New friends

With Meredith Smith, a Project Coordinator for the Advanced Consortium on Conflict, Cooperation and Complexity (AC4), at the Earth Institute, Columbia University.  Meredith is an educator and community development specialist with over six years of experience in international and domestic development work in the U.S., Peru and Jordan.  Prior to joining AC⁴, she completed her Master’s degree in Public Administration in Development Practice at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. For her culminating project, she collaborated with a team to design and assess health related vulnerabilities of underserved urban communities in NYC post-Hurricane Sandy for Doctors of the World USA.

With Raphael Schmidt, who introduced us to The Oasis Game, a community mobilization tool developed by Instituto Elos in Brazil.  Oasis "materializes collective dreams" by bringing people together from  various sectors of a community, and helping them work together - not to "solve problems" - but to create positive visions, and then to make them real.  One of the team-building games that we played involved standing in a circle, and tossing a large spool of string from person to person.  Each time a person caught the spool, s/he declared a personal talent or gift that s/he could contribute to the group.  When we were finished, we had created a complex network of intersecting strands.  Raphael placed three bottles at various locations underneath the network, and then tied three pens to the network, each one hanging down far enough to reach a bottle, but located several inches away from a bottle.  Our task was to strengthen, slacken, and shift the network until we had dropped all three pens into the narrow mouth of each bottle.  To accomplish this task, we spontaneously entered an "intersubjective field awareness," and somehow managed to get all three pens into the bottles in under two minutes.  in a debriefing, I shared with the group that I experienced "an unexpected joy" when we completed the task.  One of the German participants said, "That's because you're an American!"

The Oasis Game is, of course, much more than team-building games.  Here is the video that Raphael showed us. It shows the impact that an Oasis Game can have on a community: