Jean A. Rickert, History of Changes in the past year

In the summer of 1971 when I first came to Changes there were perhaps a few more than a dozen people who were greatly involved with the idea of Changes and had been trying to make it work in each other’s homes for the past year. It had apparently been a struggle at times but there was still an enthusiasm and what one person described as a freshness or a softness he had not found anywhere else in an organization.

As the fall approached we were faced with the possibility of getting some money or funding to carry on more effectively. Some of us felt a need for more leadership to get more coordinated and we wanted to pay one or two of our members to give them the time to do this for us. Yet there was also a lot of hesitation about the money, fearing it would spoil our freshness and leave

us with heavy obligations we did not want.

When the fall did come we accepted the money, hired two “coordinators", moved into a small office in a church and expanded our crisis phone service to cover every night of the week. New people joined us and we actually got some teams together to work on the phones. The " coordinators" did get us some more

organized with ourselves as well as with other resources in the community. Having a place to come regularly seemed to be a big help and we tried to decorate it so that we would like coming there. All in all, most of us felt pretty good about the way things were going in the fall.

Yet somehow, we had not yet learned how to really listen to each other and be a community so we went through some bad times. We had weekly meetings which were generally miserably long business meetings with lots of arguing. Eventually we decided we did not want to have " coordinators" any more and even did not want any business meetings at all. Business would be handled it was decided, by whoever wanted to show up ahead of the regular meetings to discuss it, but in our regular meetings we would have none of it.

At first having banished the business meeting we did not know quite what to do in its place. The business did get handled all right outside of the regular meetings because a group of concerned persons volunteered for various jobs that had to be done and formed a council which did come early and got business done fast. In our regular meetings, we seemed to need some sort of structure to relate around yet obviously the business meetings had not been the right thing.

Finally, by the winter some of us got our heads together and decided to get some people with skills to come in and teach us how to listen and do the things we wanted to do. Gene Gendlin did a 10-week listening training series for us followed by another series led by Joe Noel in the spring. Gene's thing really got us together again and drew a lot of new people in. Joe’s thing continued the listening training in groups and pairs with a focus on community development. A sense of community did seem to arise among us from meeting in the same small groups

each week and taking the time to listen to each other. Becoming a community also seemed to become a more explicit goal again.

With the crisis phone all this time we seemed to be going through cycles. We would be getting lots of calls for a while and be kept hopping trying to help with all the problems and then calls would drop off and teams would sit by silent phones and people would quit because they got bored. Then we would get some more publicity out and the phones would start ringing again and we would scramble around trying to get teams together to handle it all.

From time to time covering the phones got to be such a hassle that we talked about not " doing the phones" anymore. We did not want to do a bad job with them and we did need to put energy into getting with each other and working out our own problems. Most of us figured we had about as many problems to deal with ourselves as did the people who phoned us. Yet we also felt that we needed to do the phones and really wanted to if we could just get organized enough to do a good job with them. So we struggled on with them with one person after another taking responsibility to try to keep them covered.

One of the exciting developments of this last year was that a lot of us did learn how to start " listening” to each other and taking time for this outside of the regular meetings. Some of us were able to pair off and trade listening time with an agreement like “I’ll listen to you for an hour and then you listen to me. " Others of us just felt more free to ask for someone to " listen" to us when we needed it and to agree to do this when someone else asked.

Another important development was the development of a women’s group by several women in Changes. In this group women were able to share common feelings and issues and here again took time to " listen" to each other. A men's group also developed which has been important for a few. The women's group grew by leaps and bounds as women became more aware of common issues and found that the group could be an important source of support and growth.

Throughout the year there has been a continual high rate of turnover among the people in Changes. Sometimes this is a great source of fresh energy but sometimes it is difficult to absorb new people. Old people leave generally because they are leaving town or burying themselves in writing a dissertation. Many new people do not stay long enough to become involved. Sometimes they probably discover we just were not what they were looking for. Other times they must feel like we did not give them enough of a welcome.

Where are we now? There may be perhaps a bit more continuity in membership though not much. Some of our old leadership is leaving us. We still have difficu1ty absorbing new people but we still need and want new people. We still have a struggle sometimes trying to cover the phones and do them well. The women's group seems to be growing very important and a second one has just been formed. It seems about time we have another listening training series. During the summer, we have had a variety of programs and listening training has been carried on some informally by concerned individuals. Generally, though we seem to be in a much more solid place. There seems to be more of a consensus among us that we want to be a community to each other and that " listening" is an important part of being this.