Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

Last time I introduced four key topics to illustrate the differences between activism and development work.

Meetings may seem an odd place to start.  But consider the standard meeting.  You know the drill –

I’ve sat through enough meetings to know it’s easy to make heavy weather of them.  Dull meetings with lots of procedures, mastered by a few activists, are not only boring but also dis-empowering.  Their purpose is to exercise power and control.

The Meeting as a Powerhouse

Where did this style of meeting come from?  I’m no historian and I would be delighted if anyone can prove me wrong but I think it was the eighteenth century evangelical revival!

Portrait of John Wesley by Frank O Salisbury

John Wesley organised the new industrial poor.  I don’t know where he got the model from but it seems this type of meeting was not generally known before him.

He passed his approach to the Methodist societies and their members passed them onto other organisations.  During the nineteenth century almost everyone used this approach to meetings, particularly among the working classes.  All sorts of local economic initiatives developed that helped people organise and make the most of their incomes, for example worker and retail co-ops, insurance companies, building societies, friendly societies, penny banks, sick and dividing clubs, libraries, educational institutions …  None of these would have been possible without Wesley’s approach to meetings.

Trade Unions organised in chapels, beginning meetings with a hymn and a prayer and were one type of organisation representing working class interests.  Others included non-conformist chapels, temperance halls and pubs.

What Went Wrong?

Meetings we experience today as dull were a powerhouse of innovation 100 – 200 years ago.

Why are meetings so often experienced as dis-empowering today?  With the welfare state (arguably the greatest achievement of this movement) and mass media, perhaps there was a decline in opportunity and purpose for the autodidact, the self-taught man or woman.

Maybe the rise of community development in the nineteen seventies, reflected this decline in innovative change from the working classes.  Perhaps we need to understand this change.

The point is meetings don’t have to be this way.  It is the role of the development worker to help activists organise participative and enjoyable meetings.  The role of the activist is to organise meetings, introduce topics, help people participate and follow-up once the meeting is complete.  The developmental role is watching how the meeting is organised and helping the activists improve their performance.

Throughout the nineteenth century, working people built the institutions we take for granted today.  I’ll tell you about one of the great debates of the time in my next post: Beatrice Potter, Development Worker?

One comment I’ve received refers to the “curse of structureless meetings”. Would you find a review of the purpose of the elements of a typical meeting helpful?

Do you think it is true there were no nineteenth century development workers because the people were able to organise themselves?  Or if there were development workers, where do we look for them?