Final Review of Issues

[Beth Sutton]

In our last steps before bringing this to the final decision, we felt it important to look at the situation one more time through the lens ofResponsive Leadership – which means recognizing and appreciating emotion, suspending opinion, and looking at input once again. As we went back over all that has happened, there was one place in which we felt we had not yet fully unearthed the wisdom in the conflict: why did the Facebook group not feel that our original offer (to have us send all Enki users and new purchasers notice of their FB group) was a sufficient connection to Enki.

This is what we did with Holistic Families - at their suggestion - for many years, and it was not a problem (and it was the entirety of how we met our commitment to online support  - even early on in our homeschool journey, when there were no monthly calls). We wondered what made this situation different.

So we looked to see what was different now, what lay at the heart of the issue. We do know that some people have strong feelings about having a public “Enki identity,” and others feel strongly that using the name does not qualify as representing Enki. These are things we see very differently and we have detailed why in the post on the details of the importance of the name use. But, though we do see these issues differently, we still felt something here needed to be seen – so we kept looking and exploring, asking ourselves: 

• ·       What was different about Holistic Families?
  
• ·       Why was there no question there among its founders about use of the Enki name?
  
• ·       Why was there no issue for all those parents for so many years?
  
• ·       Why did that satisfy the need for peer support?
  

What we came to feel is that there is an energetic difference between these types of groups. One is a group that is owned by Enki (even though it has no leadership involvement, as was true of Holistic Families 1), and is completely democratically, peer run. The other is owned by a member of the community; it is their own group to which we send people.

This feels like a very important distinction, though we are still not fully sure just why that is, we see that it is. We will sit with it and work to understand better as we finalize the decision on restructuring to offer discussion groups that, we very much hope, can support the whole community.

Beth and Amy

1 Initially Holistic Families was owned and hosted by particular parents, which makes understanding this all the more tricky. However, for the last many years it was not; those later years are what we are concentrating on at this point since that is where many involved came in to Enki.