Community Care Working Group

Minutes - final June 23, 2004

Present: Judith Broadus, Jay Stewart, Alan Sloan, Amy Conway
Excused: Jane Condon
Absent: Dennis Southward, Jon Barbieri, David Whitehorn, Tara Slone

Agenda Item	Discussion	Action Item
Update on the "view" statement in the Community Caring in Action document	Jon has added a preamble to the beginning of the Community Caring in Action document. The group agreed that the view statement can be short and simple – maybe 3 paragraphs at the most. In general, we would like to have the document completed with a view statement, mental health section, and input from our review groups by the July Director’s meeting.	Amy will still check with Dennis and Jon to see if any further progress has been made on the "view" section. Amy will also forward them the minutes from the meeting where we had extensive discussion on the view of this work and re-send them Judith’s previous written document on ground, path and fruition. Alan offered to help Jon and Dennis with the writing process if Dennis and Jon would like the help.
Work on Objective #4 regarding the role of Shambhala center administration/delegs/ upaya councils etc. and the forms that the Vidyadhara gave us	Jane was working on this before she went to Shambhala Mountain Center. No one was sure whether she completed something for our document or not. In the meantime, we could ask places that have delegs (like Burlington and Nelson BC) to share anything they have on the practice. Jane did send some information on child care programs in Boulder that Amy will add into the list of Community Care resources.	Amy will check with Jane when she returns to see if anything has been written on this. Judith will send the group her notes on Upaya councils again.
Mental Well-Being section to be developed	Judith has worked on this section. We did not have time to discuss it, but she will send Amy what she has done to add to the document. There was a Shambhala mental health task force a few years ago. They did some work on Mental health and well-being. We thought their work might make a good jumping off point for this section. Amy will add mental health resources to our resource list if workgroup members can send her the resource links, books etc.	Judith will send Amy what she has for the Mental Well-Being section of the Community Caring in Action document.
Development of our Community Care Resources list for the shambhala.org website	Amy has a very sparse list of resources so far that she has gathered from our calls, from the review group calls, and from the karuna-talk messages. The resource list can include documents, website links, and books that are personally recommended from sangha members. Amy talked to Aaron Bihari who was overseeing the last shambhala.org site and he said it would be simple to put together an online webpage of resources for us. We will need to figure out how to organize this list – perhaps either by region or by topic area. Eventually, this list could become an extensive database of resources for the community that could be sorted various ways. For now, we’ll put it out and see how it gets used and then further development can occur based on that. The resource list/webpage should be ready by the next Shambhala congress in March 2005.	Amy will format the resource list she has and send it to the Working group to augment and review.
Designing the Community Care Exploration Process	Alan, Jay and Amy had agreed on our last call to develop a guide that communities can use to engage in a process to assess which areas of care they need to focus on first. The main part of the exploration guide will be developed after the Director’s meeting at Shambhala Mountain Center at the end of July so that we will have their input into whether this is useful. We decided to call this a community exploration process that will include some suggested questions for the community and suggested facilitation guidelines that will most likely occur in a community meeting format and will lead the community to develop an action plan. The process will include a guide for communities to look at how they are doing currently, what the ideal caring community would look like, (relating their ideal to our document), then and then to set ways for them to get from the current to the ideal. Our Community caring in action document refers to an ideal. Each community can tailor our suggestions to determine what their ideal would be. The process will be a map/action plan for how they can work with what they have. Neighboring regions may choose to work together on areas that overlap. We will suggest as a part of this process that the community set measurable goals and objectives so there is a clear way to see and measure success. Each community must define their own objectives and timelines, including a review process.	Jay will develop the first draft of the Community exploration and facilitation document. Amy, Alan and Jay will meet on August 17th at 4:00 pm Pacific time to work on this exploration guide
Discuss feedback from our review group	The review groups like what we are doing. They were particularly interested in the processes and forms associated with Building Community. Members in both review group calls were very interested to know about how Delegs are being used. Another suggestion was to include spontaneous insight as a helpful community process. Two other areas of interest were the Shambhala Café, which has been used to build community in several areas. The role of MI’s and Shambhala guides as people who make new members feel welcome and cared for was emphasized.	Jay agreed to go through the review group notes and add in their suggestions into the Community Caring in Action document.
Long-term monitoring of our work	Alan suggested that our workgroup plan some process to monitor how useful our work is to the sangha over time. Instead of just giving them our work and then dropping all communication, we could continue to check in with the sangha to see how they are doing and in that way, the process could evolve and improve over time. Perhaps this working group could remain loosely associated with one another in the long-term. It might be helpful to have one person in each region that folks could contact to let us know how the work is going or if there are obstacles. It was suggested that a network of health and well-being representatives could be developed, so they could share ideas and support one another. They could have conference calls like these or they could have a health well-being talk list that people could subscribe to. It would need a moderator. Both Desung or civilian health and well-being people could participate in this, including dekyongs, M.I.s and health professionals.	Amy will check with the other workgroup chairs to see if others are also thinking about how to monitor this work in the long-term.
Next meeting and upcoming deadlines	Our documents to be presented at the Director’s meeting are due July 8th. Therefore, we should have our Community Caring in Action document ready with the various sections complete by July 8th. The resource list can be an ongoing work in progress between now and the March 2005 Shambhala congress. The Community Exploration document will also aim to be done by March 2005. Amy will write a summary report of our work that will be presented at the Director’s meeting. She will send it to this group to review before our next meeting on July 6th. The next community care working group meeting will be held on July 6th at the same time. However, our conference call number will change. The new number is 641-497-7200 code 111359#