Sustaining Sustainability: My Efforts on the Sustainability Café

This is a first draft of a reflection paper on my efforts in the Sustainability Café Action Resource Team. It may not be all that intelligible, but it is one of three tasks I am supposed to complete for class tomorrow. I hope that it will do.

I recall once reading in high school about how an essay ought to provide a thread between disparate pieces, binding them not only firmly, but intelligibly together. I think I aimed at doing something like that.

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I leaped into the project when it was proffered, unassumingly, to me in the form of a partial graduate assistantship. The sound of it, though clunky, was warm and reassuring, solid even in its sound: Sustainability Café. It is both smooth sounding and sharp, lengthily Germanic but imported from the French. And the word café itself, a space to welcome people, to converse, share food and drink, to while away an evening with words and music and art.

The space, whenever it actually is, remains at least a year away. It has been confounded with administration confusion, corporate assumptions, and the overall shortcomings of passing the torch from one person in the know to someone utterly clueless. In this case, I was the clueless one. Bryan McClaren had led the way with the Café for the previous year when I began. He knows the names, faces, and many of the emails for contacts; he has documents loosely filed away and conversations in his head with key players; and he knows NAU and Flagstaff infinitely better than I have managed in the past three months. If only I could have downloaded it all, I would perhaps have been prepared for the task ahead.

Instead, I ended up with a list of two dozen people to put to work on the Café. Some loose goals hovered in my mind – most having to do with a menu and local ingredients – that have fit into my set of responsibilities. Instead, I have fumbled, even I have fumbled with a certain grace, through leading group meetings intended to inform and organize and attempted to find my voice in some harmony with the voices of my team members.

More than accomplishing the goals set out before me, this quest for harmony between enthused participants has been a primary aim. That is not to say I am unconcerned with providing a solid foundation of knowledge and community from which the Café can be built and with which the Café would be engaged. Rather, as I read through emails and connect with first-year students, seniors, and my fellow graduate students, and dig through the material at-hand and ahead, I am listening attentively, sharply to what is said, how it is said, and look for how to wrap it around my role in the project. I recognize, and at times quietly savor, my pivotal role in this process has given me a vantage in the very center of things; you see things differently from the center, at least when you manage to see things at all.

Perhaps the pivot is the best way to go about it. Most doors don't have a single pivot, but cooperate with others to get going. When one is under-performing, the door itself continues to function, but not as well and certainly not as pleasantly as when they are all accomplishing the task together. I am a pivot for the Café and my role is to assist that everything progresses, builds, improves. Most of my work at the moment is directing and checking for the follow through. Where the follow through is lacking, I push a little harder with a guiding hand, and feel for what is working and what has malfunctioned along the way.

What the pivot has little control over, though, is in what direction the mechanism turns; employing the pivot makes the pivot into a tool, with some other force showing the direction. This is not just a shortcoming of the metaphor, but part of the issue of my role as a facilitator. I am, more often than not, functioning as a means and have only sparse knowledge of the method to apply the tool of myself to the task it needs to accomplish. In some ways, I full like a lever when what we really need is a wedge.

The difference between the two is that the lever can push and lighten, shift a load from here to there, and activate – like a toggle or switch – some great mechanism into action. For a time, I might have fancied that was activating just such a mechanism, but I doubt that more and more. The wedge, on the other hand, splits and forces and breaks. I want to do that, I want to be capable of working in just such a way. I want to split apart the conception that we students and faculty are anti-profits for Sodexo when we talk about local sourcing and serving real food. I want to force the conversation toward real sustainability and not just simply the absence of bags or throwaway bottles. I want to break, I very much want to break, this project into small pieces, bite-sized even, that I cold hand to each person who could savor the task and be proud of their contribution to the whole afterward.

At the end of the day, I am not a wedge. I am not a lever or a pivot either. I am a facilitator. I am learning skills of understanding, communication, and leadership; skills I have not had the demands to practice so extensively. Understanding, I suppose, I have cobbled out of lectures, debates, arguments, mediations, workshops, and so on; but putting it to work with so many individuals, keeping each face and name and expectation in mind is not the same sort, at least not until I have done it.

Communication in the form of an article on environmentalism and Buddhism or arguing the cultural epistemology of sacred groves or what a community-oriented business looks like; well, that turns out to be the easy stuff. Communication, it turns out, involves reading the curves of a face and the accents of tone that show the way to what someone is vibrantly passionate about. Then, there is the communication that explains, off the cuff, how that is connected to the activity at-hand, the one s/he and a dozen or two dozen or one hundred others are busy make happen. And finally, if you can communicate just how exciting it all is, how much potential there is for transformation; once I get that part figured out, I suppose I'll have passed the introductory course.

Leadership on the other hand, well, it is its own game. It is two parts communication to one parts understanding to one parts personal vivacity or some adequate substitute. Leadership isn't about one skill or another, but the smooth fusion, the chemical reaction of putting the elements together and providing the catalyst. More often than not, I am expected to be the catalyst. I take the latent energy in the group, stir in the knowledge, find some source of heat to plug it into, and then I just have to figure out how to make that special event, that miraculous moment happen. Afterward, I can feel for temperature, measure for a change in volume, smell the air for some gaseous product; and as I watch I read for success or failure, for the signs of a mind or body enervated and a group newly bound together.

I would like to describe more than simple machines and chemical reactions, but in a way that is the most accurate gauge of this activity. I constantly feel like I have a wrench instead of a hammer, a nail instead of a screw, or a phone instead of a computer. The task presented to me seemed somehow simple – I have no idea how I made such an assumption – but as I feel for its intricacies, explore each socket and widget, peek behind the plates into the mechanics behind the surface, I witness more and more but know less and less about what I am intending to accomplish.

That is not to say I am distressed. Perhaps I have too little time to feel distressed. Rather, what I have is a desire to succeed. That success would mean creating a café to be shared by all campus members with issues of local, seasonal food and sustainable materials at its heart. I know that this is what I want. Such a space would foster a space warm with student artwork, music, and politics; it would intertwine issues of agriculture, food, and justice; it would explore the potential for transformation through cooperation, synthesis, and synergy.

Somehow, I know this space already. I have met some of its patrons, a few of its performers, and have heard the echoes of the conversations therein. I have taken students there – twice now – through words and quiet, space and company, and the collective work of dream. Though I have led the way to this place, I have not so far been there; it is a place a know from the insights and inspirations of others. In the process, I have showed them away, but it is only through their visions that I know the sounds and smells and sights of this shared space.

This role as a facilitator is not, in itself, one thing or another. I am party to various engaged and lively cooperators or – as Rom Coles would prefer – conspirators. We are conspiring, I have no doubt, for this chance for revolution, for a fundamental turning around and coming back again to the start. Such a coming back again to the beginning, we conspirators seem to think, gives us new eyes and new ears on what has always been there waiting for us to see. More importantly, though, this revolution gives us new hands from the old, new hands to construct and to explore, to touch and feel, to knit together new and old into a strong, supportive, and warming space.