Welcome to Powderhorn Park
I have been living in Minneapolis for about three weeks. I am now settled enough to start “getting out there” and participating in my local community organizations. My first community meeting was Thursday night.
My new neighborhood is called Powderhorn Park and our local residential equity organization is the Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association. I began by attending the Land Use and Zoning Committee Meeting. I will also attend the Economic Development Committee Meeting next week.
One of the reasons I moved to Minneapolis was to directly experience, and learn from, community level management and advocacy in a city with a reputation for providing an excellent quality of life. There were some things about the meeting that were similar to community meetings I have attended and hosted in the past, and some things that were different.
Similarities: The room was drab and poorly maintained, the staff was under fire and constantly being assigned tasks by the committee members, and there were people that attended in order to air their own grievances as opposed to find a consensus based solution to a problem that was facing the entire community. Gee, everything is so typical and predictable, I thought to myself.
Differences: Apparently, the committee hasn’t had a chair for over a year. But that didn’t mean that the group was without leadership and the staff was therefore required to inch the group along some poorly defined path of progress (as I have often had to do in my career). A committee member that described herself as “the most senior person in the room” took charge and described the committee’s function, what they had to accomplish on the night and had everyone introduce themselves. I was very impressed. She also used a very strict Roberts Rules of Order – which I mostly can’t stand. Of all of the community and residential management groups I have ever participated in, it seems that only the unsuccessful ones used it. However, that was not the case tonight. The strict rules of the meeting definitely facilitated the operations of the group. The meeting was very heavy, with some residents detailing the troubled past of a property whose new owner now needed a zoning variance in order to accomplish profitability.
This was a key finding for me on the night. In this case, the strict meeting rules and communication procedures, along with the rotating chair, gave the committee a very high level of transparency and accountability. No one left the room mad, which I have seen happen way to often, including those who were against supporting the zoning variance on very emotional grounds. The Administrative Conflict, deciding whether the variance should be supported, never spilled over into the realm of Emotional or Interpersonal Conflict. Emotional Conflict is a key destabilizer in all teams or groups of people. I have first-hand seen it kill community organizations and therefore lead to the deteriorization the neighborhood’s long-term competitive advantage in the regional real estate market. This did not happen tonight, it deserves to be commended, and I am very happy to now be working with such a high functioning group.
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