Open Journal Montreal

By Holly Wagg.

This paper was written from my reflections, or lessons learnt, from conference organizing. I'm not really sure what to do with it, or think of it, but I do think it's an interesting read.

Held November 21-23, 2003 in Montreal, Quebec, Transforming Spaces: Girlhood Agency and Power was the first national conference on girls and girlhoods. With the goal of increasing communication, collaboration and change in the social realm, this conference event sought to bring together girls, young women and women working in diverse fields. Whether individuals identified as grassroots activists, academics, artists, policy makers, educators, community practitioners, youth, or in multiple intersecting categories, this conference was intended to create a space for dialogue between these often disparate groups. Attended by approximately 265 people from around the world, over 135 workshops, papers and/or presentations were given that aimed to transform spaces while simultaneously building bridges and increasing cross-sectoral collaboration on issues pertinent to girls and girlhoods.

I was the conference coordinator of this event; a graduate student, a member of the coordinating committee, and employee of one of the core partners, POWER Camp National. I was involved in organizing this event and participated in multiple, often contentious ways. I have hesitations recording my reflections to paper. Not every person involved in the conference project is going to agree with my perceptions. Not every person is going to like the tensions I’ve highlighted, partially because I am articulating them to an external audience and partially because I am privileging some conflicts at the expense of others. But as scholars, conference organizing is something that we will most likely be involved in at some point in time in our careers. This paper is an attempt to capture my experiences of a year long organizing process, working primarily with academics and grassroots organizers. I’ve made mistakes, done some things well, and in documenting these processes, I do so in hope that others can learn about the gratifying yet complicated, sticky and political mess that organizing can become.

Framing the Coordinating Committee, Framing the Conference

We were a random group of young women and women whose work was interconnected by a shared interest in girls. We came together through a who-knows-who in the area and based on who had the skills, time and/or expertise to contribute to envisioning the project; our collaboration was akin to the snowballing technique used by researchers trying to locate participants. From an initial meeting of four in January 2003, we exploded over the course of organizing to a Coordinating Committee (CC) suddenly comprised of 14 people. The number of CC members fluctuated between 10 and 15 in this time period as people moved away or could not longer participate. The bulk of initial organizing was completed by a group of 12.

The CC was comprised of core partners and affiliated individuals. Tatiana Fraser and Rachel Gouin of POWER Camp National (PCN) initiated the conceptual process with Yasmin Jiwani (Concordia University) and Claudia Mitchell (McGill University), forming an additional partnership with Barb MacQuarrie (Alliance of Five Research Centres on Violence Against Women). These four parties, represented by 7 women, formed the core partnership of the CC. Additionally, individual members who were often loosely affiliated with one of the core partners also joined the organizing team, which brought an additional 5 people to the committee.

In the early days of collaboration we had negotiated a decision-making process based upon a consensus model. While the CC was comprised of core partners and stand-alone individuals, this was not hierarchically organized with the core partners having more power: each member of the CC was given an equal voice at the table. Group decisions would be unanimous and where consensus couldn’t be reached, an Executive Committee (comprised of the core partners and two other individuals) would make the final call on any contentious motions. At the end of each meeting, all decisions were considered binding and were not to be revisited. During the course of organizing we never had to use the Executive
Committee to make a decision.

To unify the focus and activities of the group, the early planning stages involved establishing a framework for the conference. We collectively determined how we would work together and outlined our vision, objectives and foundational principals. The goal of this document production was to clearly articulate what we wanted Transforming Spaces to be and to have written directives to guide the work of the CC and subcommittees.

Decision-Making in Action: the Paper Map versus Practice

On average, we met once a month, but it wasn’t until our fifth meeting in March 2003 when we looked around the room at who was planning and who got to sit on the committee that we began to address issues of race, class, ability, sexual orientation and youth. We had been so swept up in our excitement, that the ideas of diversity and visible representation had not been articulated: we weren’t completely white and middle class – but the many voices we hoped to have speak at the conference weren’t sitting around the organizing table. While the issue of diversity was mentioned and acknowledged at this meeting, that acknowledgement wasn’t sufficient.

Behind closed doors, issues of diversity on the CC dominated the team meetings at PCN. Each team member had a different position on what the key stakes were in diversity; for example, whether we should focus on including more youth, more women of colour or acknowledging other forms of diversity not visible to the eye, such as sexual orientation or immigrant/refugee status. At times I left these meetings incredibly frustrated. Firstly, while I recognize how different lived experiences mediate one’s position in the world and the invaluable contributions these experiences lend, I also felt strongly that including someone on the CC simply because of their race or their age would tokenize them while leaving the burden of representation to one voice. I also felt that in asking new members to participate on the CC because they made the committee visibly more diverse, diversity had become a focus only in terms of race. We weren’t looking critically at why we hadn’t considered finding girls or women who identified as disabled or from a lower class bracket. An expansion of the CC was also not practical in terms of time restraints: it was mid-March and we were planning to finish the final framework pieces of the project at our visioning meeting in April, by which point, all major decisions would have been made. Perhaps that individual would not feel like a stakeholder in the project and their presence would only serve to herald to our claims that this conference was organized by a diverse group of girls and women. Asking someone to participate at such a late stage in the game was problematic and not searching out these individuals was equally as problematic.

Interestingly, while diversity was debated between the staff of PCN, those debates were never openly placed on the table at the CC meetings. At the CC, it was almost as if our consciousness of these issues could serve as a substitute for the actual presence of bodies, and combined with the enormity of the project underway, action to make diversity happen from all members wasn’t readily forthcoming. For those who held a strong stake in diversifying the coordinating committee, they began to actively outreach in the community. The end result of our efforts found a woman of colour and a youth to join the CC (the youth attended only one CC meeting and the woman of colour was never able to attend a meeting before she moved away three months later). It was agreed that any other interested individuals would participate in subcommittees, due to time and size constraints, and that our outreach efforts for subcommittee recruitment would reflect a conscious commitment to diversity.

With the introduction of diversity as an issue, small cracks began to fragment the CC as PCN members polarized and individual agendas on the CC came into play. This had less to do with diversity itself than the way one of the first major issues was addressed by this group of women. Undercurrents of tension and differences in how to achieve the conference vision had been brewing for a while. What we were unable to do was successfully bridge the mobilization of individual agendas into collective productive action towards conference organization.

The Power Dynamics of Participatory Organizing: The Illusion of Transparency

Whether you want to use the term collective or participatory/consensus decision making, it wasn’t always so.
Decision-making began to take two forms: that which was negotiated openly at the CC meetings and that which was discussed beforehand to unite individuals on an issue. Behind the scenes discussions were held, things were decided and power plays shaped. Individuals would flesh out the meat and bones of an argument, and then sit at the CC table as if they just happened to agree with the position being put forward. I would argue that the root of this division came from the structure of the CC.

The CC was comprised of four core partners: POWER Camp National, Concordia University, McGill University and the Alliance of Five Research Centres on Violence Against Women – with PCN filling four spots on the CC and the rest of the core partners having one each. Interested third parties who had affiliations with one of the core partners were brought aboard in the snowballing process to fill the other 5 spots. PCN’s purpose was clear: they were using the conference to launch their new status as a national organization, provided the main source of funding for the project and were ultimately accountable for the outcome of Transforming Spaces. The other core partners were able to contribute financially and in-kind, and also brought connections and contacts to the mix. This was based on the presumption that the other individuals on the CC didn’t have the same financial capital or access to resources that the core partners did. While the decision-making power of individuals was equal in theory, in reality, this power was far from being distributed equally: we worked under what I call the illusion of transparency. Financial contributions, paid employees versus volunteers, allegiance to a core partner with shared ideologies, and backroom politicking all influenced what happened around the table. As much as we attempted to have a flat consensus structure and an equal power dynamic, and it appears so on paper, the hierarchy of the core partners above the rest of the committee overshadowed egalitarian intentions. This hierarchy arose because of gradations of accountability, and even within the core partners, project accountability in terms of finances and outcomes fluctuated. The more a partner or an individual was held responsible for the invested stakes of third-party interests, the more power and influence they possessed around the decision-making table. The uneven power between the core partners and individual CC members was acknowledged and the consensus-based model of decision-making was employed to equally distribute that power. However, power is inherent to a position and when it’s felt that the participatory process is not serving the best interests of stakeholders, it’s easy to intervene, shift agendas in the name of preserving this accountability. In doing so, the ‘redistributed’ power was usurped: redistribution of power without challenging the origins and source of that power is illusory.

Clarity and Convolution: Further Complications in the Participatory Process

Misinterpretations were common amongst CC members. We were too large and it was impossible to gather all members of the committee to meet at all of the same times. Moments of confusion typically arose after a missed meeting where decisions were made and individuals did not read the minutes prior to attending the next meeting. At each meeting we would have to spend a substantial chunk of time bringing absent members up to speed, as well as having to refer to our agreement to not revisit decisions already made. While meetings were scheduled in advance, giving people time to rearrange their schedules, there was not one meeting where every single CC member was present.

A second point of contention arose between CC members with respect to the recognition of when decisions had been made and conflictual interpretations of what those decisions were. We had started off with an informal model of talking about an issue, for example, the name of the conference, the role of male participation, the process of outreach for subcommittee members or what kind of food to serve at the conference. We would all discuss the issues, suss out possible approaches, and then agree on one. This final point, the decision, was generally recognized by going around the room with head nods or when there were no disagreements left to be voiced, but over the process of organizing this evolved into a more formal recognition where each person addressed had to give their verbal consent. While we had to fine-tune the mechanisms of consensus, this did not preclude misunderstandings about what the decision was. An example of this arose in regards to devising selection criteria for papers/presentations submitted. While the call had been sent out asking participants to separate their identifying information from their abstracts (which were to undergo a blind review process), the CC also had a commitment to accepting papers written across generations, races, classes, ethnicities, academic fields, regions, abilities, etc. Heated debate ensued over how to use the cover sheets where people had been invited to self-identify and self-disclose. While the CC had made a commitment to the diversity of conference presenters, it had also made a commitment to reviewing abstracts through a blind process. Some CC members didn’t realize there had been a decision for performing a blind review, and countered that they never would have agreed. Others argued that they never would have agreed to select presenters based upon whom they were or how they identified, and would only make selections based upon the quality of the work submitted. What remained unclear was how the CC had initially intended to reconcile a blind review process and use of the self-identification materials.

Watered-Down Politics: Reconciling Individuals and the Group

Decisions were made as a group and people would often sacrifice their personal politics in the interest of moving forward. While never asked to do so, I think that at some point during the organizing process each CC member felt they had to water down their politics.

Personal politics conflicted at our eight-hour visioning day in April 2003. While the goal of the day had been to come up with a schedule template for the conference, which was achieved in 1.5 hours, the rest of the time was spent addressing our prior conference experiences, mapping conference priorities and then visioning how to make Transforming Spaces meet the objectives already set. It was during this meeting that we asked, ‘who gets to speak in this space’?

The question related specifically to the participation of men at the conference and their role as speakers.
Instantaneously, the CC members clashed. Some individuals had presumed that because this was a conference on girls and girlhoods men would have no place at such an event, while others were adamant that there was no reason why men shouldn’t be able to speak or attend. Others were taken aback that male presence was even an issue and hadn’t even considered it. After an hour of stating positions and moving nowhere, we agreed to push the issue of male participation to the top of the agenda for the next meeting. At the next meeting we decided to privilege the voices of women and girls over those of men, but that men should be able to attend.

Between the first meeting where the issue of men’s participation arose and the next meeting where the issue was resolved, there was a shift of individual politics so that a consensus decision could be made. The CC went from polarization to agreement, and somewhere along the line individual positions had been diluted. In this case, people were flexible and malleable because their politics could align with the proposition being put forth and being flexible doesn’t necessarily mean your politics are watered down. However, politics can be more than watered down: they can be drowned. One CC member who strongly felt that male presence would make the conference space unsafe and the conference needed to be a women-only event wasn’t able to attend. By virtue of her absence, we had to make a decision to move forward, and in doing so, chose to erase her opinion.

When working within a group, is it possible that your individual politics will not be diluted? When working within a group, how do you reconcile within yourself when the way an objective is achieved conflicts with your politics, but not the objective itself? In organizing any conference, you have to choose your battles and prioritize what to bend on and what to let slide. Danger can arise as you let your politics slide because your Self and the project diverge. Wavering on your personal beliefs because of your commitment to the group can cause your attachment to the project and commitment to its outcomes to wane. And in the end, if you lose or sacrifice part, if not all, of your politics and passion, so too perhaps does the final project.

What Happens When Your Collective Goes Kaput? Transitioning From One Working Structure to Another

While problems crept up from the beginning, and we made many attempts at clarification and re-definition, it was the shift in working mode that finally made the CC an irrelevant working body. We recognized that 12 bodies weren’t enough to put a conference together of this magnitude and formed subcommittees to actually take on the task of work. The CC was the committee that framed the conference and decided was it would look like, and the SCs did the work to make that vision a reality.

The SCs became the life of Transforming Spaces and people were sought to participate from around the city. These groups of dedicated volunteers brought unique skills and energy to the project. The challenges in forming the SCs included diversifying our recruitment to include youth and reaching untapped communities, and, volunteer retention. Time was the biggest hurdle in terms of getting people involved. With less than five months to form SCs and complete assigned tasks, connecting with new groups and bringing new people onboard wasn’t resulting in the establishment of an overwhelmingly large volunteer base. While we continued to follow-up with contacts already in progress, we needed bodies and we needed them quick, so we recruited friends and friends of friends. People also began to hear about Transforming Spaces, wanted to get involved, and were invited to participate on the SCs after they had contacted us.

The biggest challenge of working with volunteers was finding volunteers with the amount of time needed to commit to making the conference happen or a sufficient number of volunteers to complete the tasks at hand. SCs had anywhere from four to nine volunteers, with each giving anywhere from one to ten hours of their time each week. Many of the volunteers sat on multiple SCs. Often, volunteers would end up taking on more than they had time to handle, which would result in burnout and occasionally tasks weren’t completed. I tried to work with those on the SCs for which I was a point person by acknowledging that each person needed to set boundaries of what they were able and unable to do. If unable to finish a task, all I asked of each individual was to please let me know. While I think this was effective in managing volunteers, it often left me with more tasks on my plate than I could reasonably accomplish in the allotted time frames. The volunteers I worked with were talented, gifted and amazing ? without them, this conference would never have been pulled off.

During this transition from handing the work over to the CC, summer hit and people dispersed around the globe. The CC attempted to meet monthly, but over the four-month break, only managed to have one meeting. This problematized the work of the SCs as they had no governing committee to consult when key decisions need to be made. At this time, the relationship between the SCs and CC was unclear: while key decisions that SCs needed to make in consultation with the CC had been outlined in a working document, there was no CC to consult. Forced to rely upon the CC members sitting on various SCs and PCN, the SCs had to make decisions to advance their work absent of CC guidance.

Without an identifiable governing body, the SCs had to make decisions, which were often made without recognition of how these choices impacted the work in progress of other SCs. When the programming committee was flooded with hundreds of amazing abstracts they decided to deviate from the pre-set structure of the two-day conference by doubling the number of speaking spaces and sending out acceptance letters. The logistics subcommittee hadn’t been consulted and pointed out that because of the drastically increased number of presenters, there were only 30 spaces for people not speaking to attend the conference. Suddenly, the number of projected conference attendees had to increase from 150 to 250 and logistics had to scramble to secure additional space and resources. While communication mechanisms were in place between the SCs and some members overlapped, it was insufficient to guide the planning and action processes. Furthermore, with an invisible CC, individuals began to push their personal agendas and major decisions were made without consultation and reflection of how they would affect the overall project.

Complicity of the Author

While I am putting this to paper, selectively using certain examples for illustration while ignoring events in their entirety, what I have not done thus far is implicate my complicity in the organizing process. I speak from a multi-layered position. I am an individual with ambiguous and often conflicting agendas. I wore a youth hat, the queer hat, the grassroots hat, the activist hat and the academic hat. I also had badges lining my sleeve marked volunteer and paid employee.

I started out as a grad student participating in the conference organizing and a POWER Camp National volunteer. When PCN secured funding for the project, I was hired for a paid position as their Communications Director, and the opportunity to coordinate the PCN involvement in the conference arose later. All the while, I was still a student and girls’ studies scholar. My position as an employee and advocate for PCN often clashed with my critical thinking and desires for the conference. I initially gave to the conference as a volunteer, but in becoming a PCN employee I relinquished my personal politics: my actions were often mediated by what was best for the overall project and in mind of the directives set by the CC, although this was always subject to what my interpretation of the directives were.

From this process I take away learnings, and the purpose of putting them to paper is so that you might apply them to your current or future projects. The process of organizing, the hurdles, the challenges and the mistakes are something not often documented. We may talk about them in terms of models and how-to guides, but without grounding them in personal stories and experiences they don’t always resonate and impact. I can sum up my experience in organizing Transforming Spaces as follows: we often met in living rooms over food and drink, with the home as a substitute boardroom putting into motion strategies negotiated in the backroom.

A Snapshot of Hard Learned Organizing Wisdom

Be clear about time commitments and expectations.
Participatory and consensus models have limitations. Recognize them.
Transparency is an illusion.
Power grabs will be made, and sometimes you realize it was you who did the taking.
You will get frustrated. You will get furious. Be constructive with your anger ? learn from it.
Acknowledge that the contributions individuals make are different and don’t need to be measured comparatively.
Be prepared for anything, because if you have to book it, it will get unbooked.
Say thank you, say it often, and acknowledge what people bring to the table and give to the project.
Set your personal boundaries and limits.
Organizing an event is a fly by the seat of your pants experience, and anything that can go wrong will. But it’s always something you can fix.
Own your mistakes.
Ask for help.

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[ originally posted on Wednesday, December 15th, 2004 at 9:50 am and is filed under Everything. ]