What has been happening since the Retreat?

The Retreat, held over two days in March, was undoubtedly a significant event in the life of our community. Over one hundred and sixty Aurovilians, along with members of the Governing Board and International Advisory Council, focussed upon finding ways of moving Auroville forward in key areas like governance, the economy, land protection and education. At the same time, it was seen that integral progress towards fulfilling our ideals and potential could not be made without including the voices of our youth and of others in the bioregion, and space was also given to these. [see Auroville Today # 309, April 2015, pages 4-5]

The Retreat had its limitations. Some people felt the discussions were too rushed and didn’t allow sufficient space for deeper introspection, and it was clear that significant fault-lines regarding certain issues that had solidified over many years could not be dissolved in the space of two days. But, uniquely, it was an occasion when young and old Aurovilians, as well as Governing Board and International Advisory Council members, came together in a dynamic working environment to reaffirm Auroville’s ideals, and to explore practical ways in which they could be manifested. By end of the second day, this had created an immense will and enthusiasm for moving us forward as a collective. As one of the organizers put it, “The main accomplishment of the Retreat was the rekindling of hope in the community”.

What has happened since?

One of the main challenges was to retain the energy and idealism of the Retreat and define viable strategies to materialise the goals and milestones that had emerged. The plan was to create Action Groups in each area – governance, land and town planning, growth, economy, education, youth and the bioregion – to work further on materialising these goals and insights. The Working Committee was given the responsibility by the Vision Task Force (VTF) to set up these groups, and to help each group come up with an action plan based upon the outcome of the Retreat.

Unfortunately, there was a hiatus of about two months before some of these groups were formed (the Economy, Governance and Youth Groups did not wait: they formed themselves and went ahead with their work), and this led to a certain loss of the energy that had been created by the Retreat. This was accentuated by the fact that by this time it was high summer and a number of key people were out of station.

Nevertheless, most of the Action Groups had formed by June, and in that month five of them made their first reports. The reports mostly related to restating their goals and milestones and setting out their action plans. The Governance Action Group had gone further and had already worked out a proposal for an Active Residents Assembly and received feedback on it from the larger community. Also sub-groups of the Economy Action Group had developed a detailed action plan for the Integral Entrepreneurship Lab, had started finding locations for a number of small enterprises, and begun work on planning an Auroville statistics office.

The Youth Groups was the most active of all the Action Groups in this period. By July the youth had built up a team, YouthLink, and acquired a temporary office in Bharat Nivas. Their first goal was to find ways of empowering and including the youth in community activities and, in relationship to this, two youth were participating, on a temporary basis, in two major working groups – the Budget Coordination Committee (BCC) and the Housing Service. Meanwhile, YouthLink had begun exploring the possibility of youth apprenticeship programmes with the Auroville Campus Initiative group.

In other words, in these first few months the output of the Action Groups differed widely, depending upon the presence, energy and commitment of the members, as well as upon their ability to work with the goals and milestones allocated to them. By July, for example, the Growth Action Group proposed to dissolve itself as it felt its goals and milestones were already included in those of the other Action Groups. The members were also very busy with other work and felt they couldn’t commit more time to this task.

The work in the last six months

In the last six months, much more has been achieved in terms of materialising the goals and milestones emanating from the Retreat. Sometimes, this has happened independently of the Action Groups as part of a larger community movement. For example, while the restructuring of existing working groups is one of the milestones of the Governance Action Group, a new entry process and a new mandate for the FAMC had already been taken up by the Auroville Council, which is mandated to do this work. Work upon securing the land in the city and greenbelt (one of the Land and Planning Action Group’s goals) had also been ongoing for some time. For example, the Town Development Council had been exploring the possibility of Auroville acquiring New Town Development Authority status, and there was an increased fund-raising drive that led to the purchase of some essential pieces of land.

The aim of providing higher education possibilities in Auroville was one of the milestones of the Education Action Group and work on this, in the form of the Auroville Campus Initiative, had already begun before the Retreat, although it substantially gained momentum after that event.

On the other hand, some of the Action Groups have been very active in promoting certain initiatives. For example, the Economy Action Group’s focus on an in-kind economy may have been one of the factors that persuaded the BCC to allocate 45 lakhs to promote the in-kind economy, and an economy sub-group has set up the Integral Entrepreneurial Lab (see Auroville Today no.313-14). Meanwhile, the Bioregion Action Group, with assistance from Village Action and YouthLink, has just held the first bioregional meeting of their “Paalam” project (‘paalam’ means ‘bridge’ in Tamil), the object of which is to establish links with youth in neighbouring villages to get them to work actively with Auroville for the co-development of the region.

The Governance Action Group, in conjunction with the Residents Assembly Service, has organized two preliminary meetings of the Active Residents Assembly, while the YouthLink group organized a community event on International Youth Day to introduce the community to their work and to showcase youth and their talents. They are also working to stimulate local village youth groups (interestingly, in YouthLink the majority of the active members are not Aurovilians but local youth) and have drawn up an ambitious project for a youth centre campus in Auroville called the YouthLink Hub [see Auroville Today no.313-314]. At the invitation of the youth, a number of Aurovilians have signed up to be mentors for them.

The need for youth apprenticeship programmes was one of the key findings of the Retreat. The Auroville Campus Initiative began working on an apprenticeship programme for youth in forestry and invited the youth to participate in the planning of this. The Education Action Group is still trying to get some clarity, but one possible outcome is that further learning will now be prioritised in the community.

Could more have been achieved?

So, much has been started. But could more have been achieved, given the huge tide of energy and goodwill that flowed out of the Retreat? Perhaps. There may be a number of factors here. One is that it took time for the new groups to get to know each other and evolve a way of working upon their goals and milestones. Then, as always in Auroville, the concrete manifestation of ideas is very dependent upon the energy and inspiration of the individuals concerned, and this differed from one Action Group to the next. But even when the energy and inspiration were there, sometimes there were not enough qualified people to take up an initiative, or there remained major differences of approach, either within the Action Group or within the larger community, which blocked action.

For example, most members of the Land and Planning Action Group are also part of the official planning group and the Land Board. This should make coordination easier. However, the fact that the community is still polarised on planning issues means that blockages that affect the work of the planning group also affect the Land and Planning Action Group.

Another factor has been the lack of financial support to realize certain milestones. At one point, the Action Groups were asked to present the initial budgets they needed to do their work. Almost all of them did this but, with one or two exceptions (YouthLink, for example, has received two maintenances for the coordinators), the funds have not been forthcoming or have not been made available immediately. For example, at a recent Vision Task Force meeting, the Economy Action Group presented to the Vision Task Force a budget for an Auroville statistics office (‘Aurostat’). There was unclarity about how to allocate funding for this, so the VTF said that the proposal should be presented to the Governing Board during their next meeting in March.

There may be reasons for the lack of funding. The obvious one is that Auroville does not have sufficient funds available to meet all the requests. In fact, large funding is not available immediately because it was not planned in Auroville’s 2015-16 budget. There may also be a feeling among those making the financial decisions that certain proposals are either too expensive, not well thought through, pet projects being pushed by a few individuals, or are not projects that are the outcome of the Retreat. There may even be unvoiced doubts, for example in relation to some of the youth projects, of the staying power of the individuals involved or of how far they are representative of their larger constituency.

Whatever the reasons, some Action Groups feel dispirited by the lack of funding, which, they feel, has called into question the community’s commitment to materialising certain key goals and milestones.

Post-Retreat organisation issue

Another major factor why more has not been achieved may be the way in which the post-Retreat organization of the work has been handled. It’s safe to say that nobody fully understood how big a challenge it would be to translate some of the goals and milestones into reality: the immediate post-Retreat euphoria may have been partially responsible for this.

However, when the goals and milestones were examined in the cold light of day it became obvious that some could be manifested fairly easily by the Action Groups themselves, some, at this point, were mere wish-lists (like the need for psychic education in the villages), and others, like the radical reorganization of our governance structure, would require a long and complex process involving many existing working groups as well as the larger community.

In this connection, some of the timelines identified in the Retreat for the achievement of certain milestones were wildly unrealistic. Clearly, the Action Groups would need to spend time reworking some of these timelines. However, one of the first communications received by the Action Groups from the Working Committee, which, at that time, had been appointed by the Vision Task Force to drive the process of drawing up action plans, was a form asking the Action Groups to give accurate predictions, on a week by week basis, of how and when their goals and milestones would be achieved.

Many members of the Action Groups were nonplussed by this. They felt the form was too complicated, too ‘bureaucratic’, and did not reflect the way they wished to work.

This marked the birth of a certain tension between the Action Groups and the oversight group (the Vision Task Force) which has still not been fully resolved.

In brief, the Action Groups felt that the oversight group did not fully understand or give enough space to the way they were working. For example, a line of command structure had been set up that required the Action groups to get permission from the VTF for every new initiative they engaged in. In fairness, when a concerned Action Group representative brought this up at an early Skype conference with Vision Task Force members, the meeting agreed that this kind of micro-management was unnecessary.

The oversight group, on the other hand, was concerned that the identified goals and milestones from the Retreat should be manifested rather than disappear into the sand, something that had happened many times before after high-energy seminars in Auroville. This is why they emphasised the need for structured work with clear timetables. They were also concerned that Action Groups might be pushing projects that were not specifically the outcome of the Retreat. Also, perceiving overlaps in different groups’ milestones and goals, they were keen to promote communication and collaboration between the Action Groups, something which not all the Action Groups were ready for or even felt necessary.

Early in the process, two meetings were organized with all the Action Groups, but these only succeeded in frustrating and draining the energy of everybody involved. Each blamed the other for this. The Action Groups felt the meetings, particularly the first one, were over-structured and did not give them ample opportunity to share their work. The Working Committee, who organized the meetings on behalf of the VTF, felt the Action Groups were averse to attempts to organize their work more rationally.

VAct

Recently, the Vision Task Force members decided they needed to have a full-time team in place to coordinate the work of the Action Groups, and to improve communication between them and the community. The Auroville Campus Initiative team, most of whom had been part of the organizing team for the Retreat, was asked by the Governing Board to take it on and from this emerged the Vision and Action Coordination Group (VAct).

Among the tasks allocated to VAct was to assist the Action Groups to come up with overarching priorities, to focus on manifesting the small price tag, ‘low-hanging fruits’ of each Action Group without losing sight of the goals and milestones identified during the Retreat, and to coordinate the work between the Action Groups and the existing Working Groups. The latter is crucial as many of the Retreat goals and milestones require changes in the policies or ways of working of the existing Working Groups.

VAct have not had a comfortable introduction to the work. They discovered there were many loose ends and a certain lack of coordination between the Action Groups. They also felt a need to find ways of elevating the energy levels of the Groups as they perceived that some of the original spirit and inspiration of the Retreat had drained away.

Recently, in a new attempt to re-energise them and coordinate their work, VAct invited the Action Groups to come together for a joint update meeting. This included a collective brainstorming session to identify common requirements and to create a unifying vision for all the Action Groups. Specifically, they asked attendees to envisage how to inspire a ‘Second Wave’ of aspiring youth from all over the world to come here and help us accelerate the manifestion of our ideals.

While the meeting was not particularly well-attended, partly due to the awful weather, the idea generated enthusiasm among the participants and they came up with various ideas about how to rekindle the true spirit of Auroville. Now Vact would like to take this forward by involving the community as a whole.

Where are we now?

When considering the post-Retreat achievements and disappointments, we should not forget that Auroville has never before taken on a challenge of this magnitude. If all the goals and milestones that emerged from the Retreat were manifested, it would radically transform our lives here. It would be a revolution, and, like all revolutions, it would have had to overcome the huge inertia of the status quo.

At the same time, those who are committed to change post-Retreat are having to feel their way in unknown territory. Inevitably, they will make mistakes, inevitably the changes they would like to see sometimes won’t happen, or won’t take the form they expect. Some will feel we should be moving faster, others will want longer to bring all the community on board. And, as ever, they will have to deal with issues relating to personal histories, dogma, and to how authority is perceived and exercised in this community.

The Retreat was a profound and timely ‘wake-up call’. It reminded us of the ideals and values that brought us here, and of the importance of anchoring them, materialising them, in our everyday lives.

A beginning, a solid beginning, has been made in achieving this. Our success in achieving more will depend upon our faith, patience, flexibility and our immutable aspiration for a profound transformation both of ourselves and of the present Auroville.