Ribbon Cutting Reimagined

Dozens of ribbons were cut at the the Wayfinding Academy's building dedication ceremony

This week I participated in two ceremonies to celebrate new spaces, each a home for innovative organizational endeavors. 

I wasn't able to attend the building dedication ceremony for the Wayfinding Academy, a new college opening next week in Portland's St. Johns neighborhood - but their plan captured my imagination and inspired me to support the celebration with a donation.
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After renovating an old YMCA building, the Wayfinding Academy issued an invitation to the community: "Help us make our house a home." 

Rather than repeating the tired old model of having VIPs cut a ribbon over the threshold, and offering naming rights to only the highest donors, Wayfinding set out to "fill our building with the names of supporters. That way, our students will be reminded every day that there is a community of hundreds of people who believed that they are worth supporting, that this community made the Wayfinding experience possible for them. We want to envelop them with community."

Their donation program offers "rooms and doorways and appliances and toilets (yes, those too)" for donors to claim and name - I funded a light switch! At the dedication celebration, donors signified their commitment by cutting ribbons throughout the building.  As they prepare to welcome their first class of students, they're still a few thousand dollars short of their fundraising goal. Check out this great opportunity to support a community-based model of learning.

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The second space-warming ceremony, one I led for a friend's new workspace, was more intimate. Their social change mission requires both an external orientation - to the conditions they seek to change, to the constraints and partnerships of the communities they serve and engage - and an internal focus on their creative process and their life as a team.

As the team stood facing outwards, I asked them to identify a core condition in the external world that affected their work. Turning back to each other, they wrote these words on rocks I'd brought - from racism and poverty to naysayers and devices that distract. Then I asked them to assemble the rocks into two cairns. These cairns can function as a touchstone, a way to keep themselves always oriented to the external context for their work.

Then, turning inward, I passed around a bag of ceramic hearts made by the 18h Avenue Peace House's cottage industry Grief Watch. I invited the team to bring to mind a quality or condition they wanted to foster within their new work space. Each person named a quality they were committed to embodying as they passed their heart to the person next to them. We closed with a round of rose water lemonade toasts and a poem offered in tribute to their work.

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​To Be of Use
By Marge Piercy
 
The people I love the best
Jump into work head first
Without dallying in the shallows
And swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
The black sleek heads of seals
Bouncing like half submerged balls.
 
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
Who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
Who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
Who do what has to be done, again and again
 
I want to be with people who submerge
In the task, who go into the fields to harvest
And work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the flood must come in or the fire be put out.
 
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
Has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
But you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
And a person for work that is real.