HOME >> Find Your Interests >> Public

Public interests!

Check out the new

Scale of Public Interactions (SPI)

This section of ARINA's website is still in progress, and will get substantive development over time. This is not only because of our own commitment to addressing complex issues. It is also because complex public issues affect everyone, as well as every endeavor we attempt in any domain. Thus, we all have an investment in understanding and working on them.

ARINA brings innovative expertise and methods for working on complex public issues of all kinds, and we want to share them to help people make the connections between public interests and ARINA's work. Our flagship process, The Integral Process For Working On Complex Issues ^tm (called TIP for short) both incorporates and adds many more to the general "how to's" listed here.

One version of TIP specifically targets public issues in communities. There are both hidden and obvious issues in every community and organization. They did not appear overnight, and they won’t disappear overnight. This is because, if they had been easy to solve, they would have been solved long ago. There are many reasons they still exist. One big reason is that we just have not known how to tackle such chronic issues. Old methods don’t work on them because our old methods assume things are simpler than they really are.

The abstract term complex issues refers to many concrete, real-world challenges. We will address challenges faced by citizens, officials, legislative representatives, and legislative bodies. We will address the international challenges of democratization and new governance structures. However different each of these distinct categories may sound, there are numerous patterns that repeat at all of these scales. ARINA has a commitment to educate people about how to scale integral public processes to meet particular issues.

Until this page begins to reflect the degree of depth we intend for it, we encourage you to investigate The Integral Process For Working On Complex Issues ^tm and check out the content below. Our work is aimed at providing important new ways to think about, and approach, these subjects.

Caveat: When it comes to new methods and processes, there is really no way to understand them until they have been experienced and used. Our further social and political development depend upon getting new paradigmatic processes into wide use.

General types of public challenges - how do you know what to do about them?

Imagine...

Sampling of specific complex issues listed by the names we usually give them - how do you know which "names" are just tips of more complicated icebergs?

We also encourage you to register for our general "how to's" .They are essential foundations for all public issues work and preparing for it. Those trainings are available as distance learning, and if you contact us, we can arrange with you to bring them to your site.

General Types of Public Challenges

• Why is it so hard to "make change happen"?

• Why doesn't anything seem to "work" the way we thought it would or should?

• Why do things that seemed to promise to work, not work as intended?

• Why are people so resistant to change?

• What is the real nature of the obstacles we face?

• Why do issues descend into pitted debates without good, uncontested solutions?

• Is "wheeling & dealing" really the only way to get things done? (And if so, why doesn't it work, either?)

• Why don't people get involved?

• How can we make this more democratic, really?

• Why can't "they" see another point of view?

• Why do we fear those who are different from us?

 to top --^

Imagine...

If your social change efforts are community-oriented, imagine…

You and a group of people from your community received training in certain kinds of community development work, or tried a particular approach packaged by others. Further trainings or more packages are not offered by the organization and you’re feeling stuck in several respects. You miss active, guided learning, and you’re encountering some of the same obstacles over and over in your efforts. What are we doing wrong? Where can we find some answers? Are we the only ones running into these problems?

Ø      When your group joins ARINA, you discover a whole new world of ongoing action research, new ways to formulate useful questions, and workshops that expand your understanding and ways of working with the public. There’s an ongoing network of fellow practitioners with whom to exchange learning, push the thinking, and design experiments. You learn how to reflect upon and communicate your learning in writing, so it can be shared on the web with others in the same boat you were in. Best of all, your group’s efforts are becoming far more effective and the culture and issues of the community are beginning to reap the benefits.

  to top --^

If you have developed some effective approaches to social change, imagine…

You’ve developed some very effective methods for tackling common issues, and you want to find other practitioners to test and report on their own experiments using it, and work together to get the methods into use. How do you find such people? How do you, as an individual, qualify for funding the research?

Ø      When you read about becoming an Associate of ARINA, you recognize there will be many new possibilities. It is heartening to think about having an organizational umbrella that is designed for quality assurance, peer review, co-thinking, research, and networking with fellow practitioners around the world – where your methods can provide a real service! Where else have you even seen such a concentration of vital elements that support social change work? Associating sounds like just the right thing at the right time for you.

 to top --^

If you are in a position of public leadership, imagine…

Why is it that after the community development specialists leave, we revert to our old, business-as-usual ways of doing things, the same unproductive ways of talking about things? Why is it so hard to sustain the positive influences of the work development specialists have done with us? It seems we’re missing some key ingredient or understanding, that would help us make positive changes “our own” and not dependent on bringing in outsiders.

Ø      You read about ARINA’s emphasis on complex issues and systemic complexity, and realize underneath your thinking there has been an operating assumption that there are quick fixes for the things you want to change. If there were quick fixes, why aren’t things different by now? Maybe the missing ingredient has something to do with understanding more about this idea of complexity. What does that really mean, and how do we introduce sustained change if things really are more complex than we realized? It sounds like ARINA might have some resources and processes to help us develop our own new ways of doing things, create a new civic culture. Maybe if we create “our own” kind of changes, we can sustain and "own" them, on our own. It’s time to look into this!

Sampling of specific, complex issues

listed by the names we usually give them...

Apathy

Child abuse

Civil rights

Depression

Discrimination

Domestic violence

Drug abuse

Education

Environment

Health

Homelessness

Hunger

Leadership

Justice

Peace

Penal system

Pollution

Poverty

Safety

Spending

Teen pregnancy

Terrorism

Truancy

Urban

Vandalism

Violence

War

to top --^

This important page is still under construction.

We will be adding to it progressively; so come back often to see what's here. In the meantime, please know your specific questions will help us aim specific material to your interests when you tell us about them. Please write to us!

t no