VFR Working Agreement Presentation
The following was Jay Deacon’s presentation on a VFR Working Agreement (or Code of Conduct) given at the November general meeting.
We’re all familiar with Valley Free Radio’s Mission statement and its Guiding Vision statement. These are important to us, but we need another piece. It’s the piece that says what we’re promising to each other, how we are going to treat each other, what our goals and terms and conditions are for working together.
What I’m describing is a Covenant, but for some, that word has religious connotations. Some organizations call them Codes of Conduct. We propose calling this, simply, our Working Agreement.
A working agreement or covenant statement says how you want to be with each other. It sets out the qualities that will sustain your life together, and it contains the promises you make to each other. It answers the question, what are the qualities we want in our life and work together?
It centers on the values that are held dear in the community that creates it. People come here hoping to find a place where people are valued and treated well, and find a place to work, develop skills, and make a contribution. Wherever people become deeply invested, disappointment runs very high when the organization doesn’t live up to their internal expectations. But those expectations really need to be stated and publicly owned. We’ve got to articulate them, Written covenant statements can help us all feel safe.
Every organization including this one has its covenants or codes of conduct or working agreements — that is, ways in which it is acceptable to interact with one another — but very often they’re not explicit, not written. They’re a secret. You have to figure it out and you might get it wrong. Some people seem to know. And you may never really know who determined just what the terms and conditions would be. Shouldn’t we do this intentionally, consciously, explicitly? If we don’t, there will still be terms and conditions, but they seem mysterious and arbitrary.
So we want to make it quite explicit and transparent and we want to know who created it — ourselves. Then it becomes a touchstone that people can refer to when times get testy. When tempers get frayed or people get impatient with one another, the working agreement can be recalled to remind people of what they said they would promise one another. By having the membership create the statement, they gain ownership and a sense of authority to call others back to the covenant in difficult times.
A Working Agreement can help us through rough times when they occur, but we don’t want to wait too long to create it, because if we do, everything we put into it will seem to be about somebody in particular, aimed at something that has already happened. But we can’t and shouldn’t create this thing for the past. It’s for the future.
So we ask also that, in what we’re about to do, you think about the future, about the kind of community we want Valley Free Radio to be. This conversation, now, is not for rehashing old tensions and conflicts. That would be way out of order.
It ought to be a very positive statement, describing the way we really want to be with each other and work with each other, in a way that would make you want to be a part of VFR.
Now, everybody who participates in VFR brings some talents, some abilities, some influence, and yes, some power. And the question we must all ask ourselves and each other is a very simple one. It’s this: Are you prepared to commit to use that power you have — the talents, the abilities, the influence you bring — will you commit to use your power for the good of the whole?
There’s only one right answer to that question.
The Working Agreement will define what that means. To what are we going to hold ourselves and each other?
Here is the link to the KPFT-Houston Code of Conduct.
You can give comments about the working agreement to the committee at this address: gmc@valleyfreeradio.org
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