Some years ago, I worked as a coach to assist a woman who wanted to cure her stammer. In her mid fifties, she had stammered all her life, and her stammer was quite strong. Instead of trying to make her stammer go away, as we might in therapy, we accepted and appreciated her way of speaking as complete mastery. The British actor Derek Jacobi showed supreme skill in creating a convincing stammer for his role as the Roman Emperor in “I Claudius,” yet she did it naturally without even trying. We focused instead on how could she learn to speak more fluently, because up til then, she had only ever tried to stop her stammer. She ended up soon after having two distinct ways of speaking instead of only one. What if stammering were a skill and not a disability?
We consider it normal that if we have a problem, we want to solve it. All of our creative thinking tends towards, “how can we stop or prevent this?” The story above is about what can happen with a change of paradigm. If I were to ask you not to think right now of a pink elephant, notice how immediate and pervasive the image becomes.
The Rise and Thrive project was conceived from a powerful desire to put an end to homelessness in Ireland. That social challenge has been buried so deep in our psyche that it feels in terms of difficulty like trying to stop stammering, or giving up smoking for someone who has always stammered or always smoked.
A New Term For A New Paradigm
What would it be like if there were a new word in our language to capture what we would really wish for instead? What if there were a concept of:
Homefullness!
Definition: Homefulness
Noun/Nominalisation: The quality of being able to respond in the face of sudden or involuntary loss of resources, by asking for and accepting help. Taking pride in finding a place to stay and, if you wish, to call home.
A Social State: The successful and proactive allocation of social resources to identify, approach and offer aid and assistance to people facing sudden loss of ability to support themselves. A social, political, national and legal determination to engage means to make available both temporary and permanent housing and accommodation, and assist people in generating the means to pay back.
A Movement: A reformation of nationwide opinion to a deeply felt desire and excitement for public respect of people’s dignity to be just who they are, and a genuine concern to catch them when they fall and help them to their feet again. An immovable determination to know and feel, “we all belong.”
A method called Future-basing is a way of bringing together groups of people to co-create a vision of a future they all genuinely desire, described as if it is already achieved and totally real. With key stakeholders and those affected in the room, Future-basing is at its most powerful. Over the past 32 years since its inception, Future-basing has enabled re-visioning of the world-wide Red Cross movement, creation of an International protocol, the Red Cross Seville Agreement, urban regeneration in the UK, and conflict resolution in the National Health Service.
The Homefulness Ireland project team is aiming to establish a day in which many key stakeholders in Ireland’s intentions to support and bring relief to people immersed in homelessness and helplessness, can come together in one place to create a vast, national-scale vision of an Ireland that is a State of Homefulness. Would you join us if you could?