the time I got over to the other side of the room, I had somebody just go

berserk and say, “I'm going to talk now, you know, so let me in.”

So I said, “Okay great, go. You know, you're in. You're not in order in the way I

suggested I was going to do it, but go.”

So she jumped in and did her piece. And I basically said, “You know, this facilitation

thing isn't working very well.”

They said, “Yeah, you're too slow.” “You're too this.” “You're not calling on us fast

enough.” “You're not letting us talk.”

Suddenly it was my fault. So I did my best to deflect that and say, “Yes, this raising your

hands thing, this facilitation thing, isn't going very well.” “Yes, it’s about me.” “No, it’s really not

about me.” Fine, I can deflect this. You know, this is easy.

So I said, “Yeah, we've got to fix this process, and you've got to fix me and make sure

that I'm doing this well,” and all that.

So they came after me a little bit in meeting #3 because they didn't like the format. They
didn't like what was happening with the process, and they really grabbed a hold of it. So I said,

“Yeah, absolutely right. This is really tedious and slow and we're not really getting there, are we?”

And they said, “No.”

And I said, “Okay, we'll figure it out.” “This is just another problem that you get to solve

as a group” is sort of what my thinking was at that stage. Or “in between sessions, we'll figure it

out.”

That was just one of the ways in which things started to pop. But at the end of the

meeting, this was really great. Things were really starting to pop. This was exactly where we

wanted to be. They're of course looking at us like we've lost our mind. But we're saying, “No this

is okay. This is alright.”

This is what you have to do. You have to, you know, get a little frustrated and then

decide that you want to take some ownership, so that's good. So meeting #3 was rough, rough

both on the process and a little on the substance. We tossed problems back at them: “So, if you

really don't like the data, can we go get more? What would that take? What would it cost? Who

would go get it? Who would you trust to have it?” We worked through some of those issues so

that we could then move the next meeting forward rather than going back.

One of the things I always try to do is to let the group know what I'm doing as the

facilitator or as the mediator and let them know why I'm doing it because, because that really lines

up with my image of what it means for them to do collaborative decision making, that is that they're

really in charge of this process and I'm here to help and enforce the ground rules they all agreed to.

I'm here to keep them on the agenda that they all agree to. So, if they're really going to take

ownership of the agenda or the ground rules or the data or anything or ultimately, the conflict, I

have to give it to them. So that means I have to give them, I have to give my role over to them and

say, this is what I'm doing. If that ain't it, if this doesn't work, you've got to say something.

You've got to, you've got to let me know what's working and what's not working in terms of the

process. That works as a model for situations in which, “We've got to collaborate here. We've got

to figure out a way to work together.” So to the degree that I'm able to say, “This is what I'm doing

now. This is what the agenda is now. Do you really understand what you're doing? Do you

understand what I'm doing?”

It gives them the sense that this process isn't happening to them, that they're really

responsible for it. But they can't be responsible for it if I don't make it transparent to them.

We knew we needed another meeting in September, so we had another one and really got

into the substance. We made a huge change in the format of the meeting and in my role in the
meeting and in Derek's role as the co-facilitator. I just happened to be the one standing up in the

room calling on everyone when that issue popped, but Derek was getting the same thing. So we

decided to go back, and the Coordinating Committee basically gave me some lovely feedback and

said, “Look Mike, it ain't going well. You're not facilitating this group well. This is just not on.”

And I said, “Okay, let me think of some new way to structure these meetings so that I get

out of the way.” So I went back to a design that I really wish I had invented, but I can't take any

credit for it. What we decided to do was put a little table in the center of the room and put four

chairs at that table, and then [we made] concentric circles of chairs around those four with some

aisles so you could get from the back of the room up to the front.

Basically, we said to the group when they walked in for meeting #4, “We heard you. We

know the last meeting didn't work very well in terms of this facilitation thing. So here it is. We're

going to try something absolutely different. If this doesn't work, we'll try something else. Here's

how it goes. When we are ready to open discussion on a topic, then I will clearly make the

transition as the facilitator, and Derek will do that as well: “Now its time for discussion.” We will

then get out of the way. If you've got something to say, come sit in a chair. There are four chairs,

four of you can talk with one another, loud enough so we can all hear it. When you're done, you

get out of the chair. If you see somebody waiting, get out of the chair and make room for them.

But you are now in charge of the dialogue, and we're not going to facilitate this part. Then when

we think that the discussion has wound itself to some sort of conclusion, or we want to ask if you

have come to some consensus, or if you've explored it enough or whatever, then we'll interject

ourselves as the facilitators to move the process on. But when it’s time to talk, it’s time to talk and

you don’t have to be called on, you don't have to look to me to call on you. You don't have to raise

your hand. You just have to come talk.”

They loved it. They took to it both because it was clear that we were going to be responsive

and because it was just a much smarter structure. It was a much more effective way for them to

dialogue.

At this point. meeting #4, we were down into the sixties and seventies. But one of the things

we had figured out was that some of the 110 had come to check it out. They really had only just

come to see if this thing was going to be for real and who was going to come and would their own

interests be represented by someone else there. So we heard a lot that people said, “Well, you

know, if ACT-UP is here, I don't have to come.” Or “If there are enough members of the Latino

community here, then I don't have to come. The kickoff was sort of an event and so people who

really had no intention of staying had come only to just launch this thing with us. But then they'd
gone on their merry way.

We still had good diversity. We still felt that we had reached pretty far into the community

and that we really did a pretty good job of getting a wide spectrum of people. So now, we're

getting really into the substance. The core of the plan began to emerge at meeting #4. The Center

for Disease Control had some very strict guidelines about what the plan had to contain, and what

the group had to do with some of those elements of the plan. For example, it said that the charge to

this group is to articulate the most important needs in HIV prevention in Colorado and to prioritize

those needs. They were to identify populations most affected by the epidemic in Colorado and

prioritize those populations -- what an awful thing to ask people to do, to choose one group over

another.

But that's what they said we had to have: priorities. Then [we had to] identify strategies

for preventing the disease in those populations and prioritize those. So we started really taking on

the substance of those requirements in meeting #4, starting with needs. Basically we said, “From

the needs assessment, we want you to add what you think the needs are, and we gave people

individually an opportunity to generate that list. We ended up with something like 150 different

needs. Then, actually at lunch we just scrambled to try and group the list together into some kind

of order. So while they're having lunch, we're doing that. We brought it back, presented some

kind of organization to this list of needs and then opened up lots of discussion. We told the group

that what was going to happen in-between was that some folks who were willing to take it on,

were going to try to pare down these needs into some sort of “remove the redundancies, organize

them, collapse them together to the degree that they could to make this manageable” because 150 is

a big number.

So, we began really to work in the substance, and it became clear that what we were going

to have to do was mix and match the open discussion, the individual generation so that, so that 60

people were all thinking at once and doing something at once in small group work, either during

the session or between the sessions, and then back to whole group. So we knew that we were

going to have to really get efficient if this group was going to move forward. We’d have to do lots

of stuff off line and then give the group a chance to discuss it, in this new setting. So, basically in

the September, October, November meetings, that's what we did.

At the table and four chairs in the center, it worked beautifully much of the time, but it

was not without its downsides. It didn't always work perfectly. There were at least 2 times when I

was way too far away. I was down the aisle in the back of the room listening to this conversation,

and I really should have been at the table with them. I made that mistake twice. After some
very tough going, I suggested a modification, and that came toward the end of the year. We were

in this room with these kind of teal green chairs, but there were a few that were kind of this real

ugly pink color. So I asked the Coordinating Committee. We talked about it and I ultimately

suggested to the whole group that we use green chairs for the four discussion chairs, and add a

fifth one -- one of the ugly pink ones for the facilitator. I would take one of those, and I would put

it at the table, but that chair belonged to me or Derek, and when the going got tough, we could

come and sit down in that chair and mediate the conversation. Then I was much more careful about

being at the table when it got hot -- and it got hot: Oh man, we had some serious confrontation.

Getting through one serious confrontation really turned us towards successful completion

of a consensus plan. We had compressed these needs into thirteen, by sort of lifting them up into a

level of principle and generality that captured what was underneath them. Of course, we promised

everyone that we wouldn't lose the nuance underneath them, but we needed these thirteen as

broader categories. People generally bought that. But here's how the fourteenth one arrived.

We're in the discussion. We're at the table. This wonderful participant -- he was just

brilliant -- came into the circle, and he sat down and he said, “Here's a need that is missing. There

is a need to shift the discussion of AIDS in Colorado from a moral issue to a public health issue,

and I refuse to participate in moving this plan forward until we wrestle with that. He went into this

eloquent speech about how these moral barriers to effective AIDS education were killing people,

and that we were putting in place these moral objections and the effect was that people were dying.

The whole room was just captivated. He was really angry. Other people came to the table. They

just ran to the table and started talking with him. The folks from Focus on the Family and from

Coloradans For Family Values, came and sat at the table and talked about why for them, this was a

moral issue and what that meant to them and why they believed that.

The discussion got really intense. It was amazing. As people came to the table to respond

to the opening comment, it was clear that people had been moved by the depth of feeling. So

people came to the table kind of with a new intensity. So the discussion got very intense, very

quickly. Other people came up and they started to tell their story, “From my point of view, here's

why I think we have to remove those barriers.” Or “From my point of view here's why this is a

moral issue.” People began to come and add interesting little side pieces to it. They would say,

“First stand back one step -- I agree with you that we have to remove these moral objections, but if

you say that in this plan, here's the effect. You know, this plan will never be implemented, or this

group will have doubt.”

 They started working on many different levels. People were plopping themselves down

in those chairs and talking to each other personally. The guy who started this discussion kept one

of the four chairs for quite a long time. Then after a while he got out and other people came in, and

they invited him back. The thing that was so amazing is that as it got more and more intense, it

didn't break any of the ground rules that we'd established. People were speaking to one another

respectfully. The language was really appropriate. They were really doing their best to listen to

one another. We really didn't have to do very much. Both the work that they had done thus far as

a group, and the setting in which they were communicating, worked.

I have to say that the person who had started this, had started it in a way that was so

captivating and so, it was on such a high level, that the discussion stayed pretty much on that level.

It was clear that he felt very strongly, and he had framed it in a way that was so clearly aimed at

preventing people from being killed by this disease, and it wasn't accusatory. It wasn't blaming.

He didn't denigrate the Amendment Two people or folks who really had put those moral barrier in

place.

He simply said, “They're in place and because they're in place, this is the effect.” It was

depersonalized, in the sense meaning “not accusatory.” But it was clearly personal from his own

point of view. So it was very much this “I message.” This is how “I” see it. It didn't really ascribe

any kind of blame or really point any fingers or anything that could have inflamed the discussion.

So other people came and just really spoke from their own point of view, just sort of following

him, so it really set the right tone.

We hit another issue later on [though,] where people stood up and said, “All of you

people...” It was a racial issue, “You white people all are...” the stereotypes flew out, and the room

exploded.

[But] that's what didn't happen on this one: He didn't say, “All you religious bigots . . . all

you bible thumpers. . .” He could have done that. But he didn't. He said, “These barriers are in

place.” He didn't say who put them there. He didn't point any fingers or make any inflammatory

statements. He said, “They exist and here's the effect of their existing.” So, it didn't slap anyone.

He really just spoke from his own beliefs and his own anger and his own pain at seeing people that

he cares about die from this thing. It was emotionally very powerful.

He said, “This is how I feel. This is how it affects me. This is what I think,” without ever

hinting that someone else was to blame for that or he was throwing it in someone's face. It just

was this statement of what I believe combined with the facts -- the facts as he saw them, certainly.

Part of the ensuing discussion was, “Well, those aren't the facts. In fact, why people are dying is
because we can't, in our culture, frame these things in moral terms, because we're losing the moral

ground underneath us.”

So there were people who took exactly the opposite point of view. They said, “No, you

don't understand, this must become a moral issue. If it isn't a moral issue, people will continue to

behave in ways that put them in danger. It’s when you have the moral underpinnings to keep you

from behaving in those ways, that's when people won't die.”

So they took exactly the same moral question and went 180 degrees around and said, “No,

no, no, this has to be a moral issue. That's the point.” They kept from becoming confrontational.

So when the discussion had worked its way through and had reached the point where people were

beginning to repeat themselves, or repeat one another, it was possible for us to step in and say,

“Look this discussion hasn't lead us to some kind of consensus point of view. It’s really clear. So

what do you want to do with that conflict? You have to say something in the plan. You have one

person who has said, that unless the plan says something about this, he's not with you. So we're

going to have to do something about this. We're going to have to write a need that expresses this in

a way that everyone can live with, if we can. Or we're going to have to find some other way to

resolve it. So, what mechanism?”

We had ground rules about conflict resolution. “When we can't resolve [an issue] within

the group, we're going to do something about that.” The something was, a two -- or maybe slightly

more than two -- party mediation. That was their conflict resolution system for CWT. That's when

we said, “Well, your dispute resolution system says, ‘Let's mediate it.’”

So, I said what I would do -- between this session and the next: “I will convene a

mediation of, of hopefully two, but maybe a couple more than that, from all points of view on this

one, and we will sit down and we will mediate in a different setting and bring back to the group the

recommendation.”

So I put together a four person mediation: The person who had presented the issue, a

person from Colorado For Family Values, and one person to support each of them in their point of

view. It was really interesting. The person from Colorado For Family Values said, “I don't want

to do it, I don't want to do this [with just[ two parties. I want someone else to come with me, and

here's who I want to come. So then I went back to the person who presented the issue and said,

“Looks like it might be more than two, is that okay with you? And if so, who do you want to

come?” So it was clear it wasn't going to be two on one. We made it two and two. Luckily, the

person from Colorado For Family Values selected someone from an organization called “His

Heart.” This is a Christian organization that cares for people with AIDS. The particular person
from this organization had entered in the discussion in a very moderate way. The person who

presented the issue, who was from the Colorado AIDS Project, then selected a colleague of his at

the Colorado AIDS Project who also was a very collaborative, very calm presence in the group.

They [both] made the wisest choice for who to get.

It was great. Brilliant. So I orchestrated, made those calls, got the four of them to agree to

sit down together in a room. The five of us went and sat down and did a mediation, and we

developed language that the four of them could live with. What they addressed was language.

What I was able to get them to focus on was language for the plan that would say something on

this subject that all four of them, and then hopefully the whole group, could agree to. We'd actually

modeled this already because at this stage we'd already worked through the other thirteen needs and

had wordsmithed the language together as a group. So, it was really clear that what we were doing

was writing a plan. So if we stayed focused on, “Well then, what words can we use in the plan to

say this in a way that everyone can live with?” it would lift it out of, “I have to change your mind

about this,” and become “Well, what words can we find together?”

So it was that shift from confrontation to collaboratively developing language that

everyone could accept in the plan. That was the shift we had to make. That was the task they were

willing to accept. So we had already worked through thirteen needs. We had wordsmithed them

and taken out commas and then put in different language and worked on the grammar and

struggled with wordsmithing thirteen of them, so they knew what their task was on the fourteenth.

So they did it. We walked out of that mediation after two hours with a message that all four of

them agreed to. We had gone into the room and basically I took the whole macroprocess that we

were using for CWT and just compressed it into the two hours.

I said, “We're going to begin at the beginning. Let's make sure we all know one another.”

We did introductions. And I said, “Okay, let's get the ground rules clear. This two hour session

will work if: You talk one at a time. You respect one another. You use language that's

appropriate. You avoid personal attacks...” Just laid out a whole lot of ground rules for how

careful we were going to have to be with the way we spoke to each other. So we went through

ground rules, and I had laid out a process.

I said, “I'm going to ask each of you to talk about why this wording is important to you so

that you really can become educated with one another about why this issue is so important. And

having done that, I'm going to ask you for some options that will meet those needs, and then, we're

going to problem-solve, to see if we can't find an option that you all can live with.” [I began there]

because I think what I knew to be underneath [the wording] was a set of concerns and a set of
interests that in fact all four of them could respect and to some degree hold in common: to stop this

disease from spreading. They clearly had that concern in common. So if I could remind them that,

although they disagreed about the morality, they did agree about the effect that this conflict, was

having. They really both had said, “If we can't get past this, can't figure out how to work this out,

more people are going to get sick.”

So I had to get them back to that and help them remind each other that they had a lot more

in common than perhaps they believed, and that would form the basis for coming up with wording

they could live with. I knew that unless they really saw that they ultimately were aiming at the

same thing, just aiming at it in absolutely opposite ways, that they were just going to keep aiming

in opposite ways, and that they would not find language that the other one would find acceptable.

So seeing that they had a mutual interest in getting a plan that each of their constituencies could

accept was obviously the key.

Once all four of them had heard from the others that they really did want a plan that

worked, a plan that prevented the spread of the illness, then it became a joint task, jointly shared,

jointly worked on, and they dropped the pretense of confrontation long enough to find that they

could in fact find words for the plan that would work for both sides, and [find] that they didn't

have to give up their points of view so that they could continue to agree to disagree about the things

they clearly would never let go of with one another. So that was part of it too, separating out what

they weren't going to change, that they weren't going to change the other side, but that they had to

write a document that they both could live with. That was much simpler. So I had to focus them

on that.

I also have to say that the four of them were just smart, and that was a key -- that they

were able to be creative and clever with the wording and find things that let them say, “Yeah, I can

live with it if you say it like that,” while at the same time they clearly were not all that happy to be

sitting in a room together. They were terrific.

They said, “There is a need to remove moral objections to HIV prevention and education

that is appropriate to the behaviors of the target community.” Now that's a mushy way of saying

what they wanted to say. But then they followed it with, “For communities that include members

with a range of moral perspectives, HIV prevention methods need to be appropriate to that range of

moral perspectives by presenting multiple prevention messages.”

It was messy. But if you really dig under it, what it says is, not everybody in any

"community" is going to share every moral perspective. That was pretty obvious to everybody.

So if you were going to give people prevention messages, they had to match that range of moral
points of view and present multiple options or multiple messages that lined up with those moral

perspectives. The only way that we could get the gay rights activists to accept sentences two and

three was if sentence number one was there, which was, “There is a need to remove moral

objections to messages that are appropriate to the target community.”

[Now,] they actually talked about, “Well in real life, what does that mean?”

Well, it means, that you can go into a gay bar and use sexually explicit material. Why?

Because in a gay bar, that's not outside the moral bounds. If you go into an establishment like that,

it’s not outside the moral parameters in that setting to use sexually explicit material. But if you go

into schools, and you've got kids who come from a fundamental Christian point of view and whose

parents would be uncomfortable with sexually explicit material, we're going to have to work really

hard to present a range of messages that cover the moral perspective and are really appropriate

across the spectrum of that community.

So that's the kind of thing they thought would be allowed under this kind of wording. So

in two hours they hammered this out: Three sentences. It got tough only at the very end, because

once I said, “Look you're all done. The mediation's over: hurray for you. You get to go back to

the group and say, ‘We have a draft for you,’ now let's all go home,” we stood around and started

talking about whether being gay is a lifestyle or not. Then they hit on the word “lifestyle” and they

started to have an argument.

It was the funniest thing, and I said, “Excuse me. I really think this is a mistake for you to

continue this conversation. This ain't going very well. I think you should get in your cars and go

home.”

They laughed and shook hands. They said, “You know, you're right.” This isn't a helpful

conversation for us to have. We did well today. Let's go home.”

So it only got tense when the meeting was over. So within the meeting, and within their

working on the problem jointly together, it clearly was very respectful. Absolutely. But they were

not going out for a beer afterwards, I can tell you that. It was really clear that they respected the

effort that the other side was making, that they respected that other points of view were possible,

and yet, they couldn't go much beyond that. But that's awfully far. It certainly is a lot further than

the debate about these subjects that I've seen elsewhere in Colorado.

So they went back to the big group, and we celebrated. I patted them on the back. I did. I

stood on my head to praise the four of them and to send the message to the group that this was the

kind of breakthrough they shouldn't take lightly: that this was a very big deal, and they should

really honor the four people who did this work. But the really funny thing was that the wording
didn't stick. The group changed it. But we celebrated, and we clapped, and we patted them on the

back, and it was a very big event.

We did that because we knew that this issue could have blown this group completely

apart. The whole thing could have come to a stop right here. People could have said, “I'm out of

here. I'm not working with these people any more. I'm not going to write this plan.”

If we hadn't been able to resolve this one, I think there is some chance that we would have

lost the extremes. I could have easily have seen Colorado For Family Values walking away. I

easily could have seen the folks who raised the issue in the first place walking away. That would

have damaged the credibility of the plan and may have made it impossible to continue. I thought it

was that big.

And quite honestly, it became clear to me that one of the things this group needed was an

opportunity to celebrate anything because they were dealing with very depressing things: life and

death, disease and destruction. They needed to be able to celebrate as a way of balancing some of

the negative stuff they were having to talk about. To take it just to the extreme, around that same

time, we actually lost one of the members of the group. He died of AIDS in the middle of the

process. We grieved together over that. So if we were going to grieve together over Joe's death,

we certainly ought to celebrate what we could celebrate.

So I jumped up and down. I was screaming from the rooftops that this was something to

be reveled in. We also did a lot of other celebrating that wasn't my idea, but was also really

important. We played music. We learned how to dance the samba. I'm not kidding. We broke a

pinata. We did all sorts of celebratory things. We had food. We did improvisational acting. One

of the members of the Coordinating Committee was in this improv acting group, and so she got the

whole group standing up and picked people out of the group and made them do these

improvisational acting exercises at a break where they had to pretend, without words, only with

gestures, to demonstrate -- for everyone in room -- that you were “angry”or “afraid” or “happy” or

she even managed to use “constipated.” It was hysterical. So we got people laughing, and we did

things that broke the tension and that gave people a chance to laugh and touch each other. That's

one of the places where the dancing was so wonderful. People took each other arm in arm and

danced around the room. That sent a message that was very different about what these people

needed to do with one another. [It sent a message] that they were in this tough thing together and

that they needed to rejoice in that and they needed to celebrate with each other. They needed to

touch each other and care for each other and have fun with each other and laugh and make this

worth doing. So, we did a lot of celebrating. It was fun.

 So things really fell into place after [getting fourteen hammered out]. But there was more

hard work to do after that. That was the end of the needs [discussion]. We then had to prioritize

those needs. We then had to identify populations for each of those fourteen needs and prioritize

those. [That was] really hard work. We had groups that worked to develop strategies to meet the

needs for each of those populations, and we prioritized those. But the work, the technical side of

this began to just cook after the needs stuff was over. It really took off. We only hit one really

tough [point], and that's the one I alluded to before about [race]. In the plan there really was only

one more major obstacle.

Prioritizing needs got us into a discussion of [whether] African Americans, or gay men,

or Latinos were a higher priority need group than some other group. It got us into so much

dangerous ground, so much inflammatory stuff, and into a racial confrontation that made the, “Is

this a moral issue?” look so manageable by comparison. It was quite amazing. But that was way

down in the population prioritizing stuff. We prioritized needs together, and that went

swimmingly.

There was a little rough spot depending on where “We have to make this not a moral

issue,” got prioritized. That made people uncomfortable. But we got through that pretty easily. It

was the prioritizing of populations that got us into discussions of race and of oppression and of

homophobia and of what it meant to be hated or ignored, and that's when the table and having those

four chairs was almost not enough. It was a really great forum [in which] to have the discussion,

but the discussion was very painful.

There were a lot of tears shed on that one. It was very sad, both because it looked as

though the group was pulling itself apart, and because the issues themselves were so painful to

begin with. So it was a really tough go. [But] I'm glad to talk about this: I can say without

reservation that this work stands as the most important thing I've ever done in my work life. It

means that much -- that this group was able to get through that, because we were able to get to such

tremendously important levels of conflict and get through it.

By “important levels” I mean the deepest hurts, the most honest levels of confrontation,

whether it was this question over moralizing or it was this question over race. This group

struggled with some of the most painful stuff I've ever seen a group struggle with, and they came

through it. [This was] important, too, for me personally, because this issue is important: I have a

friend who has AIDS, a really close friend. I'm executor in the will and will be the first line of care

taking in some ways, [but] not yet, thank goodness. Ten years we've known each other. And I've

lost other friends. So this issue hits close to home.

 But even beyond my own personal attachment to it, professionally [this] went beyond any

mediation I have ever been a part of. So it was pretty important, on a lot of levels. Also, this made

it really hard for me to keep my nose where it belonged and be a good mediator and not be a

participant. There were a couple of times when I could feel it slipping, really felt myself being

pulled in.

So here we are, we're trying to prioritize the populations and we started hitting on, or

getting close to the wounds that existed over racism and believing that money had gone to other

communities because those other communities are not communities of color, that the communities

of color had really not gotten their share of the funding that was commensurate with the rate of

infection in their communities. That really just touched off a whole discussion about the degree to

which this was one more example of how racism plays out in our society.

I just let that discussion go. It was really difficult. I may have let it go on longer than I

ought to have but I just couldn't bring myself to stop people from having this level of frank

discussion about how hard it was to say that this group needed it more. I really felt like they

needed to get through it and they needed to have this conversation. It was hard, hard, hard.

As I later learned, it was very uncomfortable for a lot of people who, who really wished I

had stopped it and were very angry at me for not stopping it -- because they saw it ultimately as

divisive and destructive, rather than painful and then healing. I think that if you spoke to people

today about that meeting, there would still be serious disagreement about whether or not that

meeting was a good thing or a bad thing. I guess the truth is that I have to take the mediator's role

on this one and say it was both.

It was, I think, both necessary and painful, and I understand how, for some people, it was

too much. [It was] necessary, I think, because until people were able to express that grievance,

they were going to be unable to step back and prioritize populations. That grievance was that CDC

had never really gotten enough money to minority communities, or that the State Health

Department had never gotten money to the minority communities, and that on top of the fact that

they were also being ill treated in so many other ways -- whether it was racism at the work place or

just a thousand different manifestations of the grievance of the racism and homophobia and the

oppression that they believed that they have experienced directly. You start piling one on top of the

other, and then in the group there is a gay Latino, HIV-positive, and it just starts piling up until the

sense of isolation, the sense of exclusion from our society, is so deep and so profound that people

just burst into tears in the middle of it.

I let it go, and the group let it go, until that discussion had really wound its way down and
people were emotionally and physically exhausted. Then we tried to pick up the pieces and at that

point I had to say to the group, “Okay, you have had this conversation at such a profound level.

You've worked so hard to listen to and to express the depth of the pain on this subject. Now,

heaven help us, we have to prioritize populations under these needs. That's what this discussion

was about. Now, in light of what you have heard from one another, let's get to work. Let's figure

out if we can get these populations prioritized.”

And they were brilliant. They did it. They were able to say, “Look, let's step back from

this, and let's get this right. Let's make sure that we are understanding why you would put a group

in the highest priority, and why you would put a group in a second level or higher priority, and

why you would put the group in simply a high priority population.” We talked about the criteria.

We talked about their concerns. We then went through it, and people were able ultimately to agree

under all fourteen needs to a list of populations that, that suffer from that need, from that lack, or

that line up under that need, and they were prioritized “highest,” “higher,” and “high.” They did it.

It went pretty smoothly, [actually]. Once they had really exhausted the grief over this one,

they were then able to just shift and look at the task and go ahead and do it, and do it really

carefully and really respectfully, because now they understood one another and understood this

issue at a much different level.

[But] it didn't all go swimmingly, and we didn't stop [one] conversation that we ought to

have stopped: People screamed at each other during [that] one, didn't use the four chairs, just

jumped out of their seats and started yelling. So we had to break that up. That was during

[grieving]. It got really, really tough. But afterwards, the prioritizing was very, very calm, very

respectful, very careful, very careful, and they did it. It was quite amazing.

This was another stroke of genius that came from the Ad Hoc Process. They had set as a

goal, [that] this plan [wouldn’t be] just a one time deal, and this review and this idea of community

planning [wouldn’t be] a one time thought. People who work in this area who have dedicated their

lives to HIV and AIDS work have said, “This is here to stay. This is going to be the way this gets

done. So, we need to really set this on a course for long term sustainable work”.

So they said through the Ad Hoc Process that Coloradans Working Together has all these

CDC goals and we're going to add one more. “We are going to take time to heal wounds.” That

was their phrasing, “time to heal wounds.” So they promised each other that when we hit a very

painful subject, whatever it happened to be, that we were going to take the time to work through it,

to heal with one another, to heal as a community, to really get to the depth of where people were

hurt and do something about that. So it was a promise they had made to each other.
 Not everyone wanted this discussion to go on like it did. I had people coming up to me

and saying, “Stop this thing! A couple people just got out of their chairs and came over to me and

said, “You're the facilitator, make this stop.” (They were whites.)

I said, “I don't want to make this stop. I can't. If I stop this I will add insult to this injury.

I just don't think I should stop it.” Then I said, “But if you think this should stop, there are chairs

up there in the middle of the room. You stop it. You're part of this. Take it -- take a role in the

discussion and see if it’s best if we stop it”. They didn't do it. It would have been wrong to do it, I

think -- I really do.

This is a decision that I have looked back on. I would not have done it any other way --

even though there are people who, to this day, would say I did not do my job. I just believe that

there was no answer that was fitting for everyone, and so I had to take the answer that was fitting

the values, the goals of this group, and that really met the more pressing need. In the moment, and

in reflection afterwards, I believe that the most pressing need was this incredibly rare opportunity

to talk about what we almost never talk about in this society, and that was, “What does it mean to

all of us to be in this room together and be of a different color and to be of these different

backgrounds and to have these grievances that we carry around about it, or these hurts that come

out, that have come to us because of it?”

I just would not have done it any other way. People changed, and I changed. That's one

of the things I said to people afterwards, “This was mesmerizing for me, and I feel like I can talk

about these things differently, myself. Now, let me check this out: Did it have this effect on you?”

The Coordinating Committee talked about it, and I talked with participants about it, and

they said, “Yeah, this was work we had to do. This has changed how I feel about the people who

are here in this room. This has given me a very new perspective on these issues.”

So for many of them, that was true. For some, it was too much, it was too painful, and

they believed, again, that it drove a wedge in the group. I think all it did was name the wedge that

was already in the group and give them a chance of taking it out. But there were some who really

felt that it drove it in more deeply. So at the next meeting we had to deal with that. I stood up at

the next meeting, and I said, “That was really a difficult thing. It seems to me that before we get

back to work, you had a couple of weeks to reflect on that difficult meeting, and we need to make

sure that you're ready to go forward. Do you need to say anything first before we go on?”

That gave people an opportunity to stand up and say, “I hated that. I thought that was

painful and awful.”

Then other people stood up and said, “Yes, it was painful. Yes, it was awful, but I
needed to do what I did in that meeting and I needed to have that conversation, and it was time well

spent.”

I had thought really hard about how to open the meeting and had been reading, just by

happenstance, a book called, The Soul Of Politics, by a guy named Jim Wallace. A quote from that

book had really just hit me over the head at the same time that all this was going on. I pulled the

quote out. I gave it to one of the people on the Coordinating Committee and I said, “I think this is

what happened in the last meeting. Do you think reading this would be useful?”

He said, “Absolutely. I'll read it.”

I said, “Great, you read it. I shouldn't read it. You should read it,” and so, he did.

I did a little editing of it and just took a couple of words out. Then I gave it to Vic, who

read it at the meeting. What he read was:

"Compassion. The word compassion literally means to suffer with, to put yourself in

someone else's position, to walk for a little while in his or her shoes. Compassion always

begins with listening. The listening that leads to compassion is the beginning of

understanding. In America we build walls we desperately hope will keep people away

from us. But these same walls are ultimately unable to prevent us from experiencing the

consequences of abandoning our neighbor. The walls divide us but they don't protect us.

Those illusory but oppressive walls must be broken down and nothing does that better

than the experience of listening directly to the people on the other side of the wall.

Getting close enough to see, hear, touch, smell and taste the reality of others is what

always makes the difference. In listening to the stories of those so seemingly different

from us, we find similar but unexpressed voices inside ourselves. Hearing one another's

stories is the beginning of new understanding and the foundation of compassionate

action."

So that's how we started the next meeting, and he said, “This is what happened in the last

meeting. That's what this was about,” but he also made room for everybody else to express

different points of view about what happened. That was a very wise 30 minutes we took out of the

agenda. It just gave people a chance to decompress and let go of any of the anxieties, that they

were still holding, over what had happened in that difficult meeting.

So we moved on. We talked about strategies for each population under each need, and

they just got to work, and away we went. So that really brings us to the end of the planning

process. They now had this document that had needs, populations, strategies, and really laid it all

out.
 Through this part of the process, there were always about fifty or sixty people working.

To do a consensus check, we just did it visually: You hold your thumb up if you're in consensus.

You hold your thumb sideways if you're not quite sure, or you want to ask a question, or you want

more data, or you are willing to go along, but you aren't doing backflips -- you know, you're not

ecstatic but you'll let it go. Thumbs down means, “I'm not in consensus and you can't go forward

without me.” We had used this throughout the whole process, and we'd gotten really used to doing

consensus checks on wording and on process. It was just a wonderful shorthand. We had really

learned to work through consensus. So throughout the whole thing I had been saying, “Okay, let's

see your thumbs. Do we have thumbs up? Are there any thumbs down?”

We'd work through the thumbs down, and then we'd work through the thumbs sideways,

until everybody could hold their thumbs up and then we'd move on. We used it a thousand times if

we used it once.

Before the last meeting, we gave people a draft of the plan and asked people to identify

any barriers that they had to consensus on the plan. So people had to take their pencils out, and on

little sticky post-it notes, write down the specific page number and the specific wording they

wanted to change in order to make the plan acceptable to them. Then we just worked. We just

stuck them all up on the wall. Everybody went and read them, and we just worked through them at

the last meeting, one by one, until there were no more barriers to consensus on the wall.

But I should tell another part of the story first. In order to get through the barriers to

consensus, people were really nervous -- there was a really fearful tone or you know [a kind of]

tension in the air, as we're coming into the room. The people knew that there was a lot of anxiety

about whether or not we'd really get consensus. So the Coordinating Committee had done this

really funny, smart thing. They'd made worry beads for everyone. So, as we're working through

these barriers to consensus, people could come to the middle of the room and take a string of worry

beads -- just little plastic beads that you hang on Christmas trees cut into little segments of 8 or 10

beads. So people would come in, and if they got nervous, and we started to get stuck a little bit,

they'd run up, and they would grab worry beads, and everyone was supposed to rub their worry

beads and hang onto their worry beads and we'd get through it. If we were making great progress,

they were supposed to throw their worry beads back in the bowl in the middle of the room and

give up their anxiety, let go of their worry.

It was this wonderful symbol for the tension that was in the room at the end. So, people

started taking worry beads at the beginning. They started hooking them together, sort of stringing

them back in the strings, and they were putting them around their head, and they were weaving
them into their clothing and doing funny things with them. But every now and then we'd hit a

barrier to consensus that was kind of a tough one and we'd get through it, and change the wording.

People would hold their thumbs up, and then people would start tossing the beads away.

So it gave us some humor, and it broke the tension. It was fun.

So now we're at the end, and I say, while everyone's still holding onto their worry beads,

a bunch of them, and I say to the group, “Thumbs” and they start to hold their thumbs up. Then

one person in the back of the room, and still to this day I don't know who it is, said, “No,” in this

very loud voice from the back of the room, and I thought, “Oh, we don't have consensus. There's

something else -- what haven't we done?”

And this person said, “No, don't just hold your thumbs up, stand up.”

So I looked around and said, “Is that okay?”

And everybody said, “Yeah, let's stand up.”

So people started getting out of their chairs, and the next thing you know, I'm looking

around the room, and not one person is sitting down. And so I made sure, and I said, “You know,

sit down if you need to sit down. We can still work through this stuff. If you are not in

consensus, don't stand up.”

I looked around and everyone was on their feet, and I said to the group, “Well, I think

you've done it. You have consensus,” and this cheer went up in the room, and people started to

hug one another and shake hands with one another and celebrate with one another. And all of a

sudden these beads started flying through the air. There was just this huge shower in the middle of

the room, and I'm standing and I'm just watching these beads float through the air and hit the

middle of the room. And then we all went home. It was pretty amazing -- it was great.

They were able to come to consensus on the plan and do something that so many people

had told them was impossible -- and that I had in fact believed was impossible from the beginning:

that they were really going to be able to throw the doors open, let anybody come in and really get

consensus on this thing, but they did it. It was something else! So this work keeps me going.

Now, the next step was talking about money, and they didn't do as well. They had

consensus on the plan, but they couldn't come to consensus about how to divide up the cash. It’s a

problem that continues into year two. They had a really tough time, and mostly the issue really

turned on whether or not the Health Department was going to give over all of this control over the

money, or whether they were really just asking for people's input. At that point, the negotiation

really shifted, and the Health Department people said, “Fine, you've come to consensus on the plan.

It’s a community plan, but his application is ours. This is the Health Department's. We're just
taking your input, and we're going to decide whether or not we change anything. Then we'll come

back, and if you want to come to consensus on that, that's fine. If you don't, that's fine,” and the

whole tone of collaboration and cooperation and we're all in this together that had been so painfully

created, evaporated. It was very hard. And so, they didn't get complete consensus on the money

for year one, but they took that issue back into year two, and they're struggling through it right now

on year two. I didn't do year two. I wanted to, but they wanted a new voice. They wanted to try

something different. They wanted an African American woman instead of a white guy, and CDR's

rates were higher than they really wanted to pay. So there were a whole set of issues that lead them

to say, “We care about you, and we love this amazing thing that happened, and we didn't get it all

done and we want to try something new to make it happen.” So I'm watching from the sidelines as

they do year two and I’m continuing to offer what assistance they feel they can use me for. It’s so

difficult to let go, [though]. It was really very difficult for me to say, “Maybe you do need

something new for year two. That's good.” It took me a while to get to the point where now, in

fact, I can say that clearly, that they really did need to do something different in year two. It isn't

that I did a bad thing, or that I wasn't a good mediator. It isn't about my ego. They needed to do

something different in terms of the process. They needed to try something new. So that's fine.

That's right, and they needed to be able to do it in a financially reasonable way. Our rates this year

made that hard for them. So that's a tough one, but I'm not done. I'm going to do some training in

mediation for the Mayor's AIDS council, and I'm going to throw my hat in the ring in [for] year

three.