| Date: | Fri, 10 Sep 1999 15:43:25 -0700 (PDT) |
| To: | "National Summit Accountability Plank List" <accountability@lyris.rainier-web.com> |
| From: | "Client Activist" <accountability_caucus@yahoo.com> |
| Subject: | Introduction to S.A. Plank |
| Cc: | Marie Verna |
This is Andrew Phelps. I’m writing from the collective account of the Accountability Caucus. I have just posted a working draft copy of the Social Accountability Plank for the National Summit to this <accountability> list. My hope is that the folks on this list, the folks who worked on the plank at the National Summit, the folks who helped put together the Accountability Caucus in California, and the clients in general, will study this document and help us to find the best way of putting this forth.
- This process has proceeded without a lot of guidance as to style and content. There is some material on the National Summit website <http://www.mhselfhelp.org/index2.html>, a selection from which is reproduced at the end of this message.
- We have adjusted our style radically from the didactic version of Background/Issues which we posted on the N.S. website at <http://www.mhselfhelp.org/accountability.html>. In my estimate, the substance hasn’t changed in any essential manner, but we have emphasized a different way to explain/interface it with the client community. In our workshop, we talked in the metaphor of ‘nails’ v. ‘plank’. In our individual testimonies rather than that didactic (‘lecture’) type of presentation.
- The pivotal outcome of ‘plank’ workshops is to be their ACTION PLAN(s). We felt that social accountability is like the nails that hold the planks together. We felt that our action plans had to be put in general terms and that the specific implementation processes had to be worked out through experience, through negotiation. Just to put it as an abstract expectation was not quite in the spirit of what we are seeking to give to the clients movement. So these four action plan statements have been presented with the idea in mind of trying to draw out mutually engaging connections. In the first place ‘social accountability’ is a perspective of the client culture living by the values of the clients, and this is what we wish to foster.
- There is also the matter of timelines relative to when the Clearinghouse will assemble and publish the 12 planks. Already I have heard from Marie Verna asking "When will we be ready with an electronic version" and the like. So although I don’t have any fixed date, I do think timely responses are important and that the discussion arising from sending out this draft will have to be modulated so as to keep us in sync with the entire, overall process here. Hehehe it would be clearer to operate on fixed deadlines, but so far they haven’t shown up, so we are going to have to keep this thing ‘in the oven’ until ‘it is cooked’, and use whatever savvy we have to get it ‘just right’.
Maria Maceira is the co-facilitator of the Social Accountability Plank. Her personal email address is <mariaem@jps.net>.
Peace
Andrew Phelps
excerpt from N.S. website
The action plan resulting from a Working Session would be a highly accurate, solid description of the consensus around a specific issue, as well as a description of the actions that should occur. Every action plan must name an individual who will serve as the future facilitator on that issue and who will become a member of a Facilitators Committee that would continue on after the summit. Once the summit is over, the Clearinghouse, the Oregon Office of Technical Assistance, the advisory Committee, and the newly formed Facilitators Committee would compile the information gathered at the summit into a national platform that states the collective voice of consumers and survivors on the issues they’ve defined themselves as vital to their future. In addition, the summit will yield action plans that will help us implement the platform based on true consensus.
