What we’re about
It's difficult to find solutions without awareness of the effects.
My primary motive in making this group is that I feel the current direction of child care, that is child care in the institutional sense, is inflicting financial and spiritual harms upon us that have gone largely unexamined by our politic. The preferred solution to the growing dependency on external childcare and its expense has been to subsidize it, whether it be through direct funding of daycare centers or granting them tax exemptions, but this mode of solution lacks imagination and begs a certain question:
Who do we want raising children in our society, dedicated child care workers or the parents of the children and their communities? If we continue as we are, putting money into solutions that encourages childcare as transaction, rather than listening to the needs of our communities and doing some group detective work to make solutions that touch the roots of the problem, we will have diminished freedoms and given a lower quality of life to our next generations and their parents.
We're overdue for dialogue. For us to know how we're really being affected by this, so that we can begin to craft solutions that improve the lives of our communities and make more inspiring conditions to raise a family in. To that end, I invite anyone that has kids in the Metrocrest (Addison, Farmers Branch, Carrollton) or a perspective on childcare in the area that they feel would benefit this group to attend these public listenings that I will do my best to facilitate. As the term implies, the goal of these public listenings are to listen to each other and craft solutions that consider the group as a whole, that everyone who attends should not only be heard but be listened to and should contribute to solutions that factor in as many voices as possible. To achieve this, I will conduct these meetings using the consensus mode of decision-making.
https://www.consensusdecisionmaking.org/
The above website has a very useful primer to the process, but even for those that do read and watch it, it is going to take practice and patience for us to use it effectively. I will assume most, if not all of us, will not be accustomed to it. This mode is not a new way of doing things, but a rather old one that has roots with the Quakers, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and I'm sure many others. I think its benefits of including all participants in a group as active actors making solutions that are collaborative and emphasize finding whole group agreement (while not necessitating a unanimous agreement) will get us to ideas that the greater community will find agreeable that we can then take to our city councils together to turn into tangible policy.
